THEME: Gender-sensitive evaluation requires both staff commitment and know-how.
If these guidelines are followed, an evaluation exercise can make major changes in the project approach. A case in point occurred with The Support Project for Small Producers in the Semi-Arid Zones of Falcon and Lara States (PROSALAFA) in Venezuela. This project, which began implementation in 1993, was one of the first in the region to be designed to incorporate gender mainstreaming rather than to have separate activities for women. The intention was that 38% of the beneficiaries would be women heads of households and farmers’ wives who themselves were active in farming, primarily in rearing goats. It was expected that women would participate alongside men in all the project activities. The usual types of ‘assists’ were included under the project. These included special empowerment training for women, training of project staff in gender issues and earmarking of a portion of credit funds and technical assistance for women. However, in spite of such measures, during its first few years, the project reverted to the more customary approach of having a separate women’s component. The activities for women, as was usual, were directed towards women’s reproductive and domestic roles. This situation was changed with the Mid-term Evaluation of 1997. That evaluation steered the project back to its original objectives. Specific gender objectives and ‘sub-objectives’ were established and a process was set in motion for changing the entire project orientation. Staff motivation does not appear to have been the reason for the failure to implement the gender approach, but rather the lack of know-how and tools. During the evaluation, the project extension staff agreed that there were considerable advantages to working with women. Their experience showed that women:
The main disadvantages to working with women were:
The new strategy of the project took all these factors into consideration. The project’s entire management information system was redesigned to take account of gender issues and to include project monthly reports, operational plans, data collection tools and monitoring and evaluation indicators. Data was disaggregated along gender lines, but qualitative data was also collected. One of the lessons of the experience is that gender-sensitive evaluation is unlikely to be successfully implemented unless project staff both fully appreciate what is to be done and have the tools and know-how to do it. Absence of commitment or know-how is one of the frequent reasons for the common gap between design and implementation. In this instance, the Mid-term Evaluation performed a valuable role in setting the management information system on course. Adapted from: Budinich, Valeria. 1998. Lineamientos para Incorporar la Perspective de Genero en Sistemas de Seguimiento y Evaluaction. Rome: IFAD.
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The
Fund is systematically promoting the inclusion of gender issues
in project monitoring and evaluation systems. IFAD-supported projects
in the Latin American and Caribbean Region illustrate such efforts.
But a 1998 review of the experience notes that incorporating a gender
viewpoint is far from easy. It is still fairly new for the majority
of development institutions and programmes, and will take time.
Equally, the review demonstrates that such an evaluation needs
to go beyond ‘head counting’, which compares numbers of
women to numbers of men who have taken part in one or another
activity. A gender-sensitive evaluation can be most meaningful
and useful when: