Peacebuilders have a duty to understand and demonstrate the impact of their work in terms of helping to create more peaceful, more inclusive and equitable societies. Gender is a key factor in conflict and peacebuilding, and in determining people’s positions of relative power or vulnerability, and thus having a better understanding of how different women, girls, men, boys, trans- and intersex persons are affected can only help in better grasping both conflict and peacebuilding. In practice, however, the task of grasping one’s impact on complex, long-term processes of societal change such as peacebuilding or enhancing gender equality is challenging.
This report aims to help peacebuilders to better capture the impact of integrating gender and dialogue into peacebuilding projects. It is based on a review of existing design, monitoring and evaluation (DME) tools and approaches to examining gender in a peacebuilding context, discussions with practitioners and academia, as well as case studies. The main objective of our project is to help identify innovative, comprehensive and realistic ways of measuring the interplay of peacebuilding projects and gender relations. We do not present one overarching gender indicator or one ‘measuring gender’ method that would be applicable in all cases, as this is an impossibility. Rather, we will examine different tools for measuring different kinds of gendered impacts of peacebuilding efforts on beneficiary individuals and communities.
For the case studies, we chose four projects that all fall under the broad ‘gender in peacebuilding’ category, but are otherwise quite different. Geographically, one was located in the Mano River region (Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone), one in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one in Lebanon and one in Timor-Leste. Thematically, the projects cover women’s political participation, economic empowerment, dialogue and attitudinal change on gender equality, and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).
The projects were examined at different stages and different DME approaches were tested:
- in the Lebanon case, an ongoing project was used as a basis for devising a gender-sensitive
design of a future project on more gender-equal political participation;
- the Timor-Leste project was accompanied1 throughout its implementation period of 2012–
2015, testing the adaptation of Gender-Equitable Men (GEM) scales;
- in DRC, the research team assisted with the design and development of indicators and in the
initial phase of the project using a basket of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) approaches,
including everyday peace indicators; and lastly
- the West Africa case study was revisited around five years after its completion in order to test
Most Significant Change (MSC) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) approaches to examine
medium-/long-term impacts.
In addition to the case studies, we present an overview of different DME approaches and methods that can be applied in peacebuilding projects. With all of the approaches, an adaptation to the given context is necessary and this needs to be based on a thorough understanding of the given context – an understanding to which the DME can and should contribute.
Throughout, we argue for a comprehensive, nuanced approach to gender, which looks at women, men and other gender identities, and which examines gender in relation to other factors such as age and class. While this will initially require dealing with more complexity, it will allow for a more focused approach and effective use of resources down the line. Proper DME is essential to better peacebuilding and to better understanding gender dynamics of peacebuilding, but it requires sufficient resources in terms of budgets, time and human resources.