You've made a very good point that when you look at the PMF, you're right.
The type of community mobilization activities are listed in each country and then the percentage
of women and men who are trained who actually do it are recorded over time.
As the numbers go up, that shows they've actually done the leadership through community mobilization
that demonstrates their leadership.
Very good point, Yvonne.
If you look at the performance measurement framework, they're all listed there.
I would say that that's probably a good measure.
We'll give that to them, yes, absolutely.
You could argue that there's another group of women and men somewhere else in the country
who don't get any training on leadership who are also mobilizing and promoting advancing
gender equality and human rights.
This is a fairly good start and they show the percentages.
That's interesting, yes.
We could argue that in this case, that outcome indicator is fairly good at measuring increased
leadership because they actually track how many communities they've mobilized in these
different ways.
I sit corrected.
It's not just attendance.
They actually are measuring leadership skill in the PMF by listing these ways that they
can mobilize communities, which is an indication this is how they've done and demonstrated
their leadership.
That's a good point.
We'll say that for this indicator, out of the 20 outcome indicators, it's okay.
Absolutely, and also pointing to other factors beyond the training that improves the capacity
of men and women to actually take up leadership roles in carrying out community mobilization.
I remember when sometime during the COVID-19 pandemic or before it, there was something
that was happening in the United States.
It was a Me Too movement against gender-based violence, sexual and gender-based violence.
It was so huge that it had impact in suburban communities in West Africa.
We had men and women who were not even in the United States, who were miles away.
Just for the benefit of media, they had increased capacity.
They were going into schools.
They were going into town halls, talking to people about gender equality and gender-based
violence.
They did not need to get trained for it.
But something happening somewhere else in the world just sparked off this passion and
this needs to actually spread the message across.
So I feel it's brilliant that they are training, but it's also important to note that there
are other things that are happening and other factors that would also improve people's capacity
to lead these initiatives.
Right, and that's a medium.
I'm wondering if in this project they actually introduced that as part of the training, how
to use social media as a mechanism to promote gender equality.
Be interesting to see if that was actually in there because they do have engagement,
awareness raising campaigns.
They may have used social media as a way to do that.
Exactly, and storytelling spreads the message across the world.
If you tell your stories well, people would pick lessons from it and the impact could
be far greater for equities.
Exactly, and again, the techniques are how to influence the duty bearers, especially
as we're going to talk about in this last outcome.
We're going to have a bit of fun with this one because we're going beyond evaluation,
which is the focus of the podcast.
We're going to get into a little bit of international development policy just for fun.
That gets back to your point that in the end, you have to have these social media as a platform
to influence, but the people in power have to be changed.
In this last outcome, increased empowerment of women and girls for the advancement of
gender equality in their communities.
There are two indicators and we're both going to look at them.
I'm going to start with the first one.
Number of women and girls mobilized for the advancement of gender equality in their communities.
Again, there need to be comparison groups to show that in areas where the project is
not active, that those women felt empowered, mobilized also.
Did the project actually increase mobilization at greater rates than where the project was
not involved?
Now they could come back and say, wait a sec, David, we're doing this at the country level.
The whole country got our $18 million exposure.
I don't know if there are even, but they do say target, don't they use the magic word
targeted, you know, they say target countries.
Maybe they're claiming for 18 million bucks, they've been able to blanket the entire country,
all five of these countries with all these initiatives and trainings so that they could
say, well, sorry, David, we can't have a comparison group because the whole country got it.
It's not clear.
That's one point.
The other thing is, again, forget about the women and the girls.
They were mobilized, but you want to go one step further.
Did the duty bearers bring in any legislation that reflected this greater empowerment?
So for example, duty bearers have reported that these women human rights organizations
have improved their ability to influence them on advancing gender equality.
So once again, you have to ask the duty bearers if they made any significant progress, even
if they felt they were more empowered or more mobilized.
So that's important.
And what I'm going to introduce right here is the fact that the five countries they looked
at Burkina Faso, Haiti, Kenya, Senegal, and Tanzania, according to the democracy index
in 2023, none of them are democracies.
But if you look at the 2023 Freedom House, three of them, Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania, they
say are partly free.
So it raises the issue of maybe they've picked the wrong five countries where they're not
even democracies to begin with.
And why don't we get into countries in Africa that are democracies and have made the turn
where maybe they need help in getting to the next level, which is consolidating that democracy
by advancing gender equality and human rights.
Because if you don't, the country could regress.
And there are five countries that are democracies, Botswana, Ghana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa.
But that's a policy issue.
But I just thought I'd bring it up.
So I'll stop there and let you talk about the second.
The outcome again is increased empowerment of women and girls for the advancement of
gender equality in their communities.
And you're looking at the other outcome indicator for that outcome.
Yes, we're focusing on this one, which is the level of confidence on a four point scale
of women and girls to advance gender equality in their communities.
So first I'd say they trained men and women, but they're only checking for level of confidence
of women and girls.
And as much as we've checked about the democracy index for these countries, did we check their
gender?
What's the word for it?
Gender perception.
It's part of the cultural traits of this country.
Some countries are more patriarchal in terms of the way they perceive things and the way
they do things.
Men lead actions.
Yes.
That's why, as the joke goes, dictator is two words.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Yeah, definitely patriarchal.
Yeah, because some of these countries are patriarchal.
It doesn't matter how confident women and men, sorry, girls and women are about advancing
gender equality.
If they're not allowed to have a voice, if they're not allowed to sit at tables, if they
would be persecuted for standing up in protests, then I'm not sure we're going to see verifiable
or not verifiable.
We're going to see far stretched impact of the trainings.
But going beyond that, we need comparison groups.
And this is, you mentioned something about them saying they used $18 million as a blanket
cover for the whole, that they implemented the project in the whole country.
But we have to remember that in implementing projects, you're dealing with people, especially
if you're people centered and people have rights and choices.
So if you present an opportunity for training on gender equality to a group of 20 people,
it's not all 20 people that are going to say yes, that they want to participate or to be
a beneficiary of your project for some not so specific reasons.
Some people might say, no, I'm sorry, I would not be able to participate in your training.
As much as I love women and girls and gender equality, I'm not going to be part of it.
And so even within that same country, within Tanzania, you'd have people that say, no,
who just decided that they don't want to be part of your training, part of the project?
And so they can make up part of the comparison group.
That's what I believe.
And then if the confidence level rise, if the confidence levels rise, is that enough
to be said that these women and girls have been empowered?
Because my confidence level could have improved, but I might have a parent, maybe my father,
if I was in one of these communities, my father could say, oh, I'm sorry, but I'm not going
to let you go to this meeting.
And there's nothing I can do about it, because that's the cultural structure that I live
in.
I can't just willfully stand up and do whatever I want to do.
So there's still contextual and cultural factors that also determine the level of impact these
confidence levels can create in their communities.
And we talked about the democracy index, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania, and
then we could talk about replacing them.
And if...
Well this is why we're getting at, we're sort of having fun here.
We're not focusing on evaluation anymore.
Now it's just a question of, should they have even decided the government of Canada to fund
this project in those five countries for the reasons you've pointed out, that it's not
a good focus.
They should have focused on countries that actually have already become democratic, but
need help in consolidating that democracy by getting gender equality with the people
in power that are responsible for it, aware of what needs to be done to consolidate it.
So there's no regression.
They've already are prepared to go in that direction.
True.
And many, especially for example, while I was doing my dissertation at the University
of East Anglia, I had the opportunity of visiting the World Bank database to collect data for
my project.
And there's actually something called the Gender Inequality Index for all countries
in the world.
That's right, UNDP.
Yes.
And the UNDP also publishes results for that.
So that I would like to know if Equitas incorporated that information before coming up with these
indicators and then choosing how they measured it.
Do you get?
Yeah.
That's what I would like to know.
Oh, yes.
I'd like to know.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's good.
So, we're going to look at again, the outcome increased commitment of select women's organizations
to engage duty bearers in dialogue on advancing gender equality in target countries.
And you're looking at this indicator 1320B.
Yes.
And this is which the indicator here is the level of commitment of select women's organizations
on a four point scale to engage duty bearers in dialogue on advancing gender equality.
This is still going to be about self-reporting bias.
If I was a leader of a women's organization and I have participated in some form of training
or workshop under this project, I would say, yes, my level of commitment has improved.
But there is no certainty that this would actively translate into my engagement with
duty bearers.
Also, we would need to ask the duty bearers instead of these women's organizations, if
the women's organizations were good, were actually good at engaging with them on advancing
gender equality.
So going beyond, you know, checking for whether women's organizations are committed or not,
we need to know, we need to ask the duty bearers, these women's organizations, you've met with
them, you've had meetings with them, were they good?
Did you feel your meeting was effective?
Do you feel like you're more capable or equipped to advance gender equality in your own way?
And then we have another output 1311, 1311, which provides, which trains them on how to
engage the duty bearers.
I feel David, you could talk more about that.
Right.
The other, and we've already addressed this in other indicators, but the next outcome
is increased capacity of select women's organizations to engage duty bearers in better fulfilling
their human rights obligations to advance gender equality in target countries.
And again, the outcome indicator is level of perceived capacity of select women's organizations
to engage duty bearers and fulfilling their human rights obligations to advance gender
equality.
And like before, perceived capacity of those they train is not a valid measure of technical
capacity to engage.
So that's straightforward there.
The next one is increased opportunities for civil society organizations to collaborate
on advancing gender equality at target countries.
And you're, we're looking at that outcome indicator for that outcome.
Yeah.
And that's the number of opportunities available for civil society organizations to collaborate
on advancing gender equality in target countries.
And this is flawed in that it is only measured once a year with no comparison group.
Yep.
And increased opportunities could easily happen for reasons outside of the project.
They need to find civil society organizations outside of the project who did not receive
support from the project to see if those CSOs are also increasing their opportunities to
advance gender equality without any support for the project.
So this is basically a sublition.
There's a technical word for it, but you understand what I'm saying, David.
Thank you.
Yes.
Right.
And the next outcome is increased capacity of women's and human rights organizations
to carry out human rights education to advance gender equality.
And the outcome indicator is percent of human rights educators, women, men, and others trained
on human rights education to advance gender equality, transferring knowledge to women's
and human rights organizations.
And as we mentioned previously, it's the same issue.
We're not interested in the transfer.
As the outcome says, we want to know if their capacity to carry out that education has increased.
So they shouldn't be asking the percentages transfer the knowledge, but do they actually
have the ability to educate others?
So forget the transfer, measure the percent of educators who passed the training.
And they should also measure the technical capacity to educate of the women and human
rights organizations since that is the outcome.
So we're seeing quite a bit of a pattern here.
Now the next one is, again, increased opportunities for women and or girls to participate in decision
making process within local structures in target countries.
And the other indicator for that.
The indicator for this is the percentage of total women and or girls trained that are
participating in decision making processes within local structures.
And this is also going to fall under the self-reporting bias.
Don't just ask the women or girls if they participated.
Instead, we need to find the percentage of these women or girls who are sitting on legitimate
decision making bodies and only those who have voting power in these local structures
using external criteria.
They should not or they could just be serving tea, taking minutes or doing other mundane
tasks.
They really need to know if they're actually in legitimate decision making bodies and they
have the voting powers.
And I would like to add to that an example and the country and the dictator will remain
nameless.
But there is a country in Africa where the dictator has appointed almost all of the members
of parliament to be women.
So he raises his hands and says, look, you in, I am scoring the best on the gender index.
The 100% of the assembly is women.
But guess what?
The women have no power, but they're there and they show up.
But it's kind of like a what do you call it?
I can't remember the term, but it's a rubber stamp parliament.
They have no power.
That's no sufficient.
The power is all coming out of the out of the dictator's office.
So this is another example where it's brilliant, you know, where he's he's he has appointed
all these women.
And technically, if you follow the Jezzi score, I think it's called the gender empowerment.
She still has it.
They would score perfect because women are 100% representing the parliament.
But guess what?
The parliament has no power.
That's not that's not sufficient.
So I think, yeah, no, no, far from it.
And he's actually following the rules of the index, doing very well on the index.
But you have to take a closer look.
And the last one we've got here is enhanced collaboration among women and human rights
organizations to advance human rights in their countries.
And I have here the indicator number of collaborative initiatives among women's and human rights
organizations to advance human rights in their country, which again, is good.
It's an indication that as the initiatives increase, collaboration is going to improve,
which is good.
But again, they need to more clearly define collaborative initiative so that they can
claim that the those initiatives have indeed increased.
And they measure it only at once at baseline and once at the end line.
So again, you could argue that these initiatives could go up in the middle of the project with
nothing related to what the project activities are.
If they're only measuring it once at the beginning and once at the end.
Although it's a fairly good indicator, it's just the measurement again is not very frequent.
And again, we don't know with no comparison groups if this could have happened anyways.
Collaborative initiatives increasing over time in the country with even without the
project, we just don't know.
So more frequent measurement or find me a comparison group and then they can say the
initiatives or the activities in our project were contributed to the increase in the
collaboration initiatives over time.
And I think there is one more indicate increased leadership of women and men in community mobilization
activities that advance gender equality in target countries.
And I think we had talked about this, you had noticed that now we have a better idea
that the type of community mobilize act mobilization activities is connected to the other indicator,
the percent of total women and men that actually go about doing it.
Right.
Yes.
Right.
So that's covered.
And that is where we thought both A and B combined those indicators percent of total
women and men trained demonstrating leadership is supported by the second indicator, which
is the type of community mobilize act mobilization activities, demonstrating leadership that
they actually did.
So we believe that's a good indicator.
Yes.
So that concludes our review of the outcome indicators.
And I would still conclude that the outcome indicators do not adequately measure the achievement
of the outcomes and that equitous cannot conclude that they have achieved their outcomes in
this project.
What do you think?
I agree with you.
However, I would absolutely love to hear more from them if the opportunity avails itself.
Thank you.
Exactly right.
So thank you, Yvonne, for your input.
Greatly appreciate it.
We will what we'll do now is take this part two and send it to the Minister for International
Development as well as the shadow critics from the Conservative Party, the New Democratic
Party, the Bloc Québécois critics of international development, the shadow critics, because we
believe regardless of your political affiliation, it's important that the four to five billion
dollars that taxpayers in Canada spend on these services in developing countries needs
to be properly evaluated.
And we believe or at least I believe that that is not happening and it needs to happen.
So we'll do that and build the evidence that shows that they need to improve on proper
evaluation and we'll take it from there.
Okay.
Thank you, Yvonne.
And stay tuned for episode eight in about a couple of weeks.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, Yvonne.
Bye for now.
And it's so weird.
Do I need to?
Are you still there?
Are you you're gone?
Okay.