UNCDF takes seriously its obligations in the area of gender - responsive evaluation in line with the requirements of UNDP’s Evaluation Policy and the UN System-Wide Action Plan on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. UNCDF is delighted to have been awarded a 2020 Excellence Award for our mid-term evaluation of the joint UNCDF, UNDP and UN WOMEN Inclusive and Equitable Local Development (IELD) Programme.

With a focus on addressing barriers that women face when entering the labour market, the IELD programme promotes local public and private investments, combined with training and the application of gender – focused planning tools, to support the unlocking of domestic capital for women’s economic empowerment and entrepreneurship. At the time of the evaluation, the programme had been most active in Tanzania and Bangladesh with activities starting in Senegal and Uganda.

With these objectives in mind, UNCDF’s Evaluation Unit – with the support of UN Women’s Independent Evaluation Service - designed a set of evaluation questions that – following relevant guidance from the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG) – attempted to fully apply a gender equality and women’s empowerment lense to all parts of the evaluation. This included a focus on expected results at different levels of the programme’s results chain: whether around programme execution and implementation of SME and public-private partnership investments (efficiency); the effects to date of the investments and capacity development activities on partner local governments, women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises, local banks, and women’s organisations (effectiveness); or the likely results of the programme on the market or local government systems that the programme was seeking to influence.

The evaluators followed this by designing a data collection toolkit that deployed a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques linked to each of the evaluation questions that could capture both the secondary monitoring data produced by the programme, as well as new primary data arising from visits to key programme sites in Bangladesh and Tanzania, such as interviews with key programme stakeholders and partners in the two countries. Taking care to include representatives from the different groups of beneficiaries targeted by the programme, these techniques included focus group discussions, key informant interviews and five case studies looking in detail at the different modalities deployed by the programme in different countries.

Finally, and still with the UNEG guidance in mind, when writing up the report, the evaluators paid particular attention to ensure that the different sections retained a central focus on the gender elements of the various questions in the evaluation matrix. This ensured that the final report was able to address the programme’s gender performance across different sectors, different countries and at different levels of the theory of change, all of which helped deliver an evaluation report that provided a set of gender-focused conclusions and recommendations to the implementing partners and key programme stakeholders.