E-discussion: Evaluating SDGs with an equity-focused & gender responsive lens (no one left behind)

[Rituu B Nanda]

The purpose of the consultations (18th Jan-18th Feb 2016)

Following the approval of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly and by the international development community in 2015, EvalPartners (including EvalGender+) and United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG)’s members have begun to form working groups to strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems to assess these different goals.  The purpose of the present consultations, organized by EvalGender+, UNEG and the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of UN Women, is to provide guidance to strengthen M&E systems to assess all SDGs with an equity-focused and gender-responsive lens, in addition to Goal 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls) and Goal 10 (Reduce inequality within and among countries).  The above mentioned agencies and network, in collaboration with other strategic stakeholders, are planning to prepare a guidance note that will assist both actors directly involved in social equity and gender equality, as well as all actors involved with the evaluation of the SDGs, in ensuring that social equity and gender equality are adequately addressed in all of the SDG evaluations. It is intended to produce a first version of this Guidance note by June 2016.  The SDG strategy is to work through, and to help strengthen existing M&E systems at the national and local levels and consequently the focus of the present consultations is on indicators and approaches that can be implemented through existing M&E structures – many of which may have limited experience and resources to address social equity and gender equality issues.

In addition to their importance as stand-alone sustainable development goals, both of these are cross-cutting themes that must be integrated into the assessment of all of the other goals.  For example, the achievement of Goal 2 (end hunger), Goal 3 (ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages), Goal 7 (ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable modern energy) and Goal 13 (take urgent action to combat climate change) – to mention only four, all have important gender dimensions that affect the achievement of these goals.  Similarly, there are social equity dimensions to all goals. To read more on SDGs visit the link "Transforming our world:  The 2030 agenda for sustainable development.https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld

The consultations identify four important themes that must be addressed in the M&E systems to assess SDGs with an equity-focused and gender-equality lens, in addition to goals 5 and 10:

• Theme 1:  The relevance of “new metrics” (measurement tools and indicators) for the evaluation of SDGs from an equity-focused and gender-responsive perspective.
• Theme 2:  Evaluation and complexity – Dealing with the increasing complexity of development and interconnectedness of SDGs to ensure “no one is left behind”
• Theme 3:  Towards equity-focused and gender-responsive national evaluation systems – Multi-stakeholder partnerships to strengthen national evaluation capacities
• Theme 4:  Demand for and use of evidence from equity-focused and gender responsive evaluation to inform equitable development

Each of these themes has different implications in different countries, regions, sectors and according to the type of organization.  Consequently we invite you to share your experiences and perspectives to assist the EvalGender+, UNEG, UN Women IEO teams in ensuring that the Guidance Note will reflect the diversity of experiences and perspectives in different countries, regions and types of organization.

 

Theme 1:  The relevance of “new metrics” (measurement tools and indicators) for the evaluation of SDGs from an equity-focused and gender-responsive perspective.

In recent years a number of “new metrics” have evolved which can potentially widen the range of indicators and measures available for the monitoring and evaluation of development results from equity and gender responsive perspectives. These include:

• Data that can now be collected through mobile phones, tablets, internet, GPS mapping and other new information technologies
• Big Data collected from satellites and drones, remote sensors, analysis of twitter and social media, mobile phone records, digital electronic transfers including purchase of mobile-phone air time and ATM withdrawals and crowdsourcing
• Participatory consultations (e.g. Most Significant Change, Outcome Harvesting, PRA)
• Concept mapping
• Mixed methods evaluations and
• Feminist research methods (e.g. oral history, feminist ethnography and content analysis, power relations, social justice and empowerment approaches)

Participants are invited to share their thoughts and experiences on the following questions (as well as others they propose)as they relate to equity-focused and gender responsive evaluation.

• In your experience what are some of the limitations of current data collection methods and the kinds of indicators they produce?
• What are the most difficult issues to measure with respect to social equity? and with respect to gender equality?
• What are the new challenges for assessing sustainable social equity and gender equality?
• What have proved some of the most effective methods?
• In addition to those mentioned above, what other new metrics are you familiar with?
• Which of the new metrics show the greatest promise?

Theme 2: Evaluation and complexity – Dealing with the increasing complexity of development and interconnectedness of SDGs to ensure “no one is left behind”

As SDGs are interconnected, national policies and programme to implement them will be complex. As programs grow in size and scope, the number of partners and stakeholders and in terms of the kinds of social and behavioral changes they seek to produce, they become more complex – both in terms of how they are designed and implemented, but also in terms of how they must be evaluated.  Complexity is defined in terms of: (a) the nature of the programme, (b) the number of partners and stakeholders and the patterns of interaction among them (including the level of consensus or disagreement among them on the goals of the programs), (c) the number of external (contextual) factors that influence how the programme is implemented and its outcomes and (d) the complexity of the causal chains through which outcomes are to be achieved.  A number of additional factors are particularly important for the evaluation of social equity and gender equality, including: (i) social and cultural constraints and pressures, (ii) the power relationships and social definition of gender relations and social equity, (iii) multiple influences on processes of behavioral change, (iv) the role of social media, and (v) the long, non-linear causal chains through which changes are produced.

Participants are invited to share their thoughts and experiences on the following questions (as well as others they propose) as they relate to equity-focused and gender responsive evaluation.

• Which dimensions of complexity are most important in your work on social equity and gender equality?
• How does complexity affect our understanding of the effectiveness of different interventions on the production of changes in social equity and gender equality?
• What methods and approaches have you found most effective for understanding the outcomes of complex programs on social equity and gender equality?
• The processes of change are long, involving many actors and contextual factors.  Also the processes are not linear as advances on one front often involve set-backs on others.  What kinds of evaluation strategies have you found most effective in these complex scenarios?
• What are the special challenges for understanding the impacts of different interventions on the most vulnerable populations?  What evaluation methods are most effective for studying these very sensitive processes of change?

Theme 3: Towards equity-focused and gender-responsive national evaluation systems – Multi-stakeholder partnerships to strengthen national evaluation capacities

 

The SDGs pose challenges for national evaluation systems as the SDGs require the involvement of a broader range of stakeholders, a broadening of the range of indicators to be measured and the methodological and organizational problems required to assess sustainability which requires collecting data over a much longer period of time.  Many programmes are intended to produce benefits that continue over five or even ten years and the evaluation must (ideally) continue over all of this period.  So instead of conventional evaluations that often only cover the 3-5 years of project implementation, the SDG evaluations may be required to continue for twice as long.  The application of a social equity and gender equality lens will often present additional challenges for national evaluation systems, including the fact that the evaluation of gender outcomes and impacts is often the weakest part of many national evaluation systemsand the methodologies for evaluating social equity are also not well developed in many countries (or in the evaluation literature in general).  Given resource constraints of many evaluation agencies, it will often not be possible to consider specialized evaluations that focus exclusively on equity and gender, and it will be necessary to adapt standard M&E methodologies to address these issues.  It will be important to consider the extent to which some of the multi-shareholder partnerships can bring in agencies with expertise in these areas and with additional resources that may permit the selective application of gender and equity focused data collection and analysis methodologies

 

Participants are invited to share their thoughts and experiences on the following questions (as well as others they propose) as they relate to equity focused and gender-responsive evaluation.

• In your experience what will be the main challenges that national evaluation systems will face when evaluating social equity and gender equality?
• In the countries with which you are familiar, how well established are the methodologies for evaluating these two areas.
• Which kinds of organization have the most experience in the evaluation of these two areas?  Are these organizations already part of the national evaluation systems?  If not, what will be required to ensure their active involvement?
• What kinds of evaluation capacity development will be required to strengthen the capacity of the national evaluation systems to address these issues?
• What are the example of successful partnership in your country or in your area of work to strengthen M&E systems in general, and equity-focused and gender-responsive systems in particular?
• What are the opportunities and challenges for such partnerships?

Theme 4:  Demand for and use of evidence from equity-focused and gender responsive evaluation to inform equitable development

 

Experience from all regions and sectors shows that one of the biggest challenges facing evaluation systems is the very low rate of utilization of evaluations.  In many cases evaluation findings do not reach many of the key organizations and groups (including community and women’s organizations), in other cases they are not presented in a form which is easily accessible to some groups, particularly the most vulnerable.  Even when evaluations are reviewed, action is often not taken on many of the recommendations.  These challenges are likely to be even more serious for social equity and gender equality as these themes are less familiar to many organizations and the mechanisms to review and action are often less developed.

 

Participants are invited to share their thoughts and experiences on the following questions (as well as others they propose) as they relate to equity focused and gender-responsive evaluation.

• In your experience what are the factors affecting the demand for and use of evaluation?
• Are there additional factors affecting the demand and utilization of social equity and gender equality evaluations?
• How could the demand and utilization of these evaluations be increased?
• What types of evaluation presentations would you propose to make evaluation more accessible to stakeholders?

 

 

 

[Rajib Nandi]

I’m very sorry for joining so late in the discussion. At the same time very happy to see the wide participation in the discussion. I’ve gone through some of the discussions to see extremely valuable contributions in the discussions. I would like to make a few comments on theme: 1 on “new metrics”.

(1) As mentioned in the note, different technologies are available to collect data from mobile phone to GPS mapping and satellite systems etc. However, the vast data collected through these techniques has to be dis-aggregated in terms of social and physical cleavages and regions for analysis from an equity-focused and gender-responsive perspective. The data collection metrics should be well researched and well planned to capture the dis-aggregated data. For example, big data collected through satellite technologies should be able to tell us the percentage of women from a particular marginal community by region/locality who are accessing bank ATMs or public health services. Unless a proper metrics is developed and put in the system.

(2) Gender inequality is manifested differently in different contexts. There is a need to develop context specific gender sensitive indicators along with other global parameters.

(3) Use of innovative techniques in different situations and participatory methods could be empowering for certain communities. These techniques also help to develop alternative indicators. One may see our paper,

Nandi, Rajib; Nanda, Rituu B and Jugran, Tanisha. Evaluation from inside out: The experience of using local knowledge and practices to evaluate a program for adolescent girls in India through the lens of gender and equity [online]. Evaluation Journal of Australasia, Vol. 15, No. 1, Mar 2015: 38-47.

Availability:a href="http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=936838345059984;res=IELBUS">http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=936838345059984;re...> ISSN: 1035-719X. [cited 01 May 15]

(4) Its always most difficult to capture the impact of patriarchal value systems in our societies. At times their impacts are subtle and hidden under traditional/popular and unquestioned behaviors of men and women. The role of oral histories and ethnographic tools are most effective in these situations to capture those old power dynamics in the society.

[Rukmini Panda]

Thanks Rituu for leading a wonderful discussion and sharing the synopsis of the persons who have responded.

Thanks

Rukmini

[Damilola Taiye Agbalajobi]

The current data collection methods makes it difficult to have indicator that will produce the facts showing the reality of what is on ground. For example in finding out the ways women participate in politics across geopolitical zones in Nigeria, one will discover that there are significant differences across the geopolitical zones but even using mixed methods the indicators does not capture all that needs to be captured.

In measuring social equity, there is a need to take into consideration the background of each groups and treat each group or individual as a unique entity and not to generalize and assume same solutions to individual challenges.

[Henry Muigai Mwangi]

Team,

Gender issues are sticky and sometimes even with the best indicators and questions,it is not always possible to get factual data.When we say we want to study gender involvement in a value chain,what do we exactly mean? when we talk of gender and decision making,what do we mean/expect?.I remember struggling with measurement of equity in the way incomes were shared among gender within a household in a smallholder fruit program and it became a big thing.

When we wanted to measure gender equity in household use of fruits income ,how would we have gone about it? wass it by asking how much each gender controlled? was it by investigating whether decisions on use were collective? was it by checking who engaged in marketing/end functions?.

We struggled with all these questions and what we discovered was that gender control of income is not per se measured by how the income is physically shared across gender.

Compounding it,even when there is gender imbalance,man/woman will sometimes be protective of each other and not reveal factual gender positions.This calls for an all round approach.

Thanks.

[Jindra Cekan, PhD]

Hello - on theme 1, no one left behind, we need to really look at how well we design for sustainability post-project. More here: http://valuingvoices.com/sustainable-development-goals-and-foreign-... 

Thanks Rituu and folks...

Jindra

[Rituu B Nanda]

Evaluating SDGs with an equity-focused and Gender Responsive lens

 

• Posted by Mary Adhiambo Mbeo (Sudan) on March 3, 2016 

Theme 3

Thanks for this interesting topic. Im glad to join you in this discussion.

I have a big concern when i look at the various governments and their weakness in embracing gender responsive programmes and their understanding of gender indicators, baselines and targets. It is important that a training be set up that ensures evaluations and done in the future at country levels as the SDG indicators are very broad.

Also it depends on the SDG goals the particular governments are taking on board to implement within their national development plans. There was alot of investment with governments concerning the MDGs. Similar investments should be made possible for SDG goals. I remember that there were staff members within the ministries of planning only concerned with the implementation and reporting on MDGs. Can this be done also with SDGs. The staff developed monitoring and evaluation plans and ensured all stakeholders were involved in the implementation and the evaluations.

[Awuor Ponge]

My response is with regard to:

Theme 1:  The relevance of “new metrics” (measurement tools and indicators) for the evaluation of SDGs from an equity-focused and gender-responsive perspective.

I will address myself to the main challenges that are likely to affect the evaluation of SDG 5 with a gender lens. The general challenges include:

• Social exclusion and disparities: including gender discrimination due to social, cultural and religious factors
• Measurement of Poverty: Poverty incidences are high among women-headed households as compared to male-headed households. These may prove problematic in capturing given the already proposed indicators.
• Gender inequality in education: Especially in terms of access, achievement and completion. There are cultural factors that disadvantage wome in terms of access to education, including their achievement and eve completion. These are diverse and cannot be captured adequately through the proposed indicators.

Now, turning to Goal number 5, looking at the targets and proposed indicators, my comments are under selected proposed indicators, and the challenges likely to be encountered in monitoring and evaluating the same.

Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Target 5.1: End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere.

Proposed Indicator 1: Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote equality and non-discrimination on the basis of sex.

PONGE Comment: We may have legal frameworks to promote this. But is there a conducive environment for the promotion of the same. What of the cultural and religious considerations, which make women and girls, feel subordinate to men and boys, and they accept this without questioning? How will this be captured and documented? What if there is no legal framework to capture this in the said countries?

Target 5.2: Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation.

Proposed Indicator 1: Proportion of ever-partnered women and girls (aged 15-49) subjected to physical and/or sexual violence by a current or former intimate partner, in the last 12 months.

PONGE Comment: The indicator here talks only of ever-partnered women and girls. Now, how will we be able to track information on those who have never partnered but have been subjected to physical or sexual violence?

Proposed Indicator 2: Proportion of women and girls (aged 15-49) subjected to sexual violence by persons other than an intimate partner, since age 15.

PONGE Comment: For the second indicator, does it mean that those who are older than 49 years are not subjected to sexual violence? Again, what happens if the violence is perpetrated by an intimate partner? This indicator will not be able to track that. So it still has a weakness. In the African commuinities, grandmothers are a very vulnerable category, who are at the mercy at times of their grandchildren who stay with them and in most cases rape them. But since they do not want to expose such kind of acts, they usually go un-noticed or rather unreported.

Target 5.6: Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences

Proposed Indicator 1: Proportion of women (aged 15-49) who make their own sexual and reproductive decisions.

PONGE Comment: Again here, culture and religion play a major role. There are those women in the mentioned age catogories, who don’t make their own sexual and reproductive decisions, but they are very comfortable with it and it is not a big deal. So capturing this using this indicator may be problematic.

Target 5.b: Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women

Proposed Indicator 1: Proportion of individuals who own a mobile telephone, by sex.

PONGE Comment: Does owning translate into utilization? A woman may own a mobile phone, but its usage is usually limited by the husband. So the mere reporting of ownership does not give us much information about usage, so in my assessment, this indicator has a weakness and may be difficult to track, or if tracked, may not ofer much help in terms of explaining the target of enhancing use of technology.

[Isha Wedasinghe Miranda]

Dear All

Best move is to  we should revisited some of the challenging indicators and targets during the  Eval Gender +  session in NY this march .  How ever  I believe we need to have  set of Global indicators  as well as country wise indicators . 

Regards

isha 

[Rituu B Nanda]

•  Tara Prasad Gnyawali on March 4, 2016 

Theme : 1: The relevance of "new metrics......... perspective

Question one : in your experiences what ...............................

Response :  One of the key  limitation of  current data collection methods is it neither evidence linkage between the natural resources conservation with gender role, opportunity and quality of services. We are working on Natural resource conservation and we observed it contribute to narrow equality, diversify work drudgery, role sharing within community household and community and generate multiple economic engagement opportunity particularly in High Himalaya community and Mid hill remote where women and men are under stress of climate change and scarce and degraded resource. For example conserving degradation water sources generated to benefit community as whole but particularly to women and old age who suffered drudgery of fetching, sharing of role and increased productivity of land increase economic engagement , our recent learning

Question two: What are the most difficult ...... gender equality ?

Response: Scaling of wellbeing status and poverty linkages : due to diverse dimension and understanding of poverty according to society to society and bilateral and multilateral mission working in country it is very difficult to scale poverty and wellbeing. Income poverty, human poverty, Exclusion and Marginalization from opportunity and Weak governance are major dimension of poverty but when we talk poverty in terms of assets that is household property as common pool and while school , health post and access to them is governance of resource... so recent gender evaluation methodology is lacking to response gender equality because a women of better off family might be treated in equal way if she or her family have not political or social recognition and at the same time a women and or men from deprived family may have not sufficient nourish able foods due to of deprivation but have social recognition....... so this need to be clarify equality in terms of access, behavior or ownership and use ........... which area need to be focused while commissioning area of evaluation in gender equality

Question three : what are the new challenges for assessing

Response : A commonly agreed methodology and tools to all due to of diverse perception and practices of perception of social inequality according to country, community and region

Question four: What have prove ..... methods

Response : Commonly agreed response and data generation can only prove and the generated data must be contextualize according to country and community

Question five : IN addition ..... with

Response : several tools and techniques like seasonal mobility mapping ,works stress scaling, vulnerability (seasonal shocks, stress and trend)  mapping , linkage analysis are some example  

Question six: which of the new metrics show ..........?

Response : that methods mixed with Qualitative and quantitative and show the linkages . For example community vulnerable to wildlife living in National Park may be affected due to season of wildlife mobility . We found in a mobility assessment : during the April most of the wildlife mobility for grazing land and community mobility due to of fetching fodder and firewood is very high. Since women and poor are prone to fetching most frequently to forest have high chances to be vulnerable compare to other poor family living in urban areas.  So such information linkage analysis need to be included according to context and need specific evaluation

[Gillian]

It will be fascinating to see how the development industry copes with 'social equity', given that so much work is siloed... 'gender' being a prime example!

One of our biggest challenges will be in moving beyond the current 'gender = women' framework and towards a framework that draws more on Critical Diversity Studies, where gender (as in, judgements, norms and stereotypes related to femininity and masculinity, NOT men and women) is one of several intersecting hierarchies of disadvantage.

When gender = women, being born with a vagina is understood as automatic entry into a state of disadvantage, ignoring class/caste; race/ethnicity; physical ability and other social hierarchies. (Too bad for trans women, who face some of the highest levels of discrimination and violence in the world.)

Evaluations should start from a 'baseline' of knowing - not assuming - where inequalities are most deeply entrenched within an intervention 'site', then assessing effectiveness against that baseline. Did anything change for those most excluded?

If we are serious about addressing the SDGs, we need to accept that intersections of inequality matter.

A male Rohingyan Muslim, living in an IDP camp in Myanmar, is, almost certainly, considerably more disadvantaged than a married Burmese Buddhist woman.

A street-based female sex worker is, almost certainly, considerably more disadvantaged than a female small business woman (and, likely, experiences most discrimination from other women).

And when it comes to gender-based violence, are we able to recognise that male children who are considered 'effeminate' are often abused by both mothers and fathers? Gender-based violence is not the same as violence against women.

Achieving the SDGs requires us to shift our siloed thinking. I'm not sure it can be done.

[Rituu B Nanda]

In my work with IDS for a project in two states of India on modern slavery, we opted not to go for the traditional survey. We encouraged the NGOs and the community to collective quantitative data because external surveyors would not have been able to collect data on sensitive issue like bonded labour, child labour and trafficking. Read more here

‘Using Participatory Statistics to Examine the Impact of Interventions to Eradicate Slavery: Lessons from the Field’. 

http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/using-participatory-statistics-to-...

[Rituu B Nanda]

Theme 4 

Juliet C. Anewa

• In your experience what are the factors affecting the demand for and use of evaluation?

• Lack of an appreciation for evaluation in general due to ignorance and the value it brings towards enhancing policy affects the demand for evaluation. Although it is clear that by not carrying out evaluations, there is limited or no evidence of what policies are working and this ultimately affects the outputs, outcomes and impact, there is low demand and supply of evaluations in Uganda and the East African region. That said, evaluations must be done to provide evidence for innovative development solutions.
• Cost of evaluations. There is a consensus and the realization by government especially in Uganda that an evaluation is a “cost” to the citizen and therefore an “opportunity cost” for something else. This realization is the reason why in the last 5 or so years more evaluations have been conducted within government. This realization is what has pushed Government to support the creation National Evaluation association and Standards. Evaluations have been conducted for instance on ‘Absenteeism of Teachers and its effect on Universal Education programmers.’
• Similarly, the actual costs of conducting evaluations are high due the use of mostly experienced sourced consultants both by government and implementing agencies. This is because there are few trained and experienced evaluators locally. The high costs attributed to evaluation undermine the supply of evaluation which in turn affects demand. For example within Government, the cost implications of commissioning an evaluation in terms of resources often leads to stalling or abandoning the concept at while still in proposal form.
• Capacity is lacking: Capacity to conduct evaluations to increase supply and capacity to demand for evaluations and utilize them ably is lacking too. It is this realization that we needed both the skills, knowledge and experience to initiate, conduct and disseminate evaluations is what prompted me to write a proposal on behalf of our Department/Parliament to GIZ for their support to train Parliamentary staff and Committee Chairpersons in Basic evaluations. These short few day trainings generated interest and introduced to colleagues the basics of evaluation, the importance of evaluation in policy and how evaluation findings can be disseminated. Most importantly, by training senior staff and MPs, it created awareness to them about their role as demanders and users of evaluation in the policy cycle given the parliamentary mandate as an oversight institution.
• Attitude towards Evaluation. Most policy makers view evaluation and the practice as a means to witch-hunt and not for accountability and learning. It does not help much that policy makers tend to focus on negatives, have different understanding with regard to the term accountability and really don’s apply results for learning purposes. This is mainly because they focus more on output based reporting than long term impacts of projects. This undermines utilization of findings for learning and improvement in general.

 

If I may, below I present in summary the demand and supply issues raised during the 2013 Evaluation Week held in Kampala where I was a rapporteur. I believe these issues give an overview of what the Ugandan context is like.

• The demand for and supply of evaluations in general is driven by funders.
• Supply is still largely by donors, to a small extent by CSOs motivated by donors, academia and consultants.
• Demand is still largely created by donors and government.
• The source of demand undermines capacity in that the donors use their own consultants.
• The Terms of reference specifications are a challenge to local supply and capacity.
• Reputation determines the skewed demand attributed to a few
• Ethical issues common to local consultants
• Capacity-analytical and writing skills undermine local supply
• Lack of experience and space for skilled people to apply and practice-given the cost of conducting evaluations
• Mindsets/attitudes and ignorance; lack of enough resources allocated for.
• Lack of incentives to motivate individuals
• Lack of an evaluation culture in organizations

Source: Authors compilation from the Uganda Evaluation Week, 2014

• Are there additional factors affecting the demand and utilization of social equity and gender equality evaluations?

Yes, there are.

Prioritization: Social equity and gender equality are not always so prioritized especially during planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

The Complexity of how to measure social equity and gender equality makes many without the technical know-how to shy away from conducting these evaluations. Social and gender issues are cut across all sectors and yet sectors are divided, this somehow causes social and gender issues to be swept under the carpet.

The assumption that social equity and gender equality are generally taken into consideration within the poverty indicators makes the specific demand and supply for them difficult. However, utilization on findings is often higher than the usual programme related evaluations. I strongly believe that with the passing of the National Social protection policy, 2016 and implementation of Social protection programmes, demand, supply and utilization will increase in Uganda.

• How could the demand and utilization of these evaluations be increased?

• By creation of regulatory and institutional frameworks.  In Uganda for instance, we have the National M & E policy, we have a focal office charged with the mandate. And all respective ministries and agencies are mandated by law. What is lacking is strong enforcement, and I believe Parliament can play a key role to enhance the increased demand for and supply of evaluation through its oversight mandate and budgetary function. It can cause increase in evaluation utilization.
• Increased education and awareness creation on the importance of evaluation. CSOs can play a key role, parliament through its representative function can cause the citizenry to demand for accountability reports, performance reports and follow up on recommendation.
• The Media, if trained on how to package and disseminate findings could play a key role in linking Government, The CSOs and the populations. And this approach should dwell more on positive case studies to try to counter the negative attitude policy actors have that evaluation is a means to witch-hunt others.
• Formative evaluations, these are more appropriate for government programmes because it is easier to critic, manage or even make decisions at this stage. My experience is that once a project is initiated by government, it cannot easily be stopped! So to address implementation issues and outcomes in the beginning is very important and could save billions of monies lots each year. The challenge however is, there is limited capacity and time to do this, vast experience therefore would be needed to expedite such a process.
• Summative, are useful only to the extent that parts of the various projects are tackled at a time.
• Presentations tagged to goals. Government tends to do these a lot. By evaluating policy statements, which are budgetary aspirations of ministries and agencies, evaluations can lead to improved service delivery.
• Presentations that are not tagged to goals, this can generate supply especially on social related issues where indicators are hard to determine.

• What types of evaluation presentations would you propose to make evaluation more accessible to stakeholders?