DM&E for Peacebuilding blog: Gender in Peacebuilding Design, Monitoring and Evaluation
The following blog was written by Jonathan White for SFCG’s Learning Portal for Design, Monitoring, & Evaluation for Peacebuilding. You can find the original post here.
Gender sensitive programming is, generally, a mandatory requirement of most international development activities, including peacebuilding. For example, USAID’s office of Conflict Management and Mitigation requires all projects demonstrate a unique gender element. More than a donor-mandated exercise in project equity, the increasing emphasis on gender is forcing peacebuilders to critically reflect on how our projects interact with local actors and context on a micro-level, and is challenging our assumptions on what it means to ‘do good peace work’.
But what does it mean to build gender into the design, monitoring and evaluation of peacebuilding projects?
Hot Resource! Gender Mainstreaming Strategies in Decent Work Promotion: Programming Tools: GEMS Toolkit by the International Labour Organization
Design
Gender can easily be incorporated into the initial assessments and analyses of project design, such as the context and conflict assessments. A common donor suggestion is to examine the distinct ways in which the conflict and environment affects men and women differently.
Hot Tip! The International Labour Organization defines gender analysis as a systematic approach to examining factors related to gender. It involves a deliberate effort to identify and understand the different roles, relationships, situations, resources, benefits, constraints, needs and interests of men and women in a given socio-cultural context.1
Hot Resource! Gender Analysis Tools by the Canadian International Development Agency
Practically speaking, this could mean do women participate to the same extent as men in local decision making processes? Are women appropriately represented in the ongoing peace process? In what ways, if any, has the conflict increased or decreased the security of men and women?
Hot Tip! The focus of the project or program will guide you towards the right gender analysis questions.
Or, at a more basic level, how has the relationship between the sexes changed as a result of the conflict? “Has the scope of action of women and of men—in the home, community, region, at the national level—diminished or increased?”2
There are a range of tools available for such an exercise. You might adapt a traditional analytical model to specifically examine gender and there are also tools developed specific to gender analysis.
Answering these questions will help you better understand how your project might affect men and women in different and distinct ways, and allows you to plan for greater gender equity in the project cycle.
Gender Indicators in Peacebuilding
Hot Resource! Guide to Gender Sensitive Indicators by the Canadian International Development Agency
Gender sensitive indicators track gender-related changes in society over time. “Their usefulness lies in their ability to point to changes in the status and roles of women and men over time, and therefore to measure whether gender equity is being achieved.”3 It is important, as in any other project, that your indicators be multi-dimensional and focused on the clearly developed objectives and goal.
Hot Tip! Indicators may not tell you everything, particularly if you have not developed a robust system of indicators that utilize both qualitative and quantitative measures and at the strategic levels of society in the project seeks to affect.
The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was kind enough to develop a wholeguide to gender sensitive indicators, and many of these can be adapted to your peacebuilding projects if not immediately relevant.
Hot Resource! Check out Presentation 4 in this American Evaluation Association Conference 2010 presentation by CARE on indicators for women’s empowerment disaggregated by type of human agency.
But, of course, we cannot forget good principles of indicator design. First and foremost, indicators must pass tests of reliability, feasibility and utility in decision making. And second, the indicators must be measurable!
Hot Resource! Designing for Results: Integrating Monitoring & Evaluation in Conflict Transformation Activities, Chapter 4, by Cheyanne Church and Mark Rogers
Gender in Evaluation
The role of gender in evaluation is a more difficult category to address. Not every project will explicitly seek to address gender or women’s dynamics—simply disaggregating certain data sets by gender is gender sensitivity, but does not necessarily mean that the project sought to address the unique ways in which women experience conflict (or whatever the ‘problem’ at hand is) differently.
If your project is specifically seeking to address the unique ways in which women experience a situation differently from men, then obviously the evaluation will examine the extent to which you were successful against the stated goal and objectives.
But it is equally important to examine how the project did or did not affect gender or women differently even if the project did not specifically seek to do this. This will help tell you if there are gaps in your project, and whether there is a need to incorporate such an explicit focus into the project or similar future programming.
This, however, raises an issue evaluators are still struggling with: what is the role of the evaluator when gender issues arise in the data, but when gender is not an explicit focus of the project?
Here it can be useful to have an evaluation manager to oversee the evaluation process and help the program staff and evaluator collaboratively think through the consequences of the data and how those consequences will be dealt with.
But of course, everyone experiences and perceives gender differently. So, how do you incorporate gender considerations in peacebuilding?
Hot Resource! Designing for Results: Integrating Monitoring & Evaluation in Conflict Transformation Activities, Chapter 9 by Cheyanne Church and Mark Rogers
Hot Resources
Gender Mainstreaming Strategies in Decent Work Promotion: Programming Tools: GEMS Toolkitby the International Labour Organization
Gender Analysis Tools by the Canadian International Development Agency
Guide to Gender Sensitive Indicators by the Canadian International Development Agency
Presentation 4 in this American Evaluation Association Conference 2010 presentation by CARE on indicators for women’s empowerment disaggregated by type of human agency.
Designing for Results: Integrating Monitoring & Evaluation in Conflict Transformation Activities, Chapter 4, by Cheyanne Church and Mark Rogers
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