Senior Manager, Systems-Level Impact CARE, United States
Establishing a feminist, decentralized approach to evaluation requires pushing back on “the way we do things” with funders and other partners. Co-designing research and evaluation with local Women-Led Organization (WLO) partners required CARE to not set the agenda ahead of time, from establishing measurement indicators to baseline survey methodology. This is a challenge when donors often require detailed Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) plans and evaluation frameworks in order to obtain funding. While many evaluators may embrace feminist, locally led and participant-action oriented evaluation methodologies in theory, it can be difficult to implement them in the face of strict donor requirements. The complexity further increases when attempting to measure systems-level change across four countries. In this presentation, we’ll share some of the ways we have operationalized a feminist, locally led approach to evaluation in a USAID-funded initiative with Women-Led Organizations in Afghanistan, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nepal. We have established methodologies that provide rich country-level data, but with enough standardization to aggregate a global story—a compelling narrative that is important to further increase humanitarian funding to WLOs. We will discuss what we learned, challenges, and how we set up our feminist, participant-oriented evaluation framework that is locally led while still meeting USAID standards.
