Human Rights and Gender Equality

Ensuring fully inclusive and participatory evaluations is of outmost priority for IES. In support of these efforts, IES has taken measures to mainstream gender, human rights and inclusivity throughout its work, for instance through developing guidance for evaluators, including new guidance on inclusive, gender-responsive and human rights sensitive evaluations. See below.

NEW GUIDANCE ON INCLUSIVE, GENDER-RESPONSIVE AND HUMAN RIGHTS SENSITIVE EVALUATIONS

Guidance Note for Evaluators on Inclusive Evaluations (new) strengthens the inclusion of marginalized and/or underrepresented groups, in particular persons with disabilities and youth throughout the evaluation process.

Guidance Note for Evaluators on Gender Responsive Evaluations (new) provides practical guidance to mainstream a gender perspective throughout the evaluation process.

Guidance Note for Evaluators on Human Rights Mainstreaming (new) supports the mainstreaming of human rights in the different evaluation phases.

See also the Guidance Note for Managers and Evaluators in the context of a pandemic or other crisis, addressing mitigation of potential risks, including selecting respondents in an inclusive manner and adjusting data collection to ensure under-represented group. It further addresses identified challenges in implementing gender-related evaluation recommendations.

IES INVESTMENTS

The Strategic Evaluation of UNOV/UNODC's work to advance Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (GEEW) was finalized in 2022 (Evaluation Report; 2-page Evaluation Brief), with its results being integrated in the UNOV/UNODC Gender Strategy 2022-2026.

IES commissions independent external evaluation quality assessments of all evaluation reports, including the review and scoring set by the Evaluation Performance Indicator of the UN-SWAP on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Wome n.

The Evaluator Toolkit for Evaluating Interventions on Preventing and Countering Crime and Terrorism guides on gender-responsive evaluation methods and tools and addresses gender equality, power relations, social transformation, equal inclusion and the empowerment of women.

In line with UNEG Evaluation Norms and Standards and the 2030 Agenda, all UNODC independent evaluations are guided by the principles of human rights and leaving no one behind, with one dedicated section on human rights and the whole evaluation process fully incorporating human rights considerations. At least one in each evaluation team should further have expertise in human rights and gender equality. Moreover, evaluation tools and guidance have been adapted to specifically address marginalized, disabled, hard-to-reach and vulnerable populations, especially important in the context of a pandemic or other crises.

The Evaluator Toolkit for Evaluating Interventions on Preventing and Countering Crime and Terrorism further fully mainstreams human rights aspects and guides evaluators in this regard. Moreover, the joint system-wide meta-synthesis of evaluations and oversight results under the Global Counter Terrorism Strategy placed particular emphasis on identifying human rights-related evaluation results and entails a dedicated chapter on human rights and gender equality.

GENDER MAINSTREAMING

The process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women's as well as men's concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres, so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is gender equality.

GENDER EQUALITY

An overarching and long-term development goal. Gender mainstreaming is not a goal in itself but a set of context-specific, strategic approaches as well and technical and institutional processes adopted to achieve gender equality. Achieving this goal requires systematic and purposeful integration of gender at all stages of the project cycle from strategic planning, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of all UNODC programmes and projects.