Now used by over 500 organisations in 70 countries, ActionAid developed the Reflect approach through innovative work in Uganda, Bangladesh and El Salvador between 1993 and 1995.

Reflect has been used to address a wide range of issues, from peace & reconciliation in Burundi, to community forestry in Nepal, from holding government accountable in El Salvador to opposing domestic violence in Peru.

The Reflect approach links adult learning to empowerment, and strengthens the voices of poor people in education decision-making at all levels. Having originated as an approach to adult literacy, Reflect is now a tool for building people's capacity to communicate through whatever medium is most relevant to them.

Reflect creates a democratic space where people can analyse issues for themselves. It is a basis for mobilisation, which enables us to strengthen people's own organisations and capacity to advocate for themselves at all levels.

Although Reflect projects are diverse, they all focus on enabling people to articulate their views: the development of literacy and other communication skills is closely linked to the analysis of power relationships and the active engagement of people in wider processes of development and social change.

Groups develop their own learning materials by constructing maps, calendars, matrices, and diagrams or using drama, story-telling and songs to capture social, economic, cultural and political issues from their own environment.

While members of a Reflect circle learn the basics of literacy, they are also learning how to access information or demand services more effectively. Reflect circles often strengthen people's dignity and self-confidence, as well as having an impact on improving resource management, health practices, children's education, local community organisation and civic life.

Reflect – origins

The origins of Reflect lie in the theoretical writing of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, put together with practical visualisation methods (especially those used in “Participatory Rural Appraisal).

At first Reflect was very focused on linking adult literacy. Groups of adult learners convened to learn literacy, would develop maps, calendars and matrices analysing different aspects of their own lives – social, economic, political or cultural issues.

These would be then translated to flipcharts using simple pictures drawn by the non-literate participants (who thereby practised the manual skills of holding pens). Words would then be added to the visual images as illustrations / labels and these would serve as the basis for practice. The facilitator would write up key conclusions from discussions and these would then become texts for further study.

Participants in these “Reflect circles” would identify action points to resolve issues and literacy would then be put to practical use in taking forward such actions (groups would write letters to government officials or NGOs etc).

Each participant would end up writing their own book based on the language and issues discussed. Over a year or so collectively the group would end up producing their own local development plan – their own analysis of critical issues which development agencies should respond to. This was an inversion of traditional power dynamics in development – giving the poorest and most excluded time to do their own analysis and come up with their own solutions.

Reflect has evolved rapidly, based largely on the variety of organisations who started to use the approach and adapt it to their own needs and contexts. Some of the new directions in which Reflect is evolving involve:

• Linking Reflect to governance and accountability –Reflect is positioned as an approach to “creating spaces” in contrast to the ever more prevalent (but limited) “invited spaces.”
• Linking Reflect and Information Communication Technologies: there is a DFID funded action research initiative in Uganda, India and Burundi exploring how to ensure that poor and excluded people can both choose and sustainably access appropriate information and communication technologies.
• Adapting Reflect to work in schools – eg using the citizenship curriculum as an entry point (Get Global) and to teaching English to speakers of other languages (Reflect and ESOL)
• Using Reflect on a large scale eg after the fall of the dictator Fujimori the Women’s Ministry in Peru’s transitional government launched a national Reflect programme reaching 180,000 people across the country.
• Using Reflect within institutions: there is a growing body of work looking at how Reflect adapts to organisational change processes. Eg the Participatory Methodologies Forum in Bangladesh 2001.
• Applying Reflect to ourselves: subjectivity. In much of Latin America, influenced particularly by feminist theory, Reflect practice is now centrally defined by a strong focus on personal behaviour - and ensuring consistency between work and home life.

Using Reflect within coalition building and campaigning:– bringing together diverse NGOs, parents associations, teachers unions, the women’s movement, child labour or debt campaigners etc – into broad-based platforms to place education higher up the political agenda and provoke public debate around the role of education.