Centring Gender and Power in Evaluation and Research: Sharing experiences from Oxfam GB's quantitative impact evaluations

Abstract

Bringing a feminist intent to research, monitoring and evaluation practices leads to defining these as tools to contribute to transforming the lives of women, girls and non-binary people, and to bringing about social justice. This has meant putting gender and power at the centre of our practice, which has in turn shaped the technical choices made specifically in quantitative impact evaluations. This paper focuses on describing how these technical choices, as well as ethical considerations, are changed by this feminist intent. The paper also presents the lessons learned and questions raised along the way, which may be useful for MEAL and research practitioners, as well as programme managers. How can we bring intersectionality to the fore? What does it mean to go beyond the gender binary? How can this work be transformative?

Livelihoods in the Eastern Province of Rwanda: Impact evaluation of the Enterprise Development Programme’s support to Tuzamurane cooperative

“…This contributes to the invisibilization of non-binary identities and is a limitation of this work. We want to acknowledge that such evaluative work needs to go further (see Barakat, Pretari and Vonk, 2021).…”