Resources

This report came out of the learning and inspiration event held in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania from 26th - 28th May 2014, which was part of the Making All Voices Count programme.  It is for participants and others with an interest in technology for transparency and accountability

This book is a collection of analytical narratives of what has happened to feminist voice, a key pathway to women’s empowerment. These narratives depart from the existing debate on women’s political engagement in formal institutions to examine feminist activism for building and sustaining constituencies through raising, negotiating and legitimizing women’s voice under different contexts.

Bringing together the reflections and experiences of feminist researchers and activists in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, this unique volume explores how various global trends, such as the development of transnational linkages, the rise of conservative forces, the NGOization of feminist movements, and an increase in the power of donors, have created opportunities and challenges for feminist voice and activism.

Women the world over are being prevented from engaging in politics. Women’s political leadership of any sort is a rarity and a career in politics rarer still. We have, however, begun to understand what it takes to create an enabling environment for women’s political participation.

In this pioneering collection, writers from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East are brought together for the first time to talk explicitly about women’s participation in the political scene across the global South. Answering such questions as how women can get political apprenticeship opportunities, how these opportunities translate into the pursuit of a political career, and how these pursuits then influence the kind of political platform women advocate once in power, Women in Politics is essential reading for anyone interested in what it means to engage politically.

Wealth-ranking is a participatory tool enabling people to group others in their community into wealth bands, and thus identify the very poor.  The method has been developed to include the broader aspects of well-being – such as social standing and health – that people value as much as material wealth.  It tells the story of the development of these assessment methods since the rise of wealth ranking in the 1980s and looks at the results of well-being ranking exercises and how they help identify important differences within communities and monitor changes in well-being over time.  Exploring strengths and weaknesses of methods it suggests that understanding differences within communities is essential for good development aid work.  The book goes on to describe the successful use of ranking tools over large populations and the value of using multi-dimensional models of well-being, and briefly explores the ideas used to make assessments of well-being at national levels.

This book is a collection of writings by evaluation professionals working in South Asia and aims to analyse and document the status of, and challenges for, development evaluation in this region.  It covers three critical dimensions of making evaluation matter in development processes and change in South Asia: context, methods, and use.  Drawing on a depth of experience from across the region it explores how the South Asian context influences the methods that are appropriate for evaluating policies, programs and projects, and the challenges to having evaluation findings used to influence and bring about change. Purchase details from Sage India.

This paper explores how outcome measurement is understood in several SDC local governance programmes, reviewed in a HELVETAS Learning Project. This critical review assesses the extent to which power issues are recognised, understood and tracked within such programmes and suggests ways to enhance this.  This includes being clear about what power and empowerment mean in a particular context, how the way power is implicitly understood in local government programmes can lead to a focus only the more formal and visible dimensions of power, and how the complexity of power means that a more clearly articulated and power-aware theory of change underpinning the intervention is needed.

This guide shows how self-administrable tools can be used to assess community mobilisation of any community-based organisation (CBO). The book can help CBOs assess their own performance, plan their future strategies and monitor themselves.