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management

LESSON

Lesson Learned: Enhancing Women’s Political Participation in Eswatini

Transparent and proactive communication between the grant recipient and the funder is essential to foster effective collaboration and mitigate operational inefficiencies. In this case, WLSA faced a shortage of funds and human resources, which hindered their ability to fulfil all project team responsibilities. This led to delays and inconsistencies within the narrative reports, which were never clarified by WLSA.

Project Partner
Women and Law in Southern Africa - Eswatini
Project Description

The project seeks to enhance the gender responsiveness of policies and practices in the electoral process in Eswatini by assisting stakeholders to develop gender responsive guidelines and educating citizens on the importance of women’s political participation, while empowering the female electorate with leadership skills, campaign and mobilization strategies. The project seeks to impart a long-term effect by enabling community-based paralegals to conduct gender equality sensitization talks at community level. Project activities will incorporate actions in response to the Covid-19 crisis, as it impacts women, including gender-based violence as well as social and economic pressures.

Evaluation Date
August 2024
Country
LESSON

Lesson Learned: A New Constitution: Historical Opportunity to Advance Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in Chile

Capturing, and preserving for future use, key takeaways and materials should be an integral part of any successful and well-run project. In the present case, the experience of the constitutional reform processes in Chile and lessons learned from the project will self-evidently be of wider interest in the Latin American region, and beyond.

Project Partner
Centro Regional de Derechos Humanos y Justicia de Género
Project Description
The project objective is to promote women’s participation and gender content in Chile’s current constitutional process; advance women’s understanding of a new constitution’s importance to them and their rights; generate debates on key gender issues; advocate for the inclusion of gender aspects in the drafting process. The project is highly relevant in the Covid-19 world and its aftermath, where it will be essential to address the massive impact of the crisis on women, ensuring that responses uphold their rights and are inclusive of their needs.
Evaluation Date
May 2024
Country
LESSON

Lesson Learned: A New Constitution: Historical Opportunity to Advance Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in Chile

When operating in a highly charged political context, where significant stakeholders can pro-actively resist change, disinformation campaigns are increasingly a fact of life. To counter this, project managers should be able to rely on a robust media/engagement strategy to counter false messages that undermine the integrity of their project.

UDF-19-869-CHI
Project Partner
Centro Regional de Derechos Humanos y Justicia de Género
Project Description
The project objective is to promote women’s participation and gender content in Chile’s current constitutional process; advance women’s understanding of a new constitution’s importance to them and their rights; generate debates on key gender issues; advocate for the inclusion of gender aspects in the drafting process. The project is highly relevant in the Covid-19 world and its aftermath, where it will be essential to address the massive impact of the crisis on women, ensuring that responses uphold their rights and are inclusive of their needs.
Evaluation Date
May 2024
Country
LESSON

Lesson Learned: A New Constitution: Historical Opportunity to Advance Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in Chile

Project designers and managers should always be alive to what is ultimately achievable – and limit scope and ambition accordingly. The scope of the project was very broad, with many activities and actors to cover, and challenging to manage. The UNDEF partner admits they were “carried away by the enthusiasm” of the first constitutional reform process, following the social protests of 2019. The project did not necessarily suffer as a consequence, but it placed strain on delivery.

UDF-19-869-CHI
Project Partner
Centro Regional de Derechos Humanos y Justicia de Género
Project Description
The project objective is to promote women’s participation and gender content in Chile’s current constitutional process; advance women’s understanding of a new constitution’s importance to them and their rights; generate debates on key gender issues; advocate for the inclusion of gender aspects in the drafting process. The project is highly relevant in the Covid-19 world and its aftermath, where it will be essential to address the massive impact of the crisis on women, ensuring that responses uphold their rights and are inclusive of their needs.
Evaluation Date
May 2024
Country
LESSON

Lesson Learned: Raising the Social and Political Profile of Youth in Mozambique

The project experience revealed that regular follow-up with project partners to monitor key activities, such as beneficiary selection, ensures accountability and maintains alignment with project goals and objectives. In this case, the project focal points across the provinces undertook the task of beneficiary selection without the consistent guidance and follow-up from the grantee. This led to the adoption of diverse selection criteria, some of which inadvertently contributed to higher participant turnover rates.

UDF-18-794-MOZ
Project Partner
Associação Gender Links Moçambique
Project Description
The project supports young people's participation in local and national issues by developing youth councils and youth councilor training workshops. Young people will have their voices heard on key social and political platforms, and will be better represented at the center of local and national policies and decision-making, within and outside selected councils. Project activities incorporate actions in response to the Covid-19 crisis as it impacts youth.
Evaluation Date
April 2024
Country
LESSON

Lesson Learned: Raising the Social and Political Profile of Youth in Mozambique

The challenges posed by an unexpected event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, underscored the importance of fostering strong connections with project stakeholders, adaptability, and proactive engagement. In this case, faced with a lockdown and the inability to conduct planned activities, the project successfully maintained its course, sustained stakeholder engagement, and capitalized on unforeseen opportunities to achieve enhanced outcomes.
Project Partner
Associação Gender Links Moçambique
Project Description
The project supports young people's participation in local and national issues by developing youth councils and youth councilor training workshops. Young people will have their voices heard on key social and political platforms, and will be better represented at the center of local and national policies and decision-making, within and outside selected councils. Project activities incorporate actions in response to the Covid-19 crisis as it impacts youth.
Evaluation Date
April 2024
Country
LESSON

Lesson Learned: Strengthening Human Rights Protection Through Legal Education in Haiti

Grantees must be transparent with donors and target audience, sharing important information that can affect the implementation of the project, clearly explaining to the participating organizations in which framework the activities are based and which objectives they have. This requires a strong executive capacity that can manage by results. It should also involve a larger number of staff / members in project evaluation processes; and share evaluation reports with all its members to promote collective learning. Actions should be properly planned and documented using electronic records (administration and programmatic content) of implemented projects.
Project Partner
Platforme des organisations haitennes des droits humains
Project Description
The project aimed to build the capacity and skills of community actors such as farmers' organizations, youth organizations and women's organizations to defend and uphold their rights. The grantee aimed to capitalize on the experience and realities of these groups and to stimulate their effective and responsible participation in the mobilization for the respect of fundamental human rights in the country. It also wanted the project to address the low level of knowledge of community actors, vulnerable groups and local authorities on human rights as well as State authorities' obligations in respect of human rights. Legal education on the chain of protection of human rights in Haiti, the mobilization of local actors on this thematic and the establishment of legal clinics were the main elements of the project implementation strategy. The evaluation focused on assessing the results of the activities trying to identify changes that could be reasonably attributed to them. While the overall aims of the project were relevant, the project largely failed to achieve the intended results. The negative consequence in not doing enough monitoring was that activities and impacts cannot be measured. The project was neither effective nor efficient as facilitators/animators were unable to create or reinforce networks of human rights observers in the targeted communities and human rights violations failed to be systematically documented. Observation reports were based on too few and poorly documented cases and legal aid was not provided as intended. The few trainings and meetings that brought together locally elected authorities, justice system representatives and members of grassroots organizations did facilitate exchanges that are still ongoing after the projects’ closure and continue to contribute to legal education and social dialogue.
Evaluation Date
June 2018
Theme
Country
LESSON

Lesson Learned: Strengthening Participation of Women in Geographically Deprived Communities in Local Governance in Ghana

In future similar projects in Ghana there should be more focus and resources given to capacity building, to support training on CSO management, the development of board charters for CSOs, training on proposal writing training and basic financial management for CSOs.
Project Partner
Gender Centre for Empowering Development
Project Description
The project’s objective was to increase participation of women in decision making to develop sustainable, decentralized, bottom-up planning processes in Ghana. The grantee institutionalized Women’s Group Advocacy (WOMGA) Platforms to engage and dialogue with local government authorities in decision making processes on public service delivery. At the heart of the project strategy was the mobilization and empowerment of 150 women, who were trained and deployed to monitor policy implementation at the district level using a Gender Monitoring and Tracking Tool, and to champion the participation of women in local planning and implementation processes. The project’s intervention logic was sound and had clarity and coherence. Institutionalizing the WOMGA Platforms facilitated regular engagement with local government authorities, and hence effectively contributed to the overall development goal of increasing women’s participation in decision-making process on public service delivery. Local officials commended the high level of preparation they had to undertake for the public sessions the project held, during which they faced thorough questioning by the WOMGA members and the community.
Evaluation Date
June 2017
Country
LESSON

Lesson Learned: Strengthening Young Women’s Civic Participation and Leadership in Uganda

The international grantee involved implementing partners in Uganda - namely ten universities in three target areas - from the very beginning, in the design of the project objectives. This enabled good support during project implementation and a certain degree of ownership of the results among the universities. However, the project might have been more efficient at the implementation stage if a detailed memorandum of understanding among the partners had been formulated defining roles and responsibilities.
Project Partner
Century Entrepreneurship Development Agency
Project Description
The project’s objective was to strengthen the political leadership capacity of 1,500 young women from 10 public and private universities based in five districts of Uganda. The grantee aimed to increase awareness among the project’s target group and to provide them with access to information about women’s political life, as well as civic, voting, electoral and democratic processes. This was expected to enhance the leadership capacities of the young women to participate in the March 2016 general elections. Following these elections, an additional component was included in order to create a platform for leadership development of young women in Uganda. Although women’s political advancement at the time of project implementation was a national priority, the actual implementation of related international, regional and national legal and policy commitments remained an important challenge. This was due to persisting socio-cultural factors, such as the high illiteracy rate among youth and girls, lack of access to appropriate information related to political, human and civic rights, early marriage and sexual and gender based violence. While highly relevant in this respect, the project did not address the significant risk of SGBV that young women are exposed to because of their interest in political participation.
Evaluation Date
May 2017
Country
LESSON

Lesson Learned: For a More Vigilant Civil Society in Morocco

The grantee’s project and partnership management was transparent, respecting the contract terms. The result framework’s achievement indicators, as well as quality control mechanisms were established from the beginning of the project. No significant delays were reported in the mobilisation of human, financial and logistic resources.
Project Partner
Association Mouvement Alternatives citoyenne
Project Description
The main objective of the project was to strengthen democratic processes and the rule of law, through the progressive incorporation of grass-roots organizations and marginalized sections of the Moroccan society in elaborating and monitoring public policy. The project strategy was structured around capacity building of civil society organizations to participate in democratic mechanisms, and support to marginalized groups, in particular women and youth, to foster their inclusion as protagonists in the management of public affairs. In the context of the Morocco’s democratic transition, the project’s efforts to promote the new Constitution was very useful, as most civil society organizations were unacquainted with concepts and mechanisms of participatory democracy, as well as with the new prerogatives as set in the country’s 2011 Constitution.
Evaluation Date
May 2016
Theme
Country