Setting up your project monitoring system
Project monitoring is an ongoing process by which you track progress towards set objectives. To integrate gender equality in your project monitoring system, include some indicators that specifically relate to gender equality and collect sex-disaggregated data for all other project indicators. For example, track how many women attend your trainings and gather their feedback. When it comes to media monitoring, track how many times your issue is raised in the press and assess whether women’s role is described in a positive way.
Choosing your evaluation methods
An evaluation allows you to determine if your project has reached its objectives. You can conduct an evaluation halfway through a project, at the end of a project, or many years after to measure its long term impacts.
The evaluation of a public engagement project aims to measure increased awareness, new knowledge, and changes in values, attitudes and behaviours. If you’ve integrated gender equality throughout your project, this will come up in the evaluation and in people’s perception of the project.
It isn’t easy to measure the impact of public engagement projects on target populations because most projects don’t have the means to track medium- and long-term changes. The following table gives an idea of the kind of feedback you could gather during a qualitative evaluation that would reflect impact in terms of gender equality:
| Increased awareness | “I now realize that I don’t experience the issue in the same way my partner does.” “I now know that women in the South have a harder time than men in accessing… “ |
| New knowledge | “I learned that 99 percent of all maternal deaths occur in developing countries.” |
| Values | “I have realized that equality is a fundamental value for me.” “I am outraged to see the inequalities that still exist between women and men.” |
| Attitudes & Behaviours | “I am committed to raising awareness about gender equality in my school.” “I am going to do volunteer work in a women’s center.” “From now on I’m going to speak up when I hear sexist remarks or witness sexist behaviour.“ “I am going to pay more attention to provincial gender equality policies.” |
Further resources:
- Global Affair’s Canada’s Framework for Assessing Gender Equality results (2017)
- AQOCI, Comité québécois femmes et développement (2011), Training kit : Promoting Gender Equality from Theory to Practice, p. 53 to 57, http://www.aqoci.qc.ca/IMG/pdf/trousse_efh_vang.pdf
