Evaluation: Improvement of Women’s and Girls' Rights in Finland’s Development Policy and Cooperation

The Government of Finland has had a longstanding commitment to promoting the rights and status of women and girls and supporting gender equality. In order to have knowledge and lessons on the results on the ground the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland (MFA) decided to carry out an evaluation on women’s and girls’ rights and gender equality. The overarching purpose of the evaluation was to learn from good practices. The evaluation thus searched for gender changes and the mechanism contributing to these changes.

The Government of Finland has had a longstanding commitment to promoting the rights and status of women and girls and supporting gender equality.  In order to have knowledge and lessons on the results on the ground the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland (MFA) decided to carry out an evaluation on women’s and girls’ rights and gender equality. To prepare for the actual policy evaluation, an evaluability assessment was conducted. The assessment pointed out that the commitment to promote women’s and girls’ rights and gender equality has been clearly defined at the political level, but there has been a gap between well-defined policies on the one hand, and effective implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of programmes on the other hand. The ability to have evidence of results to improve gender equality and women’s and girls’ rights, is limited without predefined gender-specific goals.

Evaluations usually critique and raise examples of what has not worked. However, the Evaluation on Women’s and Girls’ Rights in Finland’s Development Policy and Cooperation took a different approach. The overarching purpose of the evaluation was to learn from good practices rather than derive generalizable conclusions of effectiveness and impact. The evaluation thus searched for gender changes and the mechanism contributing to these changes. Not only positive changes were searched for but the evaluation intended to increase understanding on what works and what doesn’t and how to overcome the gap between policy and practice.

The evaluation employed the principles of utilization-focused evaluation and adapted Outcome Harvesting (OH) approach. The evaluation had field missions to Nepal, Kenya, Somalia and New York, with a special focus on UN Women and UN Population Fund (UNFPA). The evaluation identified results in terms of behavioral changes in actors that were relevant to promote the rights of women and girls and traced these back to the contribution of Finland. Results were synthesized according to their main theme and context and developed into 15 case studies.

Evaluation report

Evaluation on Improvement of Women’s and Girls' Rights (PDF, 345 pages, 3 Mt)

Presentation slides

Power point presentation on 19.9.2018 (PDF, 3 Mt)

Recordings

Please contact eva-11@formin.fi if you would like to have the webinar recording.