1. Background to AWESOME

In January 2021 we began a 5-year, €10 million advocacy programme called AWESOME to support women’s movements in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda to be strengthened, less fragmented and more representative of diverse groups of women, including women with disabilities (WWDs).

Working as a partnership of six organisations, we share a vision for women's rights, equality and feminist principles, yet we work with diverse approaches and constituencies. Our AWESOME partnership is between:

Ethiopia: Siiqqee Women’s Development Association (SWDA)

Ethiopian Women with Disabilities National Association (EWDNA)

Kenya: Federation of Women Lawyers, Kenya (FIDA Kenya)

Women Challenged to Challenge (WCC)

Uganda: Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE)

United Kingdom: Womankind Worldwide (WK)

The AWESOME partnership purposefully includes a mainstream women’s rights organisation (WRO) and a disability women’s rights organisation (DWRO) in each country. We each bring different areas of expertise relating to policy and advocacy and position within the women’s movement covering access to justice, finance and budgeting, and women’s economic rights.

AWESOME is funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of the Netherlands’ Strengthening Civil Society ‘Power of Women’ instrument.

This final evaluation is a learning and accountability opportunity for us to document shifts we have seen and contributed to during the five years of our programme.

1. Context

While inequality continues to rise globally, having strong feminist movements building coalitions nationally and transnationally is more important than ever. The AWESOME programme operates across three countries in East Africa. In Ethiopia, EWDNA’s work focuses on the regions of Oromia, Amhara, SNNPR, and national level advocacy in Addis Ababa. SWDA’s work is in Oromia region, and national advocacy in Addis Ababa. In Kenya, FIDA is working nationwide with a focus in Nairobi, Machakos and Kisumu. WCC is working nationwide. In Uganda, FOWODE is focused in Amuria and Masindi Districts, as well as national advocacy in Kampala. Womankind plays coordination, grant management, donor liaison role and international advocacy and communication roles.

Since the start of the programme in 2021, it has been navigated four prominent risks related to conflict (Ethiopia), political instability (Kenya and Ethiopia), shrinking of civic space (Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda) and inflation (Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and the UK).

In Ethiopia, there was pre- and post- election conflict during the first year of implementation, which saw disruptions to internet connectivity and government-led shutdowns. In addition, the Ethiopian partners saw their work being impacted by the Tigray conflict which escalated in 2020 and persisted into the third year of the programme, with a rise of Internally Displaced People which shifted government’s attention from longer term advocacy outcomes to immediate humanitarian needs. Ethiopian partners have also been consistently reporting continued shrinking civic space as journalists and members of parliament continue to be arrested for opposing the government’s participation in the ongoing conflict.

In Kenya, elections were held in 2022, and partners recorded several incidents of violence against women in the pre- and post- election period with political uncertainty, sporadic protests and heightened political tensions. In 2023, partners accelerated implementation after the formation of National Dialogue Committee (NACDO), which they viewed as an opportunity to engage with political leaders and influence policy change. The surge in femicides in Kenya has intensified over recent years, with reports highlighting alarming increases since 2023 and continuing into 2024. While Kenya has robust legal frameworks to address gender-based violence, partners report implementation gaps and cultural barriers that hinder progress. In 2024, nationwide protests in Kenya against the Finance Bill and government economic policies were met with severe police violence and repression, resulting in significant impacts.

In Uganda, the Government’s 2023/24 budget revealed a significant lack of funding allocated to address gender-related concerns, particularly Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV). The Uganda Police Crime Report for 2023 showed an increase in cases of domestic violence, emphasising the urgent need for adequate resources to combat SGBV. Additionally, the decrease in government funding for community mobilisation and mindset change programming exacerbated challenges in eliminating deeply entrenched social norms that perpetuate SGBV. The enactment of the Anti-Homosexuality Act in May 2023 compounded difficulties for the LGBTQI+ community, hindering their ability to report instances of SGBV due to heightened fear of discrimination and persecution. Nonetheless, Uganda's ratification of the ILO C190 - Violence and Harassment Convention (2019) represents a positive step in addressing SGBV and harassment in the workplace.

Our baseline data reinforced our understanding that women’s movements can be strengthened by supporting women to come together more actively and ensuring that all women feel safe and included in these spaces. Many women that we spoke to are members of women’s groups, self-help groups, saving clubs, community associations, and WROs. However, we heard from women about fragmentation, challenges to come together regularly, and limited leadership opportunities for women with disabilities.

In addition, our baseline showed that communities are broadly aware of women’s rights and know that they are expected to report support for participation, leadership and ending SGBV. However, follow-up questions, focus group discussions and interviews demonstrated that there are significant gaps in society’s support for women’s rights to participate in leadership and to prevent and eliminate SGBV, and that patriarchal norms are dominant.

Our baseline report also highlighted the importance of working with formal institutions to address gaps in policies and legislation at multiple levels, as reinforced by data collected from constituents and partners across the three countries.

For a more detailed overview of baseline data for this programme, our baseline report is available here, baseline data is here, and our mid-term review is published here.

1. Description of AWESOME

Operating within these contexts, AWESOME aims to contribute to the impact of achieving gender equality and empowering all women. AWESOME’s strategic objective is to strengthen women’s movements to be less fragmented and more representative of diverse groups of women, including women with disabilities. Our theory is that these stronger movements will contribute to strong women leaders at all levels and the prevention of SGBV against women and girls. These are our two core themes (women’s participation and leadership and preventing SGBV).

Our theory of change (ToC) aims to address these themes by building, organising and mobilising to transform power dynamics at three areas of change: Self, Society and Formal Institutions.

Self: To provide safe spaces for WROs including those led by WWDs, activists and young women to come together to increase collaboration and solidarity

This includes safe and inclusive spaces for different groups of women to come together, address existing power imbalances within the women’s movement and to develop and agree common agendas for advocacy and influencing that is informed by issues affecting different diverse women and their constituencies. In addition to national and local level spaces in different countries, multi-country online and offline spaces will be created that will bring together project partners from the three countries to meet, exchange ideas, learn together and from each other and build solidarity.

Society: To ensure greater willingness and support to challenge harmful gender norms and attitudes

Working with societal actors and key influencers at community level including religious and traditional leaders, elders, law enforcement officials, the formal and informal justice sectors, and the media in each country, we aim to change the conversation around how women and girls are perceived. We will challenge stigma and discrimination against women, in particular WWDs, seeking access to justice and access to leadership positions. We will engage men and boys to promote positive masculinities and transformative change at community level, creating a critical mass of change agents to shift the narrative around women’s rights and disabled women’s rights.

Formal institutions: To improve the policy and legal framework for the realisation of women’s rights

Our focus is on state actors to seek change at numerous levels including agenda setting, framing of the issues, procedural change as well as law and policy change, recognising the different contexts in which we are working. We will advocate for gender transformative and inclusive amendments that specifically address and accommodate the needs of women with disabilities. As part of the process of advocating for law reforms at the country level, we will use international instruments as a standard especially where the three countries have ratified/endorsed them by lobbying for effective changes to laws and policies to align with key international conventions and agreements.

Below is our ToC diagram which outlines how our desired changes are expected to happen.

Objective of evaluation

This is a summative evaluation with the objective of reflecting, learning and documenting AWESOME’s experiences, successes and challenges over a five-year period. By assessing the effectiveness of AWESOME in contributing to our intended outputs and outcomes, we hope the evaluation will contribute to accountability: both to partners’ constituents and to our donor.

The intended users of the evaluation are the six AWESOME partners, who will be able to learn from the evidence that the evaluation documents of successes, challenges and the conditions that contributed to effectiveness. Partners will be able to use this knowledge to inform future programming and hold themselves accountable to their constituents. Our donor, the MFA, will be able to use the evaluation as accountability for the programme’s funding and to inform future funding programmes and policies.

Scope of evaluation

The evaluation should involve a review/reconstruction of our ToC, a mapping of the funding (an overview of what the AWESOME budget was spent on and key activities), and address the suggested evaluation questions outline below (in Section 6).

The evaluation should cover the entire AWESOME programme, ToC and €10 million budget. The experiences of all six partners should be given equal focus, covering activities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and international advocacy. The geographic focus areas of each partner are outlined above in Section 2. A sampling of the activities and geographic scope of each partner will be required to make the evaluation feasible. The consultant should propose a sampling strategy and size for this as part of the inception plan.

The evaluation (and final evaluation report) should report on both partnership-wide insights that cut across multiple countries, and also country- and partner-specific indicator results, learnings and recommendations.

The evaluation should review AWESOME since the programme began in January 2021 until the final year of the programme, which ends in December 2025. Although the programme ends in December 2025, we envision that the evaluation will review the programme until November 2025.

Evaluation questions

Below are our suggested evaluation questions. Consultants are welcomed to propose additional ideas and amendments to these in their proposals.

The evaluation should have two focus areas: a) programmatic progress and challenges, and b) partnership collaboration.

The OECD DAC Evaluation Criteria (relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, sustainability and coherence) should inform the evaluation. However, we recognise that exploring all criteria within one evaluation may not be feasible, so we are happy to focus on a selection of criteria in discussion with the chosen consultants. For the MFA, the minimum criteria that we must address are effectiveness and coherence. Additionally, we would like a focus on sustainability.

The AWESOME programme has been designed with gender and disability as two core cross-cutting themes, and we expect this to come across strongly throughout the evaluation process. ; iIn addition, the evaluation must also address cross-cutting issues of gender, youth, climate and localisation/southern leadership (which are required by the MFA).

Main question

To what extent did AWESOME contribute to strengthened women’s movements, which are less fragmented and more representative of diverse women, including women with disabilities? How did this contribute to strong women leaders and the prevention of SGBV against women and girls?

Programmatic progress and challenges

• How effective was AWESOME in contributing to its key outcomes of:
• Self outcome: Women’s rights organisations, activists, young women and women with disabilities come together through movement building, and collective action through increased solidarity and closer cooperation.
• Society outcome: Greater willingness among society to challenge gender norms and attitudes.
• Institution outcome: Improved policy and legal framework for the realisation of all women’s rights, related to SGBV and the rights to meaningful participation in decisions that affect them.
• To what extent has AWESOME been effective in achieving the planned outputs? What unexpected outcomes have been observed (positive and negative)?
• What lessons and best practices have been learnt on the cross-cutting themes (gender, youth, and climate)?
• Which of the changes seen are likely to be sustainable? What will influence the future sustainability of outcomes achieved in each of the contexts? (in terms of continuing positive impacts)

Partnership collaboration

• How coherent was the partnership between AWESOME partners, the MFA in the Netherlands, and the Dutch embassies in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda?
• To what extent has AWESOME modelled southern leadership, localisation and shared power in its approaches to partnership and the programme?
• To what extent have partners within AWESOME enhanced their organisational and lobby and advocacy capacities?

Approach and methodologies

We are keen to hear from evaluators about their proposed methods rather than pre-determining specific approaches. Below we outline some of our priorities.

The final evaluation is a requirement of the MFA. The MFA has provided IOB evaluation criteria (the IOB is the MFA’s independent evaluation body), and the evaluation must meet these 17 IOB criteria to be accepted by the MFA.

Based on the IOB criteria, we anticipate that the evaluation will use a mixed methods approach and ensure triangulation between multiple methodologies, evidence sources and perspectives. We are seeking a consultancy that can balance the IOB criteria with feminist approaches. This will involve triangulating feminist approaches with a methodology from the IOB criteria to validate causal chains between activities and outcomes (four methods are suggested by the MFA: Contribution Analysis, Realistic Evaluation, Process Tracing, and General Elimination Theory). If the evaluation also uses other approaches such as Outcome Harvesting, these must be triangulated with other methods to ensure rigour.

The MFA guidance documents are:

1. IOB Evaluation Quality Criteria (https://english.iob-evaluatie.nl/publications/guidelines/2022/04/22/evaluation-quality-criteria)
2. 2024-07 Extra information on SCS ETEs
3. The IOB criteria on methodology is informed by their 2022-23 review: ‘Report - The effectiveness of support to lobby and advocacy synthesis of evidence from Dutch MFA programmes’: https://english.iob-evaluatie.nl/publications/reports/2023/04/15/effectiveness-support-to-lobby-and-advocacy

We expect the evaluation to integrate a feminist evaluation lens and to use participatory approaches that centre the voices, knowledge and lived experience of diverse women. Inspiration and principles could be drawn from approaches such as Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR)[1]. We expect participatory approaches to be proposed which are meaningful for the diverse groups of women involved, and which help us all to learn collectively. This includes women with disabilities, younger women, women working in factories, community groups, women in politics and aspirant leaders. We hope to honour local knowledge generation and diverse views of women involved, recognising that there are multiple ways of knowing. We are seeking approaches that centre care, creativity and adaptation to make this evaluation a useful process for participants.

We are interested to learn about how our approaches are challenging power dynamics, structural inequities and patriarchal systems. We see opportunities to document learning on intersectionality, disability inclusion, how women’s movements are contributing to change, and exploring the application of lessons around positive masculinities.

Each partner leads the ongoing monitoring and evaluation of their activities, with their own customised indicators that contribute to a ‘basket’ of shared indicators that we report to the donor. We expect the evaluation team to verify each partners’ gathered outcome and output data, supplementing this with insights gained through participatory processes to assess contribution to change. The evaluation must include an annex of key output and outcome indicators that have been verified. This must evaluate the MFA basket indicators as a minimum but will likely include other indicators to fully describe the AWESOME programme.

As this programme works across diverse contexts in three countries, we envisage an evaluation team of at least three members who respectively bring deep knowledge of the women’s movements and wider contexts in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. We hope for a team who have worked together previously, with strong collaboration skills. We expect a cohesive final report but also recognise that different approaches may be appropriate for gathering partner- and country-specific information in each context and we welcome this diversity. We expect the team to have significant disability expertise.

Deliverables

• An inception plan agreed with the Reference Group. This should be based on a desk review of key documents and initial discussions with AWESOME team. The plan should include a detailed explanation of proposed methodology, an evaluation matrix, sampling strategy and size, research ethics, an itemised budget, and a timeline for the evaluation.
• Research tools agreed with all AWESOME partners, in advance of evidence-gathering. We expect this to include explanation of the participatory approaches, process for gathering and recording participants’ informed consent, and safeguarding procedures.
• Face-to-face data analysis and validation workshops of key findings in each country (3 workshops in total), to invite feedback from all partners (before drafting the final report).
• An in-person workshop to share final report(s) with all partners. (Note the venue and accommodation costs of the final workshop will be met by Womankind Worldwide, so do not need to be part of the consultancy budget proposal.)
• Final report(s): We envisage a full final report of maximum 50 pages, an executive summary version of up to 5 pages, and relevant data annexes. The final report should include an annex of quantitative and qualitative results against the Results Framework indicators, and an annex which outlines how the evaluation meets the MFA’s IOB evaluation criteria. The format should reflect the MFA’s recommended structure. We invite alternative methods of sharing the findings, and welcome creative, accessible formats for a final report(s). Please note, the final report will be published online for transparency. We can agree an external version of the report if there is sensitive information. All reports must be shared in digital form (in both Word and PDF versions) and be accessible for WWDs.

Existing resources

The successful consultant(s) will be provided with: AWESOME proposal (including theory of change, results framework, context analysis, workplans for each partner), baseline report, annual reports including Result Framework updates, access to quantitative and qualitative MEL evidence and reflection tools, external Mid-Term Review from 2023. Each partner will nominate a colleague(s) to work with the evaluation team to explain their organisation’s work in AWESOME.

Roles and responsibilities

Womankind will agree one contract for this work with the lead consultant of the team, who will be the primary contact point for the evaluation team.

Womankind will be the primary contact point for the evaluation team and have regular meetings to discuss progress as the evaluation progresses.

The consultancy team will work directly with each AWESOME partner to learn more about their activities and agree the best approaches to speak with their constituents as part of the evaluation.

Womankind coordinates an evaluation Reference Group of internal members (colleagues from AWESOME partners), the donor, and two external members (who bring disability rights and East African women’s rights expertise). The Reference Group acts as an advisory body, to guide the overall evaluation and guarantee the quality and independence of the evaluation process. The Reference Group will arrange meetings with the consultant to discuss and approve four key stages in the evaluation process (approving as the ToR, selection of consultants, inception report and final report).

Timeline and resources

We expect the evaluation to begin in February 2025 and be completed by November 2025 (a detailed timeline will be agreed with the chosen consultants).

The consultants will ideally be resident in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda (respectively), and able to work with partners based in Addis Ababa, Nairobi, and Kampala. In consultation with partners, the evaluation team will arrange travel to different regions domestically in each country, to gather evidence from participants and staff who have been directly involved with AWESOME.

The maximum budget is Euro 90,000.00 inclusive of all fees, taxes, travel, translations/interpreters, meeting costs, and other costs needed to deliver the evaluation. Please ensure that your budget includes costs for this to be an inclusive, accessible and feminist process (e.g. translation costs, costs for accessible venues, and support to women with disabilities).

Selection criteria

1. Team profile: We are looking for a team of at least 3 consultants, who together bring deep understanding of the context and women’s movements in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. We encourage evaluators with deep experience of WWD and disability movements. We will give preference to a team who have worked together on previous evaluations and have strong working relations with each other.
2. Evaluation experience: The successful team will have experience of conducting multi-country evaluations, including planning approaches, carrying out interviews, analysing evidence to draw out conclusions, working with stakeholders to validate the conclusions, and synthesizing the findings into useful final reports.
3. Qualitative, participatory approaches: The successful team will have experience using feminist, participatory approaches that centre women’s voices and experiences. They will be familiar with approaches that create safe spaces for diverse groups of women to share their views, and to shape the focus of learning and recommendations.
4. Thematic and contextual understanding: The successful team will have deep understanding of the current context of women’s movements, disability movements, SGBV and women’s participation and leadership in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and in regional policy spaces. Context is critical to understanding AWESOME’s approaches and impact, so we are seeking a team that deeply understands their contexts and can help us to situate our learning in the context.
5. Communication and facilitation skills: Strong oral and written language skills within the consultancy team (which may require factoring interpreter/translation costs into budgets) including Amharic, Oromifa, Swahili and English. The consultant will produce final reports in accessible English. The final reports should have limited jargon and aim to influence, inspire and educate a wide range of stakeholders, including women’s rights organisations, government officials, and donors.
6. Independence of evaluators: The evaluation team must be fully independent and cannot have been involved in the design or implementation of AWESOME, with any of the AWESOME partners or the MFA. The evaluators must have no vested interest in the outcome of the evaluation.

How to apply

Interested applicants should submit the following

• A proposal outlining an indicative evaluation design and methodology to the evaluation, an indicative evaluation matrix, a budget of estimated costs and a timeline against the key deliverables and methodology. Maximum 8 pages.
• A brief CV of each team member demonstrating knowledge, skills and experience against the selection criteria. Maximum 2 pages per CV.
• An example of previous evaluation work (this will be treated in confidence).

The deadline for applications is 19 January 2025. We hope to interview shortlisted consultants between 27 – 30 January 2025, and to notify the selected consultants beginning of February 2025.

[1] See https://apwld.org/feminist-participatory-action-research-fpar/