NO ONE LEFT BEHIND

issues of migrant workers, asking them directly what
are reproductive issues yielded discouraging results.
Therefore, the development of evaluator facilitation
skills that can facilitate stakeholder conversations
and practice deep listening are key.
• There should be participatory statistics through
which communities can collect quantitative data.
• Approaches to redefine and redistribute power are
also central to potential for progress. Constellation’s
self-assessment framework is a way for communities
to create a dream for themselves and also assess how
far they have come on the path towards achieving that
dream. It is a strengths-based approach that seeks to
understand a community’s aspirations and also helps
them recognize their achievements and potential.
Are we really open to listen to what is coming from the
informants? What kind of mind and heart should we
have in order to listen and understand?
Is it plausible to think that an open mind can determine
an open discussion with no agenda (either from the
evaluator or from the informants)? Can an open mind
lead to discussions that are closer to solutions or that
are themselves solutions? We need a lot of courage, as
human beings to accept that changes are happening in
the present moment. It doesn’t make any sense to reduce
that moment to an “information gathering” process.
This strongly links the methodology and the evaluation
process to the usefulness of the evaluation itself.
Such a process has a direct usefulness. After a similar
process, all participants (even the evaluators) are enriched,
empowered.
The privilege of being evaluators and conducting
field-level analysis should be systematically used to
empower people, simply by listening to them with
an open mind and an open heart and no judgement.
This cannot be forgotten when we talk about tools,
professionalization of the evaluation function (since
we need to develop different skills), and usefulness of
the evaluations.
Potential uses of technology:
••
The Cloud: Data collection through the Cloud has
been very efficient in handling large amounts of information,
is easily accessible and is cheap.
••
Facebook and Web pages can collect information
about messages, documents, etc.
••
Video helps visualize the experiences, messages, and
practices of beneficiaries.
••
Skype can be useful for interviews and meetings.
But from a gender perspective, it is critical how information
technology is accessed and utilized. Data collected
through technology has to be disaggregated in terms
of social and physical cleavages and regions for analysis
from an equity-focused and gender-responsive
lens. Data from phones, tablets, the internet and big
data could be useful for looking at gender advances
and challenges. For this, we need to have data disaggregated
by sex. However, the most important thing to
consider is critical gender dimensions in the definition
of our indicators. The most important gender dimensions
are: sexual division of labor and different gender
roles, participation of women and men in private and
public spheres, the control of the use of women’s bodies,
practical and strategic gender needs, different use
of time by women and men, and the unequal access to
and control over resources, benefits and services. You
then need to pre-test to ensure that these tools do not
introduce bias and would be unsuitable to gather with
women, youth and vulnerable groups, etc.
In formulating the evaluation questions, it is important
to ensure that we take care to target women and
other vulnerable groups.
Experiential example:
A survey in 2014 in Sri Lanka for a government programme
placed more focus on quantitative data. Police
stations in the area noted 22 entries in the record book
based on gender-based violence and rape cases.
Evaluating the Sustainable Development Goals with
an Equity-focused and Gender-responsive Lens 33