At the cutting edge >>Evaluation of UNIFEM's work in gender-responsive budgeting


First published: 2010-02-05

By Francis Watkins and Allyson Thirkell

 

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UNIFEM is the global leader and conceptual architect for gender-responsive budgeting. They have rightly claimed that changing government budgets to support women more explicitly can mean far-reaching and long lasting changes for poor women globally.

An SDDirect team recently completed a major international evaluation of UNIFEM's efforts over five years to ensure that planning and budgeting processes take gender data and analysis into account. The evaluation was carried out in three stages over a period of eight months and involved evaluation visits to UNIFEM's work in Ecuador, Morocco, Mozambique and Senegal. This was the first corporate evaluation to be carried out by UNIFEM's recently formed Evaluation Unit and the final results will be published and made available internationally later this year.

The three stages of the evaluation were:

  1. A preliminary rapid assessment of the full range of gender-responsive budgeting initiatives that UNIFEM supports around the world in order to clarify the scope of evaluation.
  2. Fieldwork research on the global gender-responsive budgeting programme: Phase II, which worked in four countries, as an evaluation case study, with the aim of assessing the programme's results at country level.
  3. Building on the findings of the first two stages,
  4. An assessment of the overall appropriateness (effectiveness, relevance, and sustainability) of UNIFEM's approach to gender-responsive budgeting programming, looking at both the theoretical work and the work carried out in places as diverse as Nigeria, India, Egypt and the South American region. This stage included a typology for the future programme strategy and its evaluation.

UNIFEM intends to use the results of the evaluation as significant inputs for:

  • The organisation's thematic strategy, reflection and learning about work on gender-responsive budgeting programming;
  • Improving the monitoring and evaluation systems of current gender-responsive budgeting programmes and preparing the impact evaluation of the selected countries.

The final report from the evaluation makes three broad recommendations:

  1. UNIFEM needs to clarify what gender-responsive budgeting consists of in different contexts and what different approaches to gender-budgeting initiatives aim to achieve. In particular it is suggested that there is a need to build on the excellent conceptual work done by UNIFEM and on the range of field experience that has been developed to ensure that a rights-based approach to gender-responsive budgeting is consistently implemented in UNIFEM's programme.
  2. UNIFEM needs to clearly set out its strengths and make clear the linkages between three different roles: leading theoretically and conceptually; supporting GBIs in the field; and, collecting, analysing and disseminating the experience of GBIs. Each of these three roles has implications for the organisation.
  3. UNIFEM could focus lesson-learning and evaluation efforts on partnerships and capacity-building in order to record successes to date and to help in developing future gender-responsive budgeting strategies. There is anecdotal evidence from the evaluation to suggest that UNIFEM's support to capacity-building has been instrumental in achieving some of the results in gender-responsive budgeting. Whilst partnerships are clearly important in gender-responsive budgeting, UNIFEM can now design indicators to measure them.