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This policy brief describes the experiences and lessons emerging from the revision of Kenya’s Wildlife Conservation and Management Act (2013) through the use of public participation. The Act was reviewed with a parliamentary body, the Departmental Committee on Environment and Natural Resources (DCENR), playing a direct role in facilitating the public engagement. The Committee was supported by the Parliamentary Research Services (PRS), that played a critical role as a knowledge broker.

After multiple attempts over the course of 16 years, the Act was successfully reviewed and with a strong sense of ownership across a diverse and somewhat fragmented group of stakeholders. However, the shortcomings and challenges in the process are recognised and give rise to a number of lessons for the country in going forward. These include:

• The value and opportunities offered by the direct engagement of Parliament in facilitating public participation
• The significance of the role of the PRS as a knowledge broker
• The importance of good leadership; and
• Ensuring that the necessary resources, including time, budget and skills is critical to successful public engagement

The research highlighted in this policy brief was carried out with, and through the perspective of, policy makers, rather than researchers. It explored how African policy makers, researchers and development practitioners can apply interventions to promote the use of evidence to improve development outcomes and practice. The case study research was guided by a common analytical framework that combines two different frameworks: i) the Science of Using Science’s framework that looks at evidence interventions and outcomes from a behaviour change perspective (Langer et al., 2016) and the Context Matters framework that serves as a tool to better understand contextual factors affecting the use of evidence (Weyrauch et al., 2016). The framework takes into account contextual influencers and the demand from policy makers. It breaks the evidence journey into the ways in which evidence is generated (evaluations, research etc), the interventions taken in order to ensure evidence use (such as training), the changes in capability, motivation or opportunities to use evidence which arise, and how these eventually translate into evidence being used. We take a nuanced view of use, to include instrumental, conceptual, process and symbolic use.

Gender is defined as the social construction of being female or male and the relationships between women, men, girls and boys based on society construction.

Gender is socially constructed and culture determines roles associated with being male or female. (Men provide for the home women care for family members)

It varies from society to society and time to time and is therefore not static e.g. some women have taken over the role of house hold heads as opposed to the past.

It is embedded in the socialization process and is passed on through generations from birth, school system, family, media and religious systems. Church sermons, media adverts, cultural functions etc.

Purposes 

• Use the AGDEN gender diagnostic tool to Review National Monitoring and Evaluation System (NMES).
• Identify potential barriers and enablers to having a well-functioning gender responsive M&E system at country level.
• Identify and develop concrete strategies (or recommendations) to strengthen gender responsiveness of country’s Monitoring and Evaluation system.

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.