Project Description:

This Endline evaluation was conducted to assess how the POWER project contributed to complex gender and social change processes among the beneficiaries of Dinajpur (Ghoraghat), Gaibandha (Fulchari & Gobindaganj) and Lalmonirhat (Lalmonirhat Sadar). The evaluation purpose was to ensure accountability to stakeholders, to understand the project’s contribution to change and to share and integrate project learnings. The evaluation took an explicitly intersectional feminist approach, which shaped methodology, analysis, and interpretation. This evaluation followed the OECD-DAC evaluation criteria of relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability. The quantitative team conducted telephone surveys with 254 (204 women, 50 men) respondents in all of POWER’s districts in Bangladesh. The qualitative team conducted telephonic interviews with 48 local and national stakeholders. The project recommended to strengthen the intersectional approach and methodology to ensure the most marginalized women and women experiencing multiple oppressions, deepen partnerships and build alliances with local, national and regional women’s rights organizations and feminist movements in project areas. The study found better track of systematically positive outcomes and build the data on the relationships between time use, gender relations and agro-ecological methods, continue to engage with relevant national government ministries to integrate unpaid care work into policy, practice, planning processes and budgeting cycles. It also highlighted best practices, practical tools, and lessons learned across country contexts on how to build momentum and political will, better integrate VAWG into women’s economic empowerment and justice. The process includes active programming through developing robust mechanisms to track VAWG impact, conducting advocacy on improved quality, budgets and accessibility of VAWG and legal aid services, consider working more directly on changing norms associated with masculinity, unpaid care work and violence. This could intensify the work on redistribution of unpaid care work, as well as address instances of backlash and resistance more consistently.