"Gender" is also about time

Counting women in decision-making positions is a popular way to determine whether gender is "mainstreamed" and women are empowered. That seems reasonable: where women are not or poorly represented, their perspectives and concerns are likely to be ignored.  But women's numbers are a blunt indicator: "token" women, drafted into a committee to fulfil the quota, might have little influence on decisions; and women will not necessarily defend women's gender-specific interests. In rural areas, many women simply don't have time for meaningful participation in those village development committees: they wake up before dawn to fetch water and firewood, prepare food for the day, get their children ready for school, and then spend 8, 9, 10 hours in agricultural work. After that, more water- and firewood-fetching, cooking, other houselhold tasks...  A UNIFEM report estimates that women in Sub-Saharan Africa collectively spend 40,000,000,000 (40 billion) hours a year fetching water. And that is just the water-fetching part of the picture.

Greetings from Myanmar

Where the digital revolution has reached deep into the Ayeyarwady Delta (picture).  And where many people I meet are worried about the "development and democratisation industry" descending upon the country. People fear Myanmar might become "another Cambodia" - i.e. a place with many happy, wealthy expatriates running hundreds of mutually contradictory projects all over the country, recruiting highly skilled local people away from local initiatives and institutions, fostering competition instead of collaboration... If you want to read more about bad examples - as well as avenues for improving the dire record of international aid efforts -, click HERE.

Participatory Statistics and more

Last week I attended a riveting conference on participatory statistics, featuring, among others, Robert Chambers and Carlos Barahona. It'll take a few weeks until I'll find time to write more about this but I am eager to start sharing. Have a look at this video by Carlos Barahona - from an earlier conference, but very much in line with what we discussed last week. Enjoy!

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.