Becoming Feminist Evaluators: A Learning Journey at Global Affairs Canada

In 2017, Canada adopted the Feminist International Assistance Policy, which is grounded in the belief that “supporting gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is the best way to build a more peaceful, more inclusive and more prosperous world.” Since then, the internal evaluation division of Global Affairs Canada has been experimenting with evaluation approaches that reflect this core belief. This includes efforts to integrate the principles and methods associated with feminist evaluation.

This roundtable discussion will provide an overview of the evaluation division’s ongoing experiences with feminist evaluation. It will include practical examples of how feminist and gender-sensitive approaches have been integrated into three program evaluations at Global Affairs Canada, namely:

-The Evaluation of International Assistance Programming in Colombia, which included a pilot application of feminist evaluation principles during the data collection
-The Evaluation of Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls in the Middle East and the Maghreb, which developed an innovative data collection tool to measure women’s empowerment
-The Formative Evaluation of Women’s Voice and Leadership, which has fully adopted a feminist approach to evaluation planning and design

Presenters will reflect on the value of these approaches for their respective evaluations, the challenges of implementing a feminist approach, and lessons learned for practitioners interested in exploring feminist evaluation approaches. A Q&A session will follow.

Our organization’s experiences with feminist evaluation to date have enriched our work, while posing difficult questions about how to best ensure inclusion, participation and representation of women, girls and other marginalized groups. We look forward to sharing our journey with you! Please contact us if you require any accommodations to participate.