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

  • Economy and Inequality

    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.

Vacancies

INCLUDOVATE -  Call for Researchers, Pacific Focus

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

The trouble with evaluation (1-Data)

Invitation to help improve evaluation methods.

Dear Members and Colleagues,

A project, funded by The Health Foundation (UK) is comparing evaluation guidance with the lived experiences of evaluators. In current guidance the key assumption is that forward planning can prevent problems. However, in the Real-World, despite good intentions and evaluation expertise, problems happen and there is little guidance about how to fix these problems. This seems to be particularly relevant to Quality Improvement (QI) projects.

Our response to this is to “crowdsource” a knowledge base of experience and advice about how to improve the integration of evaluation and QI; we invite anyone with experience of evaluation to complete an initial survey, which takes one of the key themes – that of data access, collection and analysis – as its starting point. We will be releasing further surveys on other topics over the next few weeks. To access the survey, click here.

Or copy and paste this link into your browser: https://scharr.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_abiDRf2XrOvk7vU

Further details about the project are available below.

Current Assumptions

It is often thought that the key to delivering a successful evaluation of any intervention lies in producing an appropriate and detailed evaluation plan, and then enacting that plan with adequate time and resources, and with the full collaboration of the intervention team and other stakeholders. Consequently, most guidance focuses on the elements of an evaluation that should be considered in advance in order to develop, design and schedule an evaluation plan that, in appearance at least, will meet the needs of the stakeholders.

The Problem

Of course, in practice, and even with the best possible design in place, evaluation projects do not always follow a smooth course. It is impossible to anticipate all the problems that may arise. These can include; the practical difficulties of accessing data or a lack of resources at key moments, changes to the intervention itself, to say nothing of external factors such as policy changes and global pandemics. These can all serve to throw plans off course and to undermine evaluation activities. In the case where evaluations do go wrong, or at least not according to plan, the existing guides offer little in the way of practical advice about what to do to rectify matters and rescue the evaluation process – if, indeed, it can be rescued.

Evaluation of quality improvement (QI) projects seems particularly susceptible to these problems since the latter are often complex and changeable interventions in open systems that can have unanticipated emergent characteristics. There are a number of areas of tension that can potentially derail the evaluation of QI projects. For instance, differing priorities mean that QI projects will often place the implementation of change above the requirements for evaluation of that change: for good or for ill, change becomes an end in itself.

The Project So Far

These conclusions are among the findings of the Connecting to integrate Quality Improvement and evaluation practice project being carried out by a team led by researchers from the Universities of Sheffield and Bath and supported through the Connecting Q programme of The Health Foundation. This project has undertaken a series of evidence reviews and consultations with QI practitioners and evaluators with the aim of bridging the divide between evaluation theory and QI practice. One thing that has emerged is the lack of practical guidance both for recognising the practical problems that can arise and for indicating how to respond when serious problems do occur while the evaluation is underway. But also apparent is the breadth of the practical experience that exists in the QI and evaluation communities, and the potential of this, if properly harnessed, to provide an invaluable shared resource for improving evaluation processes.

The Plan

To create such a resource, we first need to understand the nature of the problems that do arise. Our review of the published literature about the evaluation of QI projects (in both the UK and abroad) suggests that problems can be clustered around a relatively small set of themes or dimensions of the evaluation:

  • Data access, collection and analysis
  • The purpose and parameters of evaluation
  • Stakeholder management and engagement
  • Evaluation approaches and methods
  • Resources, knowledge and skills
  • Timing and timeliness
  • Culture and context

Note that certain problems can be related to more than one of these themes, which is unsurprising given the complexity of most evaluation efforts (as well as the somewhat artificial nature of any attempt to classify them into neat categories). Nonetheless, these themes give us a scaffold for talking about the problems that do occur.

While not all the problems will have easy solutions, we believe that the collected experience of evaluation and QI practitioners offers a pool of practical knowledge for both recognising problems and suggesting solutions. As a first step we would like to try to “crowdsource” a knowledge base of experience and advice about how to improve the integration of evaluation and QI; we invite anyone with any experience of the evaluation of QI or other interventions to complete an initial questionnaire which takes one of these themes – that of data access, collection and analysis – as its starting point.

You will be asked to provide your particular experiences of tackling problems that have arisen relating to this theme. You will also be able to share your opinions on the approach that we’re taking. To access the questionnaire, click here. We look forward to receiving your responses!

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Comment by Steven Ariss on May 25, 2022 at 17:16

Hi Rituu,

great to hear from you! I hope you are well.

The use of participatory processes sounds like an interesting thing to consider.

We are in a process of iteration at the moment, where we are slowly developing tentative findings and refining and testing them with key stakeholders. As well as the online questionnaires, we are planning a workshop at the HSR UK 2022 conference, which will be our next milestone.

We should have some firmer findings to share after this. It would be great to have a chat about the project, as I'm sure you wil have some great ideas.

Comment by Rituu B Nanda on May 25, 2022 at 16:36

Hi Steven, will you be sharing the results of your study. I facilitate participatory processes, have you thought of that ? Thanks and warm greetings!

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