We present these thirteen key insights into how women’s rights organizations and movements can strengthen capacity to track and assess the contribution of our organizations and interventions.
These lessons can contribute to uprooting and shifting the deeply-embedded gender-based inequalities and injustices that continue to plague our world.
- Make M&E a key ingredient in our learning and accountability
- Develop M&E capacity
- One size does not fit all
- Track reversals or “holding the line”
- Balance quantitative and qualitative assessment
- Prioritize approaches that assess our contribution to change, not those that demand attribution
- Less is more
- Flexibility and adaptability
- M&E systems must be appropriate to organizational architecture
- Negotiate M&E systems with donors
- Tailor indicators and results to time frames
- Create baselines
- M&E that works for us will work for others
Recognizing that many organizations fighting for women’s rights are working within significant resource, staffing and capacity constraints, we offer these insights as ideas, possibilities and approaches from which organizations can choose, adapting those that seem most relevant, useful, and above all, feasible, given their particular contexts.
These insights stem from AWID's intensive research into the challenges faced by women’s organizations in effectively monitoring and evaluating women’s rights work, and the ways to enhance the collective capacity to assess the influence and impact of such work.