What is your experience in evaluating women's political participation?

[Shravanti]

Dear Members,

I will be working on an evaluation of women's political participation over the next year and I wanted to both start a discussion on this topic.

As a start, it would be great to gather experiences from within the group What approaches and methods have been used? What has worked well? What are some of the key challenges for evaluating such interventions? Do you know of any relevant evaluations you could share?

Look forward to interacting with you on this interesting issue!

Shravanti

[Sarita Ranchod]

Hello Shravanti, you could look at this evaluation of women's political empowerment by three women's and feminist organisations in South Africa supported by Norad/SAIH (Norwegian) development cooperation organisation. The evaluation was undertaken by Sonja Boezak and myself . We used participatory and feminist approaches in undertaking the evaluation. I hope you will find it useful.

The report is at

https://www.norad.no/om-bistand/publikasjon/ngo-evaluations/2012/sa...

[Sarita Ranchod]

www.norad.no-ny/filarkiv/ngo-evaluations/saih-programme--evaluation..." target="_blank">https://www.norad.no/globalassets/import-2162015-80434-am/www.norad.no-ny/filarkiv/ngo-evaluations/saih-programme--evaluation...

[Nwedobong Okon]

The only evaluation I am aware of is the one done by the world bank. I am not aware of any individually carried out projects and I'm not acquainted with the challenges that may be associated with this task. Thank you.

[Sara Niner]

Dear Shravanti

We wrote this report a few years ago now and it might be helpful to you.

Women’s political participation in Asia-Pacific. Report for United Nations Department of Political Affairs.  New York: Social Science Research Council Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum.

You can download at http://profilesarts.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/sara-niner/files/2012/0...

We summarised the situation (soci-economic, culturaland political) in each country in the asia-pacific, described the initiatives to improve the situaiton for women's formal political participation and then made some general recommendations.

best wishes Sara--
Dr. Sara Niner Lecturer & Researcher
Monash University | School of Social Sciences | Anthropology

[Luis Fujiwara]

Hi Shravanti,

In terms of methods I know that there are people using statistical analysis to study women's political participation (like Dr. Wylie at James Madison, for example), but the true is that I do not recall reading any sophisticated econometric analysis on this matter in the past couple years. Most of the studies you might find will be qualitative by nature, especially if you intend to use women/individuals as the unit of analysis, and to infer to which degree political participation has changed their lives, families and communities.

It might be worthwhile consulting with Andrea Azevedo, who uses to work at UN Women in Brazil, she is a great evaluator and have been researching women's political participation from a intersectional perspective for many years now. 

Hope my two cents help.

Cheers.

L