Beneficiaries are experts to measure impact of Gender, social & cultrual norms.

Few weeks ago I was enaged in a partnerships capacity assesment for one of the national partners which was a face to face or physical meeting. While I covered both MEAL and gender sections, I had conversations with a gender techcnical focal person for the organization, our conversation made me to puase for a moment to reflect on the following;

What method is approprate for gender and social norms impact!

A conversation with this gentleman brought out something that a non MEAL/ M&E usaully rearly think about especially where it is all about spending money. There are centain results that you will not easily realize or measure unless you use a particular and intentional data colelction methodology. Donors keep asking for impact or our work in the evalaution and research evidence yet there are no clear answer, iIn his words he said;

" We collect a lot of data yet we keep asking where the impact is especially on gender and social norms, we can never fully document full impact on gender and social norms when we are stuck to a particular approach like using only quantittative evidence because these are opinions, perceptions and behaviour, the best apporach to measure these impact is to have a conversation with the target beneficiaries and let them narate their story".

Sometimes the change we wish to see are not writen or documented in black and white , they are said or shared, these changes/ impact are observed. The beneficiries are the experts because they experienced the situation and listening to their conversation/ story make it more easy to see reality and mearesure impact. - The feminist MEAL approach clearly brings out rights based approach to measure impact by shifting ownership of processes to program partners and participants, it shifts power and gives space for beneficiries to be in the driver's seat on defining and implementing exercises and the use of information,Here.

We spend a lot of time collecting evidence without neccessarily asking ourselves the " the so what, the how ". While we try to balance between meeting donor complaince/ requairements and creating impact, we get lost and forget to ask the "the how , the why and so what" at the right time.

Do you really need to apply all the comperehnsive data methods/ approaches to mesaure impact? how much evidence do you already have in you knowledge management repository system or from external system?

You are not the first person colelct evidence on a particular topic or impact, other did it already but how the evidence was or is colected is what matters.

Tips to effective evidence generation and utilization to intentionally measure impact;

1. Review the Country strategy plan ( CSP) and its milestone: what is the proirity interms of quality, innovation and impact,
2. Learning agenda: Do you have an up to date learning agenda either for the program or the one linked to the CSP, be intentional about what and how the evidence should be generated to realsze the impact.
3. Have a simple process map to help the team understand the evidence generation and utilzation processes, this builds or streghtens a learning culture.
4. Intentional pause and reflect moments with evidence based lens to understand the context, flexibility to adapt and accepting to learn from failures.
5. Make it fun and do not complicate the process: Especially in Africa, we do not like reading or having complicated processes, try always simply the processes.
6. Make the

These tips may seeem obvious, however it takes a proace ans time to make it a culture among team to effectively own it.