The role of gender in the evaluation of literacy programmes in development: a case study of UNESCO

Abstract

UNESCO has been a forerunner in the field of mainstreaming of gender which is evident in countless conferences and publications, notably in its Checklist for the Integration of Gender Issues in the Evaluation of UNESCO’s Programmes (UNESCO 1999b ). The branch with special responsibility for questions of Adult Literacy has been the UNESCO Institute of Education (UIE). Careful historical-comparative analysis of its publications reveals a varied picture on the question of gender. On the one hand it has published evaluation manuals (Bhola 1990, Easton 1996) in which gender goes virtually unnoticed. And on the other there are collected essays of workshops organised and published by the UIE which present some of the strongest voices on the subject, notably Sara Longwe (1997, 1999a), the exponent of the evaluation tool, Women’s Empowerment Framework. While personnel changes in the UIE in the course of the nineties may be a partial explanation, there are other ambiguities in its policies and practice which are not as easily explained. When the evaluation reports of literacy programmes published as exemplary practice by the UIE are examined they reveal some striking differences.

Two evaluations of literacy programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa were analysed, one in Oyo State, Nigeria (Omolewa et al. 1998) and the other being the National Literacy Programme of Namibia (Lind 1996). The methods of analysis were both the UNESCO Checklist and the Women’s Empowerment Framework. They both have received wide acceptance within this particular field. Furthermore, their use provides a means of internal comparison. What the study reveals is a striking discrepancy between such policy and the actual practice of evaluation, and at the same time it becomes clear that the Women’s Empowerment Framework is the more rigorous of the two. Particularly in the analysis of the Oyo programme evaluation it becomes evident that such a gender approach is able to uncover significant failures, particular with regard to its patriarchal notion of “empowerment”. Although it too falls short of the standards, the evaluation of the Namibian programme comes a lot closer to the requirements.

An explanation for the discrepancy between the two may be located in the fact that whereas the Oyo evaluation was conducted by a team of local consultants, all of whom were male, the Namibian evaluation was a joint local-international initiative with an equal male-female balance. Further study of UIE’s other published evaluation reports would however be necessary in order to confirm such a conclusion.

What the study does succeed in establishing is the way in which the role of UNESCO through the UIE’s has been that of a facilitator. By bringing different emphases into dialogue with one another it has served to open up new directions in the field of gender and literacy programme evaluation.