Evaluating for Equality

Evaluating for Equality is an international development consultancy specialising in gender responsive evaluation and research to improve the well-being of women and men in poor and marginalised communities.

We work to optimise the ability of development organisations and programmes to articulate, implement and achieve their gender equality objectives, including for the most marginalised.

We work across sectors, with a particular focus on women’s economic empowerment; education; eliminating violence against women; sanitation; social exclusion; citizenship and rights; social norms and the enabling environment for young women; and youth employment.

What we do

Evaluation

We design and implement gender-responsive evaluation processess to support your programmes.

We understand that what and how a programme gets evaluated matters. Development accountability is a cornerstone objective of evaluation, but it is not the only possible one. When an evaluation is designed to contribute to organisational learning and to support strategic decision making, it is important to centralise the right questions and conduct the right process.

At Evaluating for Equality, we know how to ask the right questions so that equality issues remain central to the purpose of evaluation and reseach.

We contextualise evaluation based evidence so that findings are driven by equality-related issues.
We prioritise an evaluation process that is sensitive to equality issues and remains accountable to the rights-holder beneficiaries of a programme.
We work collaboratively to generate evidence-based recommendations which optimise an organisation’s ability to achieve its equality-related objectives.

Participatory theory-of-change review

We work with your team to review live programme evidence and refine strategy.

We can facilitate reflection on current programme knowledge. Analysis of this against a theory of change framework can help identify gaps and bottlenecks, and therefore guide live decision-making as well as tweak monitoring to improve evaluability and prepare for evaluation.

Case Study Development

We research emerging good practice to highlight what is working and why.

The key to developing a good case study is being clear what it’s a case of. We can help to develop a methodologically robust study that surfaces the learning you’re looking for.

Qualitative Studies

We design studies on specific work areas to explore and evidence how results are being achieved – and identify how these causal pathways can be optimised.

Sometimes resources for a full progamme evaluation are simply not available or warranted. We can design smaller studies which probe particular parts of a programme, so that the most pertinent learning from a programme experience will not be lost.

Monitoring systems and evaluability

We work with you to optimise monitoring systems for gender responsive results-based management.

Would committing resources to an evaluation produce sufficient, robust knowledge to make it worthwhile? Do you have the right indicators and monitoring structure in place to make evaluation a smooth and productive process? Are the various elements of the planned MEL system for a programme in design stage optimized so that new knowledge can realistically be one outcome of the programme? Has the nature of your programme changed somewhat since it was designed, so that your monitoring framework may now be missing something? We can carry out short studies to assess the evaluability of the programme, making recommendations on how to improve its evaluability; on on whether to evaluate at all.

Data synthesis for organisational learning

We can work with you using existing monitoring information to develop knowledge products supporting learning both within your organisation and externally.

Do you have stacks of monitoring data and reports, but no time to bring it together to tell the story of your programme - or your organisation? We can carry out analysis of your data, looking across different components to see what it says about the 'big picture' results you are trying to achieve. We can also design this exercise as a collaborative process with key staff, so that the resulting story reflects their latent knowledge and learning from the process remains deeply embedded in the organisation.

Literature reviews

We can research current knowledge and practice in niche areas to act as a foundation for programme design and decision-making.

Programme designers and managers have core expertise in their sectors, but they often do not have time to update this knowledge with live global experience, nor to present this knowledge in a format which makes it available across the team and more widely. We can help by collecting and synthesising information summarising current knowledge. See these literature reviews produced to support the Muva programme supporting opportunity for young women and men in the labour market in Mozambique.