Monthly Corner
IDH Publication, 2026
Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is not just a social issue, it’s a systemic challenge that undermines agricultural value chains.
In rural and isolated areas, GBV threatens women’s safety, limits their economic participation, and weakens food security. When women cannot work safely, entire communities lose resilience, and businesses lose productivity. Climate resilience strategies that overlook gendered risks leave communities exposed and women vulnerable.
Ending GBV is essential for building equitable, sustainable, and climate-resilient agri-food systems; and it’s not only a human rights imperative, but also central to climate adaptation and economic stability.
The good news? Solutions work. Programs like the Women’s Safety Accelerator Fund (WSAF) demonstrate that addressing GBV can enhance productivity and strengthen workforce morale and brand reputation. Safe, inclusive workplaces aren’t just good ethics, they’re smart business.
Gurmeet Kaur Articles
Luc Barriere-Constantin Article
This article draws on the experience gained by The Constellation over the past 20 years. It is also a proposal for a new M&E and Learning framework to be adopted and adapted in future projects of all community-focused organisations.
Devaka K.C. Article
Sudeshna Sengupta Chapter in the book "Dialogues on Development edited by Prof Arash Faizli and Prof Amitabh Kundu."
Events
Vacancies
- We’re Hiring: National Evaluation Consultant – Bangladesh
UN Women is recruiting a National Evaluation Consultant (Bangladesh) to support the interim evaluation of the Joint Regional EmPower Programme (Phase II).
This is a great opportunity to work closely with the Evaluation Team Leader and contribute to generating credible, gender-responsive evidence that informs decision-making and strengthens programme impact.
📍 Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh (home-based with travel to project locations)
📅 Apply by: 24 February 2026, 5:00 PM
🔗 Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gar4ciRr
If you are passionate about feminist evaluation, gender equality, and rigorous evidence that drives change (or know someone who is) please apply or share within your networks.
- Seeking Senior Analyst - IPE Global
About the job
IPE Global Ltd. is a multi-disciplinary development sector consulting firm offering a range of integrated, innovative and high-quality services across several sectors and practices. We offer end-to-end consulting and project implementation services in the areas of Social and Economic Empowerment, Education and Skill Development, Public Health, Nutrition, WASH, Urban and Infrastructure Development, Private Sector Development, among others.
Over the last 26 years, IPE Global has successfully implemented over 1,200 projects in more than 100 countries. The group is headquartered in New Delhi, India with five international offices in United Kingdom, Kenya, Ethiopia, Philippines and Bangladesh. We partner with multilateral, bilateral, governments, corporates and not-for-profit entities in anchoring development agenda for sustained and equitable growth. We strive to create an enabling environment for path-breaking social and policy reforms that contribute to sustainable development.
Role Overview
IPE Global is seeking a motivated Senior Analyst – Low Carbon Pathways to strengthen and grow its Climate Change and Sustainability practice. The role will contribute to business development, program management, research, and technical delivery across climate mitigation, carbon markets, and energy transition. This position provides exceptional exposure to global climate policy, finance, and technology, working with a team of high-performing professionals and in collaboration with donors, foundations, research institutions, and public agencies.
Participatory Evaluation: Who evaluates whom? Why? How?
I am passionate about participatory practices. I was excited when my office Institute of Social Studies Trust with Restless Development and CMS organised a half day session on Participatory Evaluation. This was part of EvalYear celebrations. About 25 participants attended the session and deliberated on different issues around Participatory Evaluation. Mallika Samaranayake and Rajib Nandi took the lead in facilitation.
Some reflections
Top to down approaches in development can lead to ineffective programmes. For instance inspite of a large-scale campaign on semi solid food for babies after the age of six months did not lead to community response. It was found that women from poor families feared that giving salty food to babies would develop their taste for that kind of food and babies would reduce milk consumption. As the women were poor they could not afford semi solid food and breast milk was what they could afford. It is after engaging with the community that the WFP team learned this and changed their campaign.
Those engaged in the intervention are best placed to evaluate their own work. When they take the lead in evaluating they take greater ownership, which can lead to sustainability of the development programmes.
During evaluation create a space so that everyone has a chance to voice his/her thoughts and experiences
Attitude of a participatory evaluation Facilitator is key. He/she should approach the community to learn and stimulate them to reflect and track their own progress.
Creativity, flexibility and visualization techniques are some other features of PE
We should recognize heterogeneity in the community. Power dynamics play a key role in the community.
Quantitative and qualitative approaches are not standalone, they are complimentary.
What scale can qualitative evaluation handle? For small scale studies qualitative methodology can suffice. For larger national level programmes, quantitative data can give us trends. This should be accompanied by qualitative evaluation representing relevant stakeholders and geographical areas.
Survey is for data collection what the evaluator wants to collect but qualitative tools are for information generation, it is transformative for both the evaluator as well as the community
Why participatory evaluation?
- Provides opportunity to all including those who don’t usually have a voice
- Ownership of the progamme when evaluation is generated in the community
- PE collects information which cannot be collected by quantitative methods
- Data ownership of the community
- Indepth understanding of the programme and its direct and indirect impacts and challenges (not possible in surveys)
- Engages the communities in dialogue vs fatigue of answering the questions
- We get answers on sensitive issues
- To identify community behavior, resources, power structure in the community
- Quick data triangulation is possible
- Qualitative data can compliment traditional quantitative method based data
- Ensure majority participation
- Out of box data is obtained or allied data is obtained
- Helps in a situation when there maybe no baseline data available
- Easier to understand why what has happened in the project
- Helps prioritise development objectives
Way forward
We would like to embed participatory evaluation in India’s national evaluation policy and system. To take this further, we would like to:
- Create a Delhi-based group for regular sharing and exchange on participatory evaluation.
- Conduct an online discussion on PE to draw attention of the government. We will use Gender and Evaluation online platform for this discussion. https://gendereval.ning.com/
- Training on Participatory Evaluation
Add a Comment
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Comment by Rituu B Nanda on January 25, 2015 at 22:24
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A resource from Linkedin
Irene
Research Associate at Overseas Development Institute
For those interested in the issue of what is genuine participation in evaluation, I've also just written a piece on participation in impact evaluation for UNICEF. I raise the issue of defining more clearly who participates and to what extent on what aspects of, in that case, impact evaluation. Table 5 might be useful to some. Unfortunately I could not point to examples of participatory impact evaluation. http://www.devinfo-cloud.info/impactevaluation/impact_evaluation/im...
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Comment by Soledad Muniz on January 23, 2015 at 14:46
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Wonderful!
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Comment by Bhaswati Chakravorty on January 23, 2015 at 10:09
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Thanks Rituu for your regular updates which I have been following with keen interest.
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Comment by Zeytuna Abdella Feyissa on January 22, 2015 at 22:03 -
Thanks for sharing this. It is well summarized.
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