Collaborative, Participatory & Empowerment Evaluation
Iana Barenboim (she/her/hers)
Director of the entrepreneurship and private sector department at MUVA
MUVA
Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Iana Barenboim (she/her/hers)
Director of the entrepreneurship and private sector department at MUVA
MUVA
Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Iana Barenboim (she/her/hers)
Director of the entrepreneurship and private sector department at MUVA
MUVA
Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Kerry Selvester, n/a
Director of the MELR (Monitoring Evaluation Learning and Research) at MUVA
MUVA, United States
Kerry Selvester, n/a
Director of the MELR (Monitoring Evaluation Learning and Research) at MUVA
MUVA, United States
Kerry Selvester, n/a
Director of the MELR (Monitoring Evaluation Learning and Research) at MUVA
MUVA, United States
Location: Grand Ballroom 3
Abstract Information: This session will focus on MUVA, an FCDO funded programme from 2015-2022 and now an independent Mozambican NGO, that aims to improve the economic empowerment of urban young female Mozambicans. We will share our experiences with respect to two key points: first, we will show how we have tried to build an ‘evidence story’ on the effects of this large and complex programme over the years, with a particular emphasis on quantitative evidence. Second, we will show how we have tried to disseminate such evidence in the communities MUVA worked in, using participatory and hands-on story-telling sessions. Our session will be a live demonstration of this interactive dissemination technique.
To build an ‘evidence story’ on the effect of MUVA, we have implemented a follow-up study to assess the socioeconomic situation of 1,321 youths that participated in MUVA’s projects. We have interviewed MUVA participants six months or more after they left the programme. The study provides gender disaggregated data and evidence on the lives of the youth interviewed, who participated in ten of MUVA’s projects: seven related to labour insertion, focused in supporting participants to gain access to the job market in urban Mozambique and three projects were ‘entrepreneurship’ projects, focused in supporting female entrepreneurs to increase their profits. Despite the large diversity encountered on the data analysed, this study provides a descriptive analysis using gender disaggregated data of participants’ situation after participating in one of MUVA’s projects and an assessment of the effects that MUVA had had on their lives.
To disseminate evidence in communities, we visualised quantitative data and graphs using physical objects, which were built together and by the community using colourful sponges and sticks. This allowed community members to interact with the data, which sparked discussions and generated ownership of results among a population that rarely interacted with the type of quantitative data used here. The sessions also helped participants’ families, especially male members, to truly understand how the projects positively affected the economic prospects of their female family members, which in many cases led to further endorsement and support of their economic activities.
To explain the results of the follow-up study mentioned, we will apply the participatory methodology MUVA uses to disseminate evidence in low-income communities in Mozambique. Participants of this session will ‘learn-by-doing’ the dissemination technique and will be ready to implement it where they find fit!
Relevance Statement: This session is relevant in two ways. First, via a hands-on experience, we will share how to effectively provide feedback of complex evaluation results to low-income and low education populations that rarely interact with data. Second, we will explain how we have built a coherent story about the effects of MUVA, a complex program that had ten different interventions with ten different profiles of participants. Below we detail both.
About disseminating results in an accessible way: Feeding back results to individuals and their communities who participated in interventions, studies, or projects can be highly effective to increase ownership of participants and buy-in of their families and friends. It might, however, be a challenge to explain complex statistical analyses and results to communities that are not very familiar with quantitative data. Another challenge is to ensure that participants and families not only ‘see’ the data but can also make use of the data to inform their actions and practices. MUVA has developed an innovative approach of how to present data and results from quantitative studies with audiences that had limited exposure to this by using participatory sessions, interactive graphs, and physical objects. This methodology can be easily replicated in any part of the world. It uses very common and easy to find materials. In a hands-on session, we will explain how this works and discuss the benefits of implementing it.
About MUVA’s evidence story produced: MUVA’s goal is to produce and disseminate evidence and learning about female economic empowerment, contributing to the advancement of this agenda through evidence-based approaches. The key objectives of our study were to first provide a descriptive overview of the situation of MUVA participants after they had left the program and second to provide an assessment of the effects that MUVA had had in their lives. A particular focus of this descriptive analysis is on comparing the situation of men and women, and how they might differ from each other. We produced descriptive statistics both by project and sex. We also produced a few general insights, acknowledging the diverse set of participants profiles MUVA worked with and the different ‘starting point’ participants were in when joining the programme. To assess the possible effect that MUVA had on the lives of participants beyond the estimates of this study we used an external data source, the Youth Survey MUVA implemented in 2020 among youths of two of the largest cities in Mozambique, which provided us with the best comparison data in relation to MUVA participants interviewed in the follow-up survey. In this session we will share the challenges we encountered to produce this kind of comprehensive evidence, the procedures we used to make comparisons and how the variety of evidence we collected allowed us to draw a few general insights, which should be used to inform public policies and programming related to Women’s Economic Empowerment.