Workshop on Building Alliances for Gender Transformative Evaluations in India

[Anand Shukla]

For a long time, I have been thinking about joining some courses or workshops on Outcome Harvesting, as implementing one to three-year projects it becomes difficult to write about the impact and people tend to hover around activities while reporting. Thus when I came to know about the workshop in New Delhi focused on the Outcome Harvesting by the ISST, I applied quickly and got selected too. When I reached the venue I met one of the CSO heads from Bihar. I told him about the workshop, he said: "oh Evaluation me bhi ab gender chahiye" (roughly translated as oh, gender is needed in evaluations too). It shows the seriousness around efforts required to push gender in evaluations. The resource persons were senior MEL experts, they touched their respectively topic thoroughly. The Bongaigaon case study, which was shared among the participants was written well and I am sure that many people can follow it for their own organization while capturing the change. As a follow up I will explore opportunities for organizing an Evaluation Fest in Raipur organized by different agencies including Oxfam in January or February 2020. Let's hope, we will be able to do it; making people discuss the program evaluations without having any fear.