Reflection sheet on ways and practices to promote gender equality
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Answer:
Sida’s Action Programme for Gender Equality, passed in 1997, and the
prospects of its revision, constituted the basis for UTV’s Terms of Refer-
ence for the evaluation of “Mainstreaming Gender Equality – Sida’s
support for the promotion of gender equality in partner countries”. The
evaluation team took these as valid points of departure and prepared
detailed evaluation methods which were negotiated and agreed with
UTV prior to the evaluation work gender equality in Country Strategies
and in four interventions in Nicaragua, South Africa and Bangladesh.
The current post-evaluation report has been commissioned with the pur-
pose to learn lessons from the evaluation approach and methodology it-
self. The report summarises frank reflections by eight of the evaluation
team members. A separate Annex 2: “Taking a Closer Look”, by one of
the team members, contains a basic critique of how the global strategy for
mainstreaming gender equality has been adopted by donors and partner
countries as universalised goals without the necessary context sensitivity.
The Annex is a contribution to the debate on gender mainstreaming and
reflects on implications for evaluation of gender equality. Several issues
raised warrant research and studies of more depth than what can be ex-
pected of most evaluations, but which would deepen the understanding
of opportunities and constraints on changes towards gender equality and
the evaluation of these.
Comparisons with team members’ experience from other evaluations
proved to be of somewhat limited scope. Either the methodologies
of phasing, and sample case evaluations and tracking changes had been
rather similar to the current evaluation and posed the same kind of con-
siderations of sample selection and measurement, or the evaluations had
been much more narrow in scope and did not warrant comparison.
“Assessing progress in the mainstreaming of a gender equality perspective
is a bit like picking up mercury. It all too quickly slips through your fingers.
There is often no agreement on what to look for, how to measure progress,
how ‘high the bar should be’. Until organisations have clear objectives
and targets of what they hope to achieve and how they will monitor and
measure those achievements, it will be up to evaluators to sort out what
they are looking for.” This comment by a team member characterised the
nature of the subject under evaluation which prompted a particularly
careful preparation of evaluation methods and tools. Key among these
were Concept Papers and Prompt Sheets, Analytical Frameworks of