Tag: Gender

Capturing Change in Women’s Realities A Critical Overview of Current M&E Frameworks and Approaches

by Srilatha Batliwala and Alexandra Pittman. Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) Dec 2010. Available as pdf Found courtesy of @guijti

“The two part document begins with a broad overview of common challenges with monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and identifies feminist practices for engaging in M&E to strengthen organizational learning and more readily capture the complex changes that women’s empowerment and gender equality work seek. The document concludes with an overview and in-depth analysis of some of the most widely used and recognized M&E frameworks, approaches, and tools.”

[RD Comment: A bit of text that interested me…”Some women’s rights activists and their allies consequently propose that we need to develop a “theory of constraints” to accompany our “theory of change” in any given context, in order to create tools for tracking the way that power structures are responding to the challenges posed by women’s rights interventions“. ….[and before then, also on page 12] … most tools do not allow for tracking negative change, reversals, backlash, unexpected change, and other processes that push back or shift the direction of a positive change trajectory. How do we create tools that can capture this “two steps forward, one step back” phenomenon that many activists and organizations acknowledge as a reality and in which large amounts of learning lay hidden? In women’s rights work, this is vital because as soon as advances seriously challenge patriarchal or other social power structures, there are often significant reactions and setbacks. These are not, ironically, always indicative of failure or lack of effectiveness, but exactly the opposite— this is evidence that the process was working and was creating resistance from the status quo as a result .”

This useful proposal could apply to other contexts where change is expected to be difficult]

THE PITFALLS OF MONITORING & EVALUATION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS, WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT, GENDER EQUALITY: DO CURRENT FRAMEWORKS REALLY SERVE US?

(From The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID))

A summary of Part I “Capturing change in women’s realities: The challenges of monitoring and evaluating our work” a paper by Srilatha Batliwala* and Alexandra Pittman.** [Link yet to be found] PS:  Authors are currently inviting feedback and will publish a final version of this paper, together with additional research later this year.

By Kathambi Kinoti and Sanushka Mudaliar – AWID

Monitoring and evaluation now form an integral part of women’s rights and gender equality programmes as we attempt to measure how effectively we work. But are the frameworks we use able to perform this ambitious task?

In their paper Capturing change in women’s realities: The challenges of monitoring and evaluating our work Srilatha Batliwala and Alexandra Pittman assess the “ifs,” the “whys” and the “hows” of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in women’s rights, women’s empowerment and gender equality. They observe that “over the past few decades, important strides have been made in developing ways of capturing a whole range of abstract but vital social realities, and particularly in trying to quantify them. These efforts have been the result of the realization that when policies, resources, and strategies are applied towards building more equitable, sustainable, rights-affirming, inclusive and peaceful societies, we have to devise ways of checking whether they are working effectively or not – whether they are producing the changes we wish to see.”
Continue reading “THE PITFALLS OF MONITORING & EVALUATION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS, WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT, GENDER EQUALITY: DO CURRENT FRAMEWORKS REALLY SERVE US?”

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