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A gender responsive national monitoring and evaluation system refers to how different strategies, tools and policies can affect men and women differently and in so doing, improve their effectiveness.

This system also includes how monitoring systems are designed and operated, as well as utilising myriad evaluations types that can pick up the nuances of gender and gender programming.

Gender-responsive evaluation is important as a means for building strong systems for generating and using confirmation to improve the work that government departments do to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Gender-responsive evaluation is a powerful tool for achieving the transformative agenda laid out in the government’s national policies in through its commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals.

In June 2019, CLEAR AA and Twende Mbele worked with Ghana Monitoring and Evaluation Forum to commission a baseline study on collaboration between Civil Society and Government for improved accountability and government performance in the use of evidence and results in the sanitation sector. This baseline report provides a brief on the sanitation situation in Ghana; the processes which lead to the generation of sanitation-related data or evidence, and how these are used to inform or influence relevant sector policies. It starts with background information on the sanitation sector in Ghana, key actors and stakeholders and their roles. It also provides the different indicators necessary, at various levels, to assess evidence and the various policy making platforms.

The report concludes that although CSOs/NGOs play a significant role in the use of evidence in the sanitation sector, their involvement is largely limited to evidence generated from projects, and the meta-data related to this evidence production is not coordinated across civil society. Some of the indicators are disaggregated and not harmonized. This situation is inadequate and will have to be complemented by routine administrative data. The report recommends the need to develop agreed sets of indicators, channelled through government’s administrative data framework (GSGDA II, NDPC, 2014). It also suggests some important measures required of NGOs/CSOs in the evidence generation processes must be adhered to, if they are to inform sanitation policy and make the desired impact.

This report presents results from a tracer study conducted by CLEAR-AA in partnership with Twende Mbele following their capacity strengthening interventions aimed at improving evidence use and M&E processes in African parliaments between 2017 and 2018. The tracer study data presented in this report was collected from participants based in Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, Kenya, Benin, Malawi, Zambia, Nigeria and South Africa. The study participants were largely drawn from national parliaments (these also included members of the African Parliamentarians’ Network on Development Evaluation – APNODE), but also to a lesser extent from regional parliaments, Voluntary Organisations for Professional Evaluation (VOPES), government, academia and civil society entities.

The main objectives of the tracer study were:

• to better understand the effectiveness of the capacity strengthening interventions (Training, Training of Trainers (ToT), and Peer Learning workshops) particularly in terms of learning, application, and transfer of knowledge and skills with regards to strengthening evidence use in parliaments;
• to generate foundational evidence around effective capacity development approaches that could be built on;
• to provide recommendations on how the effectiveness and sustainability of parliamentary capacity strengthening initiatives can be improved.

The call for transformation and decolonization is nothing new in African vocabulary, there’s been calls for decolonization education and healthcare sectors, and the transformation of political and economic participation in terms of more women being represented. The evaluation development space has not been exempted from these calls. Over the years, there’s been growing calls for the transformation of the evaluation landscape with more female representation and the use of more black evaluators in the space. Phrases such as: Made In Africa Evaluation; Indigenous Evaluation; and Decolonizing Evaluations have been touted more and more frequency.

Do they all mean the same thing? If not, then what do they all mean? This webinar titled ‘What Meant by Transforming Evaluation for Africa’ will look to unpack what the meanings of phrases such as ‘Made In Africa Evaluation’, ‘Indigenous Evaluation’ and ‘Decolonizing Evaluations’.