The 58th Commission on the Status of Women is currently underway in New York, USA. It started on the 10th of March and will go on till 21st of March. This annual meeting of hundreds of women, men, government officials, ministers, national delegations, girl’s groups, boy’s groups, NGOs, and other stake-holders at the United Nations is to discuss this year’s priority theme, Challenges and achievements in the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals for women and girls.

Inevitably there are a whole host of new initiatives and campaigns that are launched/announced at this annual meeting. This year I have started my own ‘campaign’ to gather information about all the campaigns both launched and mentioned during #CSW58 and compile them in one place. This is an incomplete list in all likelihood but my hope is that I will be able to get people to leave comments with those that are missing from this compilation to help me along!

So lets get started shall we!

Campaigns @ CSW58

Tweets about the various campaigns launched or mentioned at CSW58.

  1. European Commission campaign: Science its a girl thing
  2. Campaign to build on equality, based on the stereotypes you are trying to fight. “Science: It’s a girl thing!”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA 
  3. ITU's campaign: Girls in ICT Day 24 April
  4. UN Women campaign: He for She heforshe.org
  5. UN Women campaign: Beijing+20
  6. From the NGO briefing, “#Empoweringwomen is empowering humanity” an upcoming @Unwomen campaign. @WomenNC @womenlive #CSW58
  7. Zim gvt launched campaign against rape and women continue to demand stiffer sentences for rapists@FemnetProg#CSW58@263Chat
  8. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean
  9. Unbreakable Campaign by Progressio  http://www.progressio.org.uk/unbreakable 
  10. Our campaign action has been handed in to @JustineGreening at the #CSW58! Thank you to all for taking action pic.twitter.com/yBteWUU8cy
  11. Plan Global: Because I am a Girl  http://plan-international.org/girls/ 
  12. .@PlanGlobal‘s #BecauseIAmAGirl Campaign looked to support 4million girls directly through programs #csw58 #vawg
  13. BanBossy banbossy.com
  14. SG's UNiTE Campaign
  15. Cities4CEDAW campaign una-sf.org/blog/
  16. 16 Days of Activism campaign
  17. Balakrishnan: The 16 Days campaign from @CWGL_Rutgers has been on going for 20 years. #CSW58 #WSW2015 #WILPF100
  18. Vlogs by Mandem On The Wall's bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/26545056
  19. Say No to Exploitation of Humans for Profit campaign
  20. Global campaign “Say No to Exploitation of Humans for Profit” launches Mar 13 11:30EST, rm C (CB) UN Headquarters #CSW58 @TIATaskForce
  21. Equal Pay Day Campaign: equal-pay-day.com/
  22. Equal Pay Day Campaign- if women in N.A. made same as men= $430,000 in her lifetime! #CSW58 pic.twitter.com/2u2kHIbxUT
  23. A 12 year old twin Sister & Brother just addressed the room to start their campaign to stop and END #FGM #Inspiring #YoungVoices #CSW58
  24. Men Care campaign mencare.org
  25. The impetus for the MenCare campaign: to address the unfair care work divide, & because, men gravitate towards the idea. #MenCarePlus #CSW58
  26. Unite 4 Education campaign
  27. World Pulse's 'Women weave the web' campaign: bit.ly/1fCOxLd
  28. .@WorldPulse currently doing a campaign around digital access, literacy & empowerment; want girls & women to write & speak out. #CSW58
  29. Intel's She will connect campaign
  30. @phumzileunwomen : @UN_Women & Intel are now partnering in the “She Will Connect” to encourage the use of #ICTs for women and girls- #CSW58
  31. Microsoft's Big Dream movement
  32. @Empower_Women Rane Johnson of @Microsoft announces launch of Big Dream Movement to support women & girls interested in #ICT careers #CSW58
  33. Let Girls' Lead Campaign letgirlslead.org/
  34. At the global launch of ¡PODER! which highlights the work of @LetGirlsLead in Guatemala! #CSW58 #letgirlslead pic.twitter.com/UQjKBDALCM
  35. Cyber safe girl cybersafegirl.ca/
  36. With 3 of 4 Atlantic Ministers respon for Status of Women @ cyber safe girl launch, amazing leaders #CSW58 #cybergirl pic.twitter.com/z8efz4D3oD
  37. International Women's Media Foundation  http://www.iwmf.org/get-involved/advocacy/ 
  38. @ #CSW58 side event on #women, ICTs and #pressfreedom. @IWMF will launch global survey on violence against female journalists
  39. ISIS's linking the networks campaign bit.ly/1g2Oiic

Over the last ten years one of the things I have had a love-hate relationship with is the monitoring frameworks. I love it for its instrumental role in international development programming but my hatred for its inability to be standardized enough without becoming too rigid. Of late I had the opportunity to revisit this relationship in the context of institutional monitoring needs and frameworks for accountability in my current role. This revisit has tilted the balance in favor of more love than hate. It is the bad implementation of monitoring and evaluation tools that made me hate them more rather than their ability to be adapted. If correctly applied, monitoring frameworks can actually:

  • Improve institutional accountability to its primary stakeholders and actually work to proactively improve its programming rather than not.
  • Need for ‘skills’ to develop a good monitoring framework rather than rush through the process to meet a donor requirement or an institutional process step.
  • Lastly and perhaps most importantly, monitoring and evaluation is a key element of the international develop­ment programs can be successfully applied to almost all ar­eas of public administration, domestic and international.

I think most of us owe a lot to Practical Concepts Inc. who developed the Logical Framework Approach (LFA) in 1969 for USAID. Since then it has been widely adopted and adapted by all organizations big and small around the world to monitor programmes and in project planning and design. Most, if not all, donors require all organizations to submit as part of their planning process a log frame, which most often comprise of outcomes, outputs, activities, budgets and other inputs providing a strategic performance management framework.

There are enough critics of the LFA approach both in the donor community and in the development practitioner community and each suggestion an alternative. Read Robert Chambers; Rick Davies list of alternatives; participatory learning process approach in David Korten’s foundational publication Community Organization and Rural Development: A Learning process approach; Dennis Rondinelli in the evolution of development management theory and practice in aid: a context for evaluation;  Norman Uphoff’s Learning from Gal Oya where he calls for synthesis and a holistic approach:

An appreciation of chaos theory moves us away from deterministic models without abandoning the presumption that there are causes and effects to be analysed and understood. It encourages us to think of systems as being more open than closed and as evolving rather than fixed. (Uphoff 1996:294)

Despite the criticism and alternative model suggestions LFA has remained the most predominant methodology for monitoring international development programs. Try writing up “local context” in under 5000 words without losing any context and you will know why the other models fail at being used by the donors!

This brings me back to my the reason why I started mulling over this in my previous post politics of results. What are the reasons we monitor and evaluate implementation of programs? What results are we trying to find? Are there some results that we want to find as opposed to others which we don’t? For whom are these results being measured? Is the organization monitoring and evaluating grass-root implementation processes in order to inform decisions at the headquarters-based management level? Are results for other donors and funding agencies? Or is monitoring and evaluation a way for donors to keep track of their investments?

Then perhaps the the question I should be asking is not politics of results but rather trying to unpack the underlying purpose of monitoring and evaluation and the tools used to do so!

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