Decoding Feminist MEL and Learning to Shift Power Relations

Abstract Information: A crucial aspect of building visibility around the need for strategic interventions in shifting community mindsets toward a gender-just society is having strong monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning (MEAL) processes within grassroots institutions and women’s funds. At the same time, there is a limitation in resources and capacities within women’s funds and their grantee partners to build feminist MEL systems that are accessible, flexible, and contextual. Four Women’s Funds engaged in a learning collaboration to co-create a feminist and participatory approach to MEAL. The idea of the collaboration emerged from the need for women’s funds and their grantee partners to develop a participatory and feminist monitoring, evaluation, and learning system that is flexible and inclusive of their emergent needs and changing contexts. While this collaboration aimed at strengthening approaches towards measuring change, it fundamentally aimed at altering power relations between the grantee partner and the women’s fund through the transfer of knowledge. Both the women’s funds and the grantee partners engaged in a process of unlearning traditional and existing MEL frameworks and systems, and changing their institutional thinking and approach towards a participatory and feminist MEAL approach for gender transformative programming. An iterative and emergent methodology was used through the collaboration enhancing maximum participation from all the women’s funds representatives and their grantee partners. This was also done by ensuring communication and learning materials were available in multiple languages, based on the accessibility needs of the participants. Through this collaboration, the power of storytelling to narrate changes and shifts in mindsets and behaviours was harvested by the group to develop a qualitative tool. Through the curation of a series of change stories using this tool, we will be engaging in a collective sensemaking exercise with a feminist perspective to identify structural barriers that prevent women from accessing and claiming their rights, the violence and discrimination they face, and what has worked and not worked in overcoming such barriers. It will also surface a set of best practices from the learnings of integrating such a feminist and participatory framework institutionally at the women’s funds and their grantee partners, that can be replicated and adopted widely. Fenomenal Fund supported collaboration work of women’s Funds form India, Congo, Hong Kong and Georgia (Taso foundation) committed to mobilizing and advocating for the flow of resources towards women’s movement building and gender transformative work. The flow of resources towards women and gender non-binary groups and rights-based work has historically been minimal and lopsided. The bigger aim of the collaboration is amplifying the voices of grassroots actors and practitioners, and claiming philanthropic resources to flow towards feminist movement building that will enable showing new perspectives via new tools.