National Evaluation Consultant -Feminist Collaborative Evaluation on UN Women’s approach to social norms

UN Women’s work on achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is guided by its Strategic Plan, which articulates how UN Women will leverage its triple mandate, encompassing normative support, UN System coordination and operational activities. In its integrated approach to address the root causes of inequality and affect broader systems change, supporting positive social norms is a critical area.  UN Women’s new Strategic Plan 2022-2025, both, identifies discriminatory social norms as a structural barrier to gender equality and women’s empowerment, and positions positive social norms as a high-leverage mechanism to advance UN Women’s visiosupporting Supporting positive social norms has been identified as one of the seven systemic outcomes in the UN Women global Strategic Plan (2022-2025).

While the inclusion of social norms as a specific outcome has been a recent development, UN Women programming has addressed social norms change directly or indirectly in its broader advocacy on

gender equality and specifically in its work within thematic areas that require behavioural and attitudinal change, such as ending violence against women and girls and promoting women in leadership. UN Women adopts an integrated approach to transform the unequal power relations and discriminatory social norms, behaviours and practices and promote those that advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. This includes engaging men and boys as allies to promote respectful, equitable and non-violent relationships, contribute to transforming negative stereotypes constraining women’s participation in public and private life, addressing social norms that prevent women and girls’ access to humanitarian assistance, and increase the acceptance of women as leaders and agents of change. Social norms work is also relevant in cross cutting areas such as education, health, sports and peace, humanitarian action and disaster risk reduction.

UN Women regularly evaluates its own work to enhance accountability, inform decision making and contribute to learning on gender equality. The Independent Evaluation Service (IES) provides evidence for a more relevant, effective and efficient UN Women with greater impact on the lives of women and girls it serves. UN Women carries out strategic corporate, country portfolio and regional evaluations, as well as decentralized evaluations. IES leads strategic evaluations with the support of external evaluators. They assess effectiveness, organizational performance, and normative and operational coherence.

Although programmatic efforts on changing social norms have been prevalent in UN Women’s efforts at the global, regional and country level; an explicit recognition of this area of work marks a shift in the organizations philosophy of embedding and advancing social norms work across the four thematic impact areas. Thus, UN Women HQ has taken initiative to begin work defining the social norms outcome area of work to streamline and better inform future programming directions. In this regard, the Independent Evaluation Service is undertaking a formative evaluation: Feminist Collaborative Evaluation (FCE). The FCE will facilitate an in-depth regional approach to provide comprehensive analysis and evidence based on experiences with social norms change programming at the field level across Eastern and Southern Africa, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia and the Pacific regions.

UN Women Ethiopia Country Office has been selected as one of the case study countries from Eastern and South Africa Region (ESARO) based on the desk review (meta-analysis of evaluations, review of annual reports, and the regional portfolio reviews), and consultations with UN Women personnel at regional and country levels. Country case study is a critical component of the FCE, as they will explore the pathways of change and inform implicit/explicit theories of change that can provide inspiration and lessons learned for social norms programming efforts at UN Women. In UN Women Ethiopia Country Office, social norms work spans across several thematic areas, including political participation and leadership, women’s economic empowerment and ending violence against women. The case study will be participatory and led by Regional Evaluation Specialists Arab States in collaboration with the Women in Leadership and Governance team in Ethiopia country office and M&E Officer and support from the National Evaluation Consultant. The case studies will engage rights holders, experts in social norms from the country, and civil society in surfacing their understandings of social norms efforts through storytelling or other feminist methodologies rooted in the country and local context.

• Develop a stakeholder map of UN Women’s key stakeholders in Ethiopia.
• Undertake feminist inquiry, storytelling and other feminist methodologies for participatory and inclusive data collection including through interviews and focus group discussions.
• Lead analyses (in-depth analysis of social norms related project/sub-theme/efforts implemented in the case study country), including systematic document review and triangulation.
• Facilitate participatory workshops with: (a) UN Women CO personnel and (b) key civil society stakeholders focusing on social norms efforts.
• Drafting a synthesis report based on data collection and analysis with substantive findings, conclusions and recommendations.
• Addressing feedback and comments received from UN Women CO and IES.
• Other tasks as assigned by the supervisor.

• Respect for Diversity
• Integrity
• Professionalism

Core Competencies:

• Awareness and Sensitivity Regarding Gender Issues
• Accountability
• Effective Communication
• Inclusive Collaboration

Please visit this link for more information on UN Women’s Core Values and Competencies.

• Master’s degree in relevant subjects: social sciences, monitoring and evaluation, international relations and/or development, or other relevant areas or bachelor’s degree with two years of additional work experience.

Experience and Skills

• At least five years of proven experience and technical expertise on feminist inquiry, qualitative research, participatory data collection methods such as storytelling, outcome harvesting, or
• most significant change in the field of gender equality and women’s empowerment is required.
• Three years of experience in social norms programmatic efforts is desirable.
• Experience facilitating workshops with diverse stakeholders.
• Excellent drafting and analytical skills to produce and present concise reports.
• Experience working with UN Women or the UN system and a solid understanding of its programming, coordination, and normative roles at the regional and/or country level is an asset.

Languages

• English (with demonstrated abilities of writing high quality reports).
• Amharic

Application:

• All applications must include (as an attachment) a completed UN Women Personal History form (P-11) which can be downloaded from http://www.unwomen.org/about-us/employment.

NOTE

Interested candidates are encouraged to submit an electronic application including sample of their previous evaluation or similar relevant reports (consolidated as ONE attachment), no later than 31 August 2023. Kindly note the system allows only one attachment, please combine below listed submission package into one document and send via  email ethiopia.public@unwomen.org with a subject  ‘Feminist Collaborative Evaluation‘.

Submission package includes:

• Updated Personal History Form including two references (this form can be downloaded from UN Women Employment Section)
• At least two relevant report(s) where the candidate is lead author.
• Education certificates