Annotation:
This piece by UN Women contains four
articles (by four different authors) that
examine how to monitor and evaluate local
partnerships. The first author, Narayanan,
contends that evaluations and monitoring
must be malleable. Citing evidence of HIV
reduction, he argues that flexible
monitoring and evaluation processes are
necessary for local programs to succeed.
The second author, Kosheleva, parses the
two dominant approaches to monitoring and
evaluating local partnerships and argues
that there is a "menu" of instruments
within each approach that can be tailored
for a particular issue. The third author,
Kusakabe, considers why monitoring and
evaluating is important in the first
place: collecting such information
augments "gender analysis capacity" in
addition to examining whether a given
program is succeeding. The fourth author,
Vaidyanathan, claims that the current
evaluation and monitoring approaches are
not conducive to cross-sectional, flexible
problem solving, which is necessary given
the problems vis-a-vis gender equality.