Monthly Corner
Laura Hughston - Blog
Arnoux Mouafo Nopi & Dimitri Tsona Zapzi - Article
Prof. Wangari Mwai and Prof. Catherine Ndungo - BOOK
- Understanding Gender and Identity Through The Gender Dictionary
Publisher: Bleeding Ink Scribes
RAI SENGUPTA - gender-transformative evaluation tools
This synthesis draws on evidence from 17 humanitarian evaluations across diverse crisis settings. It identifies key feminist evaluation innovations across four domains - design, methods, analysis, and ethics - illustrating how feminist principles can be embedded throughout the evaluation process. It also surfaces broader shifts required at policy, institutional, and practice levels to realise the transformative potential of feminist approaches in humanitarian contexts.
The toolkit translates these insights into applied guidance for evaluators and organisations. It provides step-by-step support across the full evaluation cycle, including planning, design, methods, analysis, ethics, and dissemination. Drawing on global feminist evaluation practice, humanitarian guidance, and gender evaluation standards, it includes adaptable tools, participatory and arts-based methods, guiding questions, and templates for field application.
Ritu Dewan & Swat Raju - Article
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In Promises & Reality 2026 Citizen’s Review of Year 2 of the NDA-III Government. Coordinated by Wada Na Todo Abhiyan, June 20, 2026. pp 94-100.
UTTHAN - Research Report
Traversing the path with women farmers in their fields and in our reflections/writings, a stark observation was the sheer lack of localized and regional vocabulary and terminology to adequately capture and communicate the understanding of climate change and mitigation strategies, informed by the unique experiences and needs of small and marginal women farmers. This is what propelled our research - to examine how women farmers perceive, express, experience, and respond to climate variability across
Our Research Report centres the lived experiences, generational knowledge, and resilience strategies of small and marginal women farmers from the coastal (Bhavnagar) and hilly (Dahod & Panchmahal) regions i.e two contrasting agro-climatic zones of Gujarat. Through their voices, the study reveals exactly how climate change intersects with gender, land rights, labour burdens, and food security.
Events
Vacancies
About the job
At Includovate, we are expanding our Pacific Research & Evaluation Talent Pool and inviting researchers, evaluators, consultants, and development practitioners to join a growing network of professionals committed to creating meaningful social impact.
As a feminist research incubator and certified social enterprise, Includovate works with partners including UNICEF, UNFPA, the ILO, governments, and development organisations across 23+ countries. Our work spans gender equality, social inclusion, health, disability, youth, climate, WASH, market systems, and other development priorities.
We are particularly keen to connect with experts from:
📍 Papua New Guinea
📍 Solomon Islands
📍 Vanuatu
📍 Timor-Leste
📍 Fiji
📍 Samoa
📍 Tonga
📍 Indonesia
📍 Australia
and across the wider Pacific region.
We welcome expertise in:
✓ Research, Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning
✓ Gender Equality & Social Inclusion
✓ Health & SRHR
✓ Disability Inclusion
✓ Youth Development
✓ Climate & Environment
✓ WASH
✓ Market Systems Development
✓ Governance & Community Development
Whether your expertise lies in data collection, research, evaluation, technical advisory, facilitation, or team leadership, we would love to hear from you.
By joining our Talent Pool, you become part of a trusted network of professionals who may be considered for future research, evaluation, advisory, and consulting opportunities across the Pacific region and beyond.
🔗 Register here: https://lnkd.in/eyF66S7H
Strength-based evaluation to understand changes from gender & equity lens & stimulate further changes
Samraksha is a development organization which has been working with communities for more than two decades now. Samraksha started its work in the field of HIV and reproductive sexual health, and has always been committed to working with the communities in order to prevent the spread of HIV and reduce its impact on the affected people. In order to do this, we have always used strengths based approach and worked with different communities – communities of identity like those of women in sex work, as well as geographical communities like villages.
We at Samraksha are very excited with a study we recently completed for Samuha, where we used the self assessment framework to measure the impact of an organization’s engagement with the village communities of Raichur and Koppal for 25 years. Samuha is a development organization which has been working on different sectors of development for more than three decades now. The goal of Samuha is to bring about a change in the quality of life of people, and to achieve this, Samuha works across different groups in the community- men, women, young people, and on different issues – microfinance, women’s empowerment, disability rights, health, watershed development etc.
This study intended to study the impact of Samuha’s work as a whole rather than just programmes and interventions. Therefore, both intended and unintended outcomes needed to be captured, and it also had to capture the impact of the interventions as well as the organizations culture, values and ways of working.
The self assessment framework is a way for communities to create a dream for themselves and also assess how far they have come on the path of achieving the dream. It is a strengths based approach which seeks to understand community’s aspirations and also helps them recognize their acheivements and potential.
We have used the self assessment framework in the past, both for participatory assessment, as well as an intervention tool in itself, primarily to promote community engagement with the issue (in our case, it was mostly HIV/AIDS) For an earlier example of our use of this framework as a participatory evaluation methodology, see here.
In the current study, we used self-assessment methodologies to understand the impact of Samuha’s intervention on five major domains, women’s empowerment, economic development, development of people with disabilities, improvements in health and hygiene and reduced caste discrimination.
What was interesting about this study was that we twinned the self-assessment process with another participatory evaluation method, the Most Significant Change. Indeed, even the self-assessment framework we developed was based on the themes of change which emerged from the narratives of significant change stories.
Self-assessment proved to be very apt for this study, because it gave a community perspective on the different changes which the individuals had reported. In most instances it corroborated the individual narratives.
What was interesting about this process, specially for gender based evaluation, was that it was able to capture the change through the lived experience of people, as well as through the changing community norms on what was desirable and acceptable. In the domain of changing gender relations, the MSC and self assessment was able to capture change at multiple levels : changes within the women as individuals, most importantly their growing aspirations as well as their self-worth, their increased capacity to solve problems; changes in the status of women within families with increased say for women in decision making; changes in the way communities regarded women, appreciation for women’s contributions to the family and community, sharing of power beteween men and women in families and communities, an increasing public role for women and an acceptance from the men of this public role, as well as a changing social norm where violence or harassment of women was frowned upon.
The self assessment process was able to help the community reflect on how these changes in power relations occurred gradually and how different processes of Samuha, like the formation of self help groups, the facilitation of collectivization of women for problem solving and the training and exposure of women contributed to these changes. As such these changes were achieved not through coercion, but through consensus, where communities started acknowledging and appreciating the women, and gradually women grew in status.
Not just gender, other contentious issues like caste based discrimination could also be openly discussed through this process and communities could publicly state in what ways caste based discrimination had reduced in the villages, and also acknowledge the ways in which it persisted. Since deliberations were happening in a mixed group, there was frequent challenging, and while changes were valued, people also had the opportunity to publicly point out persisting discrimination.
Strengths based approaches have the potential to capture changing dynamics in the community with regard to equity towards marginalized groups. Since these approaches begin with the premise that change is possible and indeed has been achieved, it helps uncover changes at different levels – changes not just in terms of behaviors and norms, but also changes in attitudes, which has led to them. It gives a perspective on the process of change, which can help in our understanding of what drives change.
A complete study report can be seen here. For a collection of stories of significant change, please see here.
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