Conversations: Evaluating Gender Impacts- How Can We Do Better?

kmilhollin — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 15:12:53 +0000

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I am a Monitoring and…

I am a Monitoring and Evaluation Assistant for an African Development Bank funded programme Building Resilience Against Food and Nutrition Insecurity in the Sahel/P2RS in The Gambia. The project targets rural vulnerable women and youth in agriculture and one of the key activities is to preparation and utilization of a gender strategy in programme implementation. This strategy has been finalised by the Women's Bureau and the Bureau is implementing the strategy which involves awareness creation and trainings covering gender awareness, mainstreaming, budgeting for gender and of course M&E for Gender. It is in this connection that I wish to exchange on how we can effectively monitor gender impact at the level of the programme.

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International Women's Day 2030 - What Will Success Look Like?

ieg_admin — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 23:37:21 +0000

International Women's Day 2030 - What Will Success Look Like? ieg_admin Mon, 03/07/2016 - 18:37

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Cogent, succinct, very much to the point, plenty of food for thought. Great article!

rightly pointed out

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Evaluation - Central to the Evidence Base for Gender Equality

ieg_admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 15:00:32 +0000

Evaluation - Central to the Evidence Base for Gender Equality ieg_admin Wed, 02/18/2015 - 10:00

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A key issue that should be taken into account is violence against women, as one of they main obstacles towards gender equality. Fortunately, a burgeoning literature is tackling this issue. My personal experience is with an impact evaluation in rural Mexico [https://files.nyu.edu/eba237/public/papers/AriasCommonKnowledge.pdf]. The main finding is that in order to change social norms regarding violence against women, informational interventions should be public, and not private. That is, if a policy maker is providing information, they ought to make sure not only that people receive such information, but that they also know that others are also receiving that information.

Thank you for the comment Eric. Domestic violence is indeed a significant obstacle to the achievement of gender equality. The numbers are mind-blowing: according to a recent survey by the World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/gender/violence/gbv/en/) , over 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. The phenomenon is particularly hideous in certain contexts. Our recent evaluation on WBG Assistance to Low-Income Fragile and Conflict-Affected States [link] shows that sexual violence as a weapon of war -- targeting of women as a tactic during armed conflict or gender-based targeting during the recovery period -- is a particularly relevant issue in FCS, which deserves more specific attention in our interventions.

I agree with the DG IEG on its focus on advocacy to promote use of evaluations by UN WOMEN. As a professional evaluator and previous consultant of UN Women sadly I find that of all the UN agencies, UN Women is in fact the least friendly and intimidating to fellow women. I am talking about the UN Women office in Kenya that is absolutely the worst place any person would want to visit because of the cold atmosphere that greets you right from the main door. With this kind of attitude internally, how can an important organization such as this one even reach out to the people it seeks to serve? I would probably suggest an evaluation of human resources at the UN Women agency to find out the real issues affecting staff attitudes and the working environment before we even attempt to promote use of evaluations by the agency to better the lives of women. Agreed utilization focused evaluation is a key and critical area that needs to be promoted by evaluators, however addressing the root causes of lack of evaluation use is also important. Perhaps the name of the agency is self defeating and should instead be UN Gender to be more inclusive and balanced in its approach and outlook. I believe women's as well as men's issues need to be looked at separately and together in order to understand the dynamics of relationships between both genders. I hope that evaluation will move towards reviewing the root causes of relationship dynamics rather than the superficial ones created in response to underlying factors.

Maureen, your point about looking at "gender" rather than "women" is well taken. It is not solely about whether women participate or benefit, but how interventions affect -- positively or negatively, deliberately or inadvertently -- the relationships between men and women. In my previous job at the World Food Program we found that giving a resource (food) to a woman could be empowering her or putting her at risk, it all depended on the circumstances. We are finding similar things here in our evaluations at the World Bank Group.

evaluation and gender

Conversations: Evaluating Gender Impacts- How Can We Do Better?

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I am a Monitoring and…

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International Women's Day 2030 - What Will Success Look Like?

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Evaluation - Central to the Evidence Base for Gender Equality

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