Global Affairs Canada’s approach to feminist evaluation practices

Challenge

Measuring and evaluating change, let alone transformative change, is a challenging endeavour. Disrupting entrenched power relations and addressing gender inequality requires different types of change on many levels (such as structural, behavioural, and informal and formal change), is non-linear and takes time. Global Affairs Canada (GAC) found that it was difficult to apply “traditional” top-down approaches to its monitoring and evaluation processes while aligning to Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy. Traditional approaches are rooted in systems of power that often exclude key stakeholders from influencing evaluation processes, rely on quantitative over qualitative data, and place more emphasis on evaluation results than the evaluation process.

Approach

Since the launch of Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, GAC has engaged in an incremental process to integrate a feminist approach into its evaluation practices. The process includes collaboration with feminist evaluation researchers, academics, practitioners and experts from the Global North and the Global South, as well as Canadian and international civil society. GAC’s feminist evaluations aim to:

• explore power relations and focus on the systemic or structural causes of inequalities and discrimination that may be present in the context of a programme or policy

• encourage collaborative Global North and Global South partnerships that involve learning and exchanging with local cultures to empower participants and seek transformative change

• emphasise the voices of women and other marginalised groups by employing participatory processes, placing them at the centre of the evaluation process

• enable those with lived experiences and contextual and cultural understanding of power dynamics and gender issues to guide and carry out evaluation practices

• facilitate ongoing reflection and dialogue, allowing room to adapt to evolving needs and information

• place importance on the evaluation process, not just the findings

• actively support social justice agendas.

GAC designed the Gender Equality and Empowerment Measurement (GEM) tool for evaluating gender equality and empowerment outcomes for women and girls in the Middle East and Maghreb. This peer-reviewed tool uses a feminist lens to capture qualitative data on gender equality and empowerment project outcomes. It employs participatory approaches to capture the voices and perspectives of project participants on their experiences of empowerment. Additionally, the GEM tool gathers information on cultural, legal, and societal factors that may enable, or hinder, empowerment.

In 2020, GAC designed and implemented its first fully feminist evaluation process with the Formative Evaluation of the Women’s Voice and Leadership Programme. The evaluation team, supported by global experts, developed a framework to operationalise feminist evaluation principles in each phase of the evaluation process and to help the team reflect and document learning along the way.

Figure 1. The Feminist Evaluation Framework

Source: Global Affairs Canada

Results

GAC’s experience to date in using a feminist evaluation approach has resulted in stronger findings that truly reflect the diverse perspectives of evaluation stakeholders. For example:

• Using the GEM tool ensured that women’s perspectives were central to understanding the changes they experienced in relation to gender equality and empowerment.

• Applying feminist evaluation principles to the Women’s Voice and Leadership Formative Evaluation led to more useful evaluation processes and products, for the diversity of stakeholders involved.

• Feminist evaluations are allowing evaluators to better contribute to transformational change by ensuring that recommendations targeted at key decision makers highlight the needs of all evaluation stakeholders.

• A feminist evaluation process can be transformative for all involved. For example, women’s rights organisations that participated in the Women’s Voice and Leadership evaluation were not only empowered to influence the direction of the evaluation process but also to strengthen their own evaluation capacity.