NO ONE LEFT BEHIND

The complexity of how to measure social equity and
gender equality makes many without the technical
know-how shy away from conducting these evaluations.
Social and gender issues cut across all sectors
and yet sectors are divided; this somehow causes social
and gender issues to be swept under the carpet.
3. The current global initiatives to integrate gender
and equity into M&E of progress towards the
SDGs could also motivate a change of thinking at
the national level. The national evaluation policies
should emphasize the need to take into account the
intersection of gender with other social and demographic
factors or there should at least be national
guidelines emphasizing such need. In Canada, for
example, there is a national requirement (though
not explicitly included in the national evaluation
policy) that all planning, implementation, and
evaluation of national legislation, policies, and
programmes must be subjected to analysis from
the point of view of gender and the intersection of
gender with other identity factors. Continued brainstorming
and advocacy is necessary to ensure that
the process of integration of gender and equity into
national development evaluations is sustained.
Results of formative evaluations are likely to utilized
more in government programmes than those of
summative evaluations as the authorities are more
ready to make changes before commencing the
programme than later.
Other institutional mechanisms to track action on
recommendations emerging from evaluations will
also be useful.
There is need for meaningful stakeholder engagement
throughout the evaluation process
so as to increase ownership, help determine the
intended use of the evaluation findings, review interim
findings and contribute to recommendations.
Experience has shown that people are more inclined
to support initiatives that they participated in.
Civil society organizations also can play an important
part in promoting demand for and use of evaluations
with a gender and equity focus. Legislators
also have a role to play in this process. Though their
representative function can cause the citizenry to
demand for accountability reports, performance
reports and follow-up on recommendations, increased
education and awareness creation on the
importance of evaluation is necessary. The media, if
trained on how to package and disseminate findings
could play a key role in linking government, civil society
organizations and the population. This approach
should dwell more on positive case studies to try
to counter the negative attitude policy actors have
that evaluation is a means to witch-hunt others.
4. It is difficult to prescribe general types of presentations
needed to promote utilization of evaluation
results, because each organization comes with its
format. The converging point that might be useful
is an action-oriented report that relates to each of
the stakeholders and suits the interests of a particular
target audience. For example, women would
be more interested in how the distance to a waterpoint
changed their lives while men in a pastoral
community would be more interested on how their
livestock benefited and the government will be interested
in what additional policies to put in place.
5. There is a need for capacity building for both producers
of evaluations as well as users. Lack of capacities
lead to lack of appreciation of evaluations and their
utilization. Some experiments on short trainings
generated interest and introduced colleagues to the
basics of evaluation, the importance of evaluation in
policy and how evaluation findings can be disseminated.
More importantly, by training senior staff and
members of parliament, it raised awareness about
their role as demanders and users of evaluation in
the policy cycle—given the parliamentary mandate
as an oversight institution. Certain issues relating
to demand and supply were raised during the 2013
Evaluation Week held in Kampala and brought out
inter alia that there is a need to change the basic
mind set towards evaluations to have a positive attitude,
resource allocation and evaluation culture.
6. The assumption that social equity and gender equality
are generally taken into consideration within the
poverty indicators makes the specific demand and
supply for them difficult.
Evaluating the Sustainable Development Goals with
an Equity-focused and Gender-responsive Lens 45