6 takeaways: Is evaluation our compass to a future free from gender-based violence?

The Fourth Future of Evaluation Dialogue, held on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, explored the critical question: "Is evaluation our compass to a future free from gender-based violence?", The dialogue emphasized that evaluation is a crucial tool for both challenging gender stereotypes and holding systems accountable for ending gender-based violence (GBV).

The discussion established that while evaluation has often functioned as a 'rear-view mirror,' focusing on retrospective reports, its future role must be real-time and forward-looking. Panelists agreed that evaluation must inform and support strategic action, enabling real-time course correction and policy reform to end GBV. The discussion stressed the power of gender-responsive, intersectional, and ethical evaluation methodologies to not only expose harms and blind spots in evaluation but also to preempt and shift power toward survivors of GBV. The conversation highlighted the imperative to adapt evaluation to emerging challenges, such as technology-facilitated GBV, and to ensure that evaluation findings translate directly into budgets, legislation, and no-harm and rights-affirming policies within institutional set-ups as much as in the national and other contexts.

Six quick takeaways from the dialogue

1. Evaluation must shift from a retrospective 'rear-view mirror' to a proactive, forward-looking strategic compass. It must move beyond focusing solely on past achievements to serve as a continuous learning and steering process that actively searches for systemic solutions and charts new paths. By prioritizing formative and participatory approaches, evaluation can improve the design and implementation of interventions in real-time, allowing for necessary course correction. This proactive stance ensures that evaluation effectively addresses accelerating risks, such as climate stress, migration, new technologies, and economic shocks, that can exacerbate GBV.

2. Gender-responsive evidence is vital to drive policy reform: Decision-makers, including parliamentarians, rely on its evidence to influence national and institutional policy reforms and create effective legislation and frameworks addressing or mitigating GBV. The evaluation results help ensure accountability, holding governments and service providers responsible, to justify the sustained allocation of budgets for survivor services.

3. Accountability requires an 'evaluation use architecture': The responsibility of the evaluator does not conclude with the report's submission. The commitment must be to make evaluation use inevitable by ensuring findings and recommendations travel to decision making tables, translating into actionable strategies, budgets and rights-affirming policies in all contexts. This process requires building a dedicated 'evaluation use architecture'.

4. Adopt ethical, intersectional approaches, and mixed methodologies: Thorough stakeholder mapping and evaluability assessments are key to identify and include the voices of those most marginalized or discriminated against. Methodological approaches must use mixed-methods, with a focus on ethical, and sensitive approaches to remove access barriers, i.e. feminist evaluation. Practical measures must be implemented to address confidentiality and ethical implications, especially when interviewing survivors.

5. New metrics are needed on evaluating technology-facilitated GBV: The rise of online harms (cyber-stalking, doxxing, deepfakes) demands evaluation tools that can speedily measure prevalence using a 12-month recall period. Effectiveness must be measured by outcomes that matter to survivors, such as tracking platform take-down time and repeat victimization.

6. Leverage existing guidance and engagement opportunities: In the wake of limited resources, utilizing established guidance and tools should be prioritized over reinventing the wheel. Entities such as the UN Evaluation Group (UNEG), with UN Women, UNFPA, and UN Human Rights provide resources for integrating gender and human rights into evaluation. Engaging with networks like EvalGender+ and sharing and learning in the thematic Communities of Practice (EvalforEarth) helps ensure evaluation is context-specific.

The Eval4Action Future of Evaluation dialogues are a series of forward-looking discussions that explore innovative and adaptive approaches to evaluation. Designed to make evaluation more influential in a rapidly changing and complex world, these dialogues bring together a diverse range of voices—from experts to young evaluators—to share knowledge and highlight ways to future-proof the field of evaluation. Each monthly dialogue is aligned with an international action day, ensuring the conversations are timely and relevant to a global discourse. 

The next dialogue, “Is evaluation key to realizing universal human rights?” will take place on 10 December 2025. Learn more

This article was written with AI support with human authors in the lead.