CSW60 Wed 23

Today's Reports

The politics of Measurement and Funding: Alternative Approaches to Measuring Social Change and Advocating for those Approaches with Donors
International Women’s Health Coalition, Global Fund for Women, American Jewish World Service

2016-03-23          Eirwen Pallant

Brief Summary of presentation of information made?
(NB: This section seeks to factually report what was said in the presentation. No inference should be drawn in terms of Salvation Army position or policy from this section)

Presentations made by representatives of the organizing bodies and DIVA (Fiji) a n organization advocating for women in the LGBTIQ community

•             First question – who is M&E for? oneself as a learning tool or as an accountability tool for the donor? May affect what tools are used. Measurement has been shown not to be good educator

•             Need to know ‘what is success? what does it look like?’

•             Money, power and politics determines what gets measured , which influences what funding is available

•             There is increasing demand from donors for monitoring and evaluation within an environment of overall decreased funding.

•             The donor’s units of analysis may be different from the organization and may not be helpful, eg. Time frames, donors tend to be short but behavior change has been shown to take 20-30 years.

•             Expectations of donors can marginalize smaller organisations working in the field

•             Example of different measurement from India. Working on early marriage, change of focus on age to focus on agency. Measurement of attitude to child marriage instead of the age of marriage.

•             Need to engage with structures not just individuals ( see William Booth’s rules of intervention/programmes in “In Darkest England and the Way Out)

•             Has been shown that Women’s Human Rights Organisations are effective in changing attitudes. What do successful WHR organisations look like?

• Strong grass roots base
• Strong leadership training for future leaders
• Have a collective political agenda
• Have strong alliances
• Are independent groups but are well coordinated
• Have strong infrastructure
• Have anchor organisations to link local to national and international groups

•             Documentation of action can itself be used as a measurement

•             Advocacy works from Praxis ( Need to be working in the arena before can advocate on the issue)

•             Shared values and honest communication needed before entering any partnership. Can always afford to say no. If fundamental differences in values impossible to work together

•             Debate on the use of frameworks for action implementation management.  Depends on organization size and action needed as to how useful/necessary they are. Bigger the size of an organization the greater the benefit, the more rapid the action needed the greater the disadvantage.

•             Frameworks aid analysis but best method of analysis is one that can be used.

•             Frameworks force people to engage with values and the politics of the issues

•             Using frameworks and templates can lead to forgetting to look for the unexpected.

•             Deeper understanding of social change is needed to develop measurement tools

•             Need to capture the change of quality of relationships and power changes

•             Are looking for different models of measurement

•             How can we convey the respectability of these models to donor

What was of particular significance to share with The Salvation Army globally?
•             The International Salvation Army has already recognized the issues with measurement that are noted above and is probably further on in their quest for measurement tools and indicators of relationship changes. Hearing the same lessons learnt from a very different group of organisations is reaffirmation that The Salvation Army is going in the right direction

•             The research showing the character of successful organisations is a good reminder of things we should be aiming for at an organizational level