A "must read" on preventing partner violence

The UK Department for International Development (DFID)  has published a study by Lori Heise: "What works to prevent partner violence?" - click on the title to download it. It is a hefty document - don't be discouraged if you can't find time, just read the short and clear executive summary!

The study draws on evidence from all kinds of places, but it is meant to inform chiefly work in low and middle-income countries. It concludes that the following types of interventions work best to prevent partner violence:

Managing for Results?

A group of Swedish researchers and development professionals has published a hefty review of evaluations on Results Based Management in Development Cooperation. The full Vähämäki/ Schmidt/ Molander study is available HERE. The authors conclude that the basic idea behind the "results agenda" - i.e. that you need to know how your development interventions perform so as to make the right decisions - is uncontested. They have found that RBM may indeed improve planning and monitoring of development interventions.

Monitoring legal aid

A team at Tilburg University has developed a methodology to measure "access to justice". It includes plenty of useful information for people with more modest ambitions - for example, legal aid providers who want to monitor the quality of their work, or development professionals who need to assess the performance of a partner organisation. Find the full manual as a PDF file by clicking HERE. Additional material - including an interactive "wiki" on measuring access to justice - are available on the "access to justice" WEB-SITE.

DAC Evaluation Standards now in Arabic!

There is a new, trilingual version of the OECD-DAC Quality Standards for Development Evaluation: Arabic/French/English. Click HERE to find them!

Where to go on 8 March?

There is a dedicated International Women's Day web-site - click here to find information on the day, a calendar of events where you can upload information on events you organise in your country, and resources - e.g. posters - that you can download and print out. One warning for people with a slow internet connection: animated advertisement banners may slow you down - if you don't need the pictures, better set your browser not to download images. And it may be a good idea to write to the corporate sponsors and find out whether they can support your work on women's rights! ;-)

"...and here are our raped women"

The other day a colleague told me about an evaluation in a war-prone country. The international consultant who led the exercise had called a meeting with the "beneficiaries" - women who used services designed for survivors of gender-based violence. At one point in the meeting, the consultant reportedly asked participants who had been raped to identify themselves by raising a hand.
Does this make you cringe? No? Then, please read on.

End Violence against Women Now: New Learning Modules

The UN WOMEN Virtual Knowledge Centre endvawnow.org has been enriched with new modules that provide guidance for a range of interventions to end violence against women. Jasmin Rocha and I are the authors of the "Campaigns" module - check it out and feel free to comment (click on the little envelope below) if you come across anything that needs enriching or improving! You can also register on endvawnow.org to indicate your preferences in terms of topics and languages. For the time being, only part of the site is available in French and Spanish, but eventually, everything will be translated.

Wishes for 2012 starting to come through!

The other day I wrote that I would do more to share findings from evaluations. And now I find out that Oxfam Great Britain has put my whole full big evaluation report on the "We Can" campaign, recommendations and all, in the public domain: ta-taa! Click here if you're interested in campaigning on people's attitudes on gender equality.
The link takes you to the Oxfam Great Britain Policy and Practice web-site, a commendable mine of publications linked to Oxfam work around the world. 

Good Resolutions for 2012

A very healthy and happy 2012 to everyone! At the beginning of this new year I realise how busy and stimulating 2011 was for me: I led two multi-country evaluations and two "strategic reviews", all in the complex fields of human rights, gender justice and peace building. Early in the year, I completed a "real-time" evaluation that had accompanied, over almost three years, the development of a facilitation method for strategic planning in conflict contexts. In October, I applied aspects of that method to plan and facilitate a multi-stakeholder, multi-lingual and inter-continental strategic planning workshop - an exhilarating experience. Between Christmas and New Year's Day, my occasional associate Jasmin Rocha and I made time to finally write up our article that presents the methodology we developed in 2010 to assess quality in work with survivors of violence against women.

What are my resolutions for 2012? I can think of a few:

New Call for Proposals!

Click on the link to find out more: The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women Announces New Call for Proposals | Say NO - UNiTE Attention: they tend to fund rather big projects. Bon courage!

Research on Gender Relations

There has been an encouraging flurry of research projects, "baseline" studies and evaluations on gender relations.  It seems that in recent years, hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of people have been interviewed. They have been asked what they think and do about the roles of men and women, girls and boys (and maybe people who fit into an in-between category) - in the household, at school, at work, in politics and other aspects of life in society. I suspect that quite some people may have undergone several interviews by different research teams, especially in those parts of the world that receive extra donor attention - my mental map shows big blotches of donor interest around Bukavu, Goma, Kabul, Phnom Penh, to name a few places.

A commendable series of "webinars"

For free on-line seminars on evaluation, click here: Equity-focused evaluations | MY M&E! I particularly recommend the 22 November instalment with Patricia Rogers and Richard Hummelbrunner - on how to make log-frames more effective for complex interventions.

A women's classic, 2011 edition!

Hooray - "Our Bodies, Ourselves" has been updated, 40 years after the first edition of this classic on women's health and sexuality. Find the table of contents, the introduction, readers' praise and more by clicking on this link: Our Bodies, Ourselves 2011 Edition - Our Bodies Ourselves

Tips for Multi-Everything Facilitation

Just got back from an exhilarating multi-country, multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder, multi-language planning workshop. So much "multi" can make workshop planning quite an adventure: Will the participants understand each other, across cultures, disciplines, languages and perspectives? Will those who come with the money listen to those who come with the expertise? Will the participants reach any agreement or useful conclusions within a short (2-day) spell of time? In the end, things appeared to work out beautifully. I see three major factors for such success:

Evaluating efficiency in campaigning

The OECD Development Co-operation Directorate (DAC) defines efficiency as follows: "Efficiency measures the outputs -- qualitative and quantitative -- in relation to the inputs. It is an economic term which signifies that the aid uses the least costly resources possible in order to achieve the desired results. This generally requires comparing alternative approaches to achieving the same outputs, to see whether the most efficient process has been adopted. When evaluating the efficiency of a programme or a project, it is useful to consider the following questions: Were activities cost-efficient? Were objectives achieved on time? Was the programme or project implemented in the most efficient way compared to alternatives?"  (DAC criteria for evaluating development assistance)