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.
What should projects accomplish… and for whom?
What should projects accomplish… and for whom?
An unnamed international non-profit client contacted me to evaluate their resilience project mid-stream, to gauge prospects for sustainable handover. EUREKA, I thought! After email discussions with them I drafted an evaluation process that included learning from a variety of stakeholders, ranging from Ministries, local government and the national University who were to take over the programming work about what they thought would be most sustainable once the project ended and how in the next two years the project could best foster self-sustainability by country-nationals. I projected several weeks for in-depth participatory discussions with local youth groups and sentinel communities directly affected by the food security/ climate change onslaught and who benefited from resilience activities to learn what had worked, what didn't and who would take what self-responsibility locally going forward.
Pleased with myself, I sent off a detailed proposal. The non-profit soon answered that I hadn't fully understood my task. In their view the main task at hand was to determine what the country needed the non-profit to keep doing, so the donor could be convinced to extend their (U.S.-based) funding. The question at hand became how could I change my evaluation to feed them back this key information for the next proposal design?
Maybe it was me, maybe it was the autumn winds, maybe it was my inability to sufficiently subsume long-term sustainability questions under shorter-term non-profit financing interests that led me to drop this. Maybe the elephant in the living room that is often unspoken is the need for some non-profits to prioritize their own organizational sustainability to 'do good' via donor funding rather than working for community self-sustainability.
Maybe donor/funders should share this blame, needing to push funding out, proving success at any cost to get more funding and so the cycle goes on. As a Feedback Lab feature on a Effective Philanthropy report recently stated: "Only rarely do funders ask, 'What do the people you are trying to help actually think about what you are doing?' Participants in the CEP study say that funders rarely provide the resources to find the answer. Nor do funders seem to care whether or not grantees are changing behavior and programs in response to how the ultimate beneficiaries respond."
And how much responsibility do communities themselves hold for not balking? Why are they so often 'price-takers' (in economic terms) rather than 'price-makers'? As wise Judi Aubel asked in a recent evaluation list-serve discussion "When will communities rise up to demand that the “development” resources designed to support/strengthen them be spent on programs/strategies which correspond to their concerns/priorities??"
We can help them do just that by creating good conditions for them to be heard. We can push advocates to work to ensure the incoming Sustainable Development Goals (post-MDGs) listen to what recipient nations feel are sustainable, more than funders. We can help their voices be heard via systems that enable donor/ implementers to learn from citizen feedback, such as Keystone has via their Constituent Voice practice (in January 2015 it is launching an online feedback data sharing platform called the Feedback Commons) or GlobalGiving's new Effectiveness Dashboard (see Feedback Labs).
We can do it locally in our work in the field, shifting the focus from our expertise to theirs, from our powerfulness to theirs. In field evaluations can use Empowerment Evaluation. We can fund feedback loops pre-RFP (requests for proposals), during project design, implementation and beyond, with the right incentives tools for learning from community and local and national-level input so that country-led development begins to be actual not just a nice platitude. We can fund ValuingVoices' self-sustainability research on what lasts after projects end. We can conserve project content and data in Open Data formats for long-term learning from country-nationals.
Most of all, we can honour our participants as experts, which is what I strive to do in my work. I'll leave you with a story from Mali. in 1991 I was doing famine-prevention research in Koulikoro Mali where average rainfall is 100mm a year (4 inches). I accompanied women I was interviewing to a deep well which was 100m deep (300 feet). They used plastic pliable buckets and the first five drew up 90% of the bucket full. When I asked to try, the seriously gave me a bucket. I laughed, as did they when we saw that only 20% of my bucket was full. I had splashed the other 80% out on the way up. Who's the expert? How are we helping them get more of what they need than what we're willing to give?
see www.ValuingVoices.com for more...
Add a Comment
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Comment by Rituu B Nanda on December 23, 2014 at 15:59
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Fantastic write up Jindra capturing the biggest challenge in the development sector...whose project ...whose funding...who measures? Success of the NGO is when community takes ownership of its issues and acts on it and ultimate when the organisation is no longer required.
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