Navigating Networks: Exploring our Movement Mapping Assessment Process

Abstract Information: With a new 2020 vision to support gender justice movements, Global Fund for Women’s Learning, Evaluation, and Analytics team began revising assessments, building tools, and creating processes that better served both our and our partners needs to describing, monitoring, and evaluating the progress and influence of social movements we support. Since 2018, Global Fund for Women has been using a Movement Capacity Assessment Tool (MCAT), led by movement organizations, to support movement organizing, strategizing, and collective actions. In 2020, we began developing a movement mapping tool and validation process, to help understand movement membership, relationships, roles, and resources as well as the overall structure and sub-networks as indicators and insights on strengths and challenges. Global Fund for Women, in collaboration with sister funds, conducted five mapping pilots across seven countries, engaging over 900 respondents, from 2021-2022. These pilots focused on mapping the movement for abortion decriminalization in Mexico, economic justice movements in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and feminist and women's movements in Ukraine, Georgia, and Mongolia. The learnings and experiences gained from the pilots were channeled into refining the MMAP tool and validation process. In May 2023, partner organizations and Global Fund for Women Learning convened to define the fundamental components of the final version of the MMAP’s survey questionnaire, user guide, and support resources. This collaboration aimed to provide the MMAP with a transparent and action-driven data collection and analysis approach, including guidelines for result validation through interviews and reflection meetings with movement actors. In the last two years, five MMAPs have been conducted, directly informing Global Fund for Women’s support strategy to movements. In this demonstration, we walk through the Movement Mapping Assessment Process. We demonstrate how and where adaptations are made, how privacy and security are embedded in data collection, management, access, and storage, and how discussions and result validation are facilitated with key stakeholders. We then present the case of mapping the abortion rights movement in Mexico, following the important decriminalization victory of the movement in 2022. We show how, beyond the mapping assessment itself, the process of co-interpretation and analysis through qualitative investigations enhanced the applicability and utility of the mapping results and informed subsequent actions. Finally, we conclude with thoughts about how mapping can be used as an evaluation practice, with considerations of how and who interprets the results. We summarize practices that helped to mitigate the often extractive practices that keep evaluation results from being used or useful, and the process by which context-responsive activities were brainstormed and subsequently led by actors engaged in the mapping process.