Evaluation - Central to the Evidence Base for Gender Equality
Director General for evaluation places evaluation front and center in pursuit of gender equality
Director General for evaluation places evaluation front and center in pursuit of gender equality
By: Caroline Heider
Director General for evaluation places evaluation front and center in pursuit of gender equality
Last week I spoke at the Executive Board of UN Women about the centrality of evaluation to their role in bringing about gender equality.
Changing the way women and men, boys and girls relate to each other, understanding each other's roles and seeing each other as equals, is a demanding challenge. It shakes up longstanding norms and questions values that are often deeply ingrained and frequently subconscious. The full realization of gender equality involves not only the notional opening up of equal opportunities, but also ensuring equal access, participation and derived benefit across social, economic and political domains. And this can only be achieved through understanding and equally valuing and favoring the different behaviors, aspirations and needs of women and men.
To make progress towards this goal, we need a different level of understanding and insight underpinned by evidence that informs us, for example: about how policies are informed and formed by norms; and about how such policies can serve to reinforce or change patterns of behavior, and militate against equal opportunities to fully participate in and benefit from social and economic development. Evaluation provides such evidence, as it looks back at past policies, programs and projects to assess their consequences â intended and unintended, positive and negative - and, in turn, help us understand how to reshape norms.
This is why a group of us -- the Global Evaluation Advisory Group of UN Women â felt strongly about placing the need for and importance of evidence based policy as the centerpiece of our recommendations to UN Women. If it is to be successful in achieving gender equality, the leadership and the organization needs to own and use evidence from evaluation and research in its daily discourse and actions.
This suggestion was fully embraced by many of the Board members. And when you listen carefully to Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women, you will hear a key player making strategic use of evidence from research and evaluation to convince others of the importance of gender equality and how to make a difference.
At IEG, we are committed to integrating gender dimensions into our evaluations to generate evidence on what works:
Looking ahead, we have a number of important reports in the pipeline that have a gender dimension, including: a soon to be published Clustered country evaluation addressing Resource Rich Countries; and major evaluations and systematic reviews of Early Childhood Development, Financial Inclusion for Low-income households and Microenterprises, and the Bank Group's Support for Electricity Access.
A lot done, a lot more to do! Let us know your ideas and experience about how evaluation can best contribute to building an evidence base to support gender equality.
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