IWWAGE Bi-Monthly Seminar: Gender Transformative Evaluation- Why and How?
Jahnvi Andharia, Director and Research Fellow at Institute for Social Studies Trust along with her colleague Alpaxee Kashyap joined us for a seminar series on July 11, 2024 to discuss Gender Transformative Evaluations.
The seminar started with a discussion on the history of evaluation and the importance of context in evaluation right from its origin. It was realized soon enough that change can only be measured through certain kinds of frameworks. An evaluator’s job then becomes to identify the right kind of measurement framework given the context accounting for both strengths and weaknesses. The discussion further progressed into origins of Voluntary Organization for Professional Evaluation (VOPEs) and evolution of evaluation as it became a government function initially because of the monetary and human resource aspect which only a government body could possess. As ‘evaluation’ expanded to both government and non-government programs, multiple stakeholders entered the picture. This also led to “engendering evaluation”. The focus of the discussion further shifted to engaging participants on differentiating between change and transformation. Change is conceptualized as a shorter-term response to new external factors but transformation is often an internal and a fundamental evolution in the belief system of individuals. Change can be small and incremental; however, transformation is always large and significant. Lastly, transformation may not require any external influence to maintain it but more foundational shifts from within. Transformations might not be necessarily positive and their impact can only be determined later.
As suggested by the discussion, transformation is a spectrum. Before understanding Gender Transformative Evaluation, one must understand different levels of how any evaluation constitutes Gender. Evaluations in its objective can choose to decide whether it wants to include ‘gender’ and how based on these different levels.
Level 1: Gender Discriminatory- Any program that perpetuates gender inequality by reinforcing unbalanced norms, roles and relations.
Level 2: Gender Blind- This suggests any evaluation/program that is neutral to gender norms, roles and relations. In terms of such evaluation, the objective might not go beyond surface level involvement of men and women without understanding gender norms.
Level 3: Gender Sensitive- Unlike previous types of evaluation, this approach considers gender roles, norms and relations. However, it does not go a further step to address inequality created by such unequal norms.
Level 4: Gender Responsive- This approach takes that step and investigates whether an intervention/program has actually responded to gender specific needs.
Level 5: Gender Transformative- Any approach of evaluation is truly gender transformative if it questions power structures and includes ways of transforming gender norms and promotes gender equality in the longer run.
The speakers urged the participants to identify key differences between research and evaluation. Through an interactive discussion, it was concluded that the key difference between research and evaluation is that research can be the creation of new knowledge but evaluation has a specific purpose to assess an activity, program or strategy. Evaluation aims to improve something and includes specific people for which the evaluation is considered- beneficiaries, implementers, government and non-government bodies etc.
Through rounds of discussion and interaction, the participants also developed a better understanding on the nature of Evaluation and what can make them Transformative. It was realized that the objective of evaluation is often very limited and this restricts transformation. Traditional indicators of measurement during evaluation often focus on achievable outputs and not outcomes. Outcomes require more time and if the evaluation fails to understand whether the current outputs actually leads to better outcomes, such evaluation won’t reveal the true picture of what is happening with the intervention.
Finally, in order to truly understand Gender Transformative Evaluations, one must develop an understanding of intersectionality, equity and human rights. The discussion also introduced various operational challenges especially in terms of budget in conducting Gender Transformative Evaluation. Overall, as a domain Evaluation requires an in-depth understanding of purpose, criteria, methodology, stakeholder analysis, data collection methods and finally incorporation of gender to develop deeper understanding of the hierarchies in the system. Before concluding, the discussion also went into some detail on conflicting perspectives that evaluators might face and the significance of maintaining strong research methods combining a mixed approach in Evaluation.
