COVID-19 and persisting inequalities are jeopardizing decades of progress in gender equality. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to measure progress accurately and effectively against our goal to ensure girls and boys have equal opportunities and access to services to be healthy, educated and safe.
As part of a partnership-wide commitment to gender equality, equity and inclusion, the Global Partnership for Education’s (GPE) new strategy, GPE 2025, moved from a standalone strategy on gender equality to a strategy where gender equality is hardwired through all levels of the operating model.
The new strategic plan helps partner countries move from a heavy focus on parity to an increased focus on equality.
GPE’s monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) framework has evolved to support the new strategy, introducing a wide gender and equity lens on all relevant aspects of MEL.
A robust approach is required to reflect gender equality as a complex cross-cutting matter and to strengthen the partnership’s capacity to learn and adapt.
The partnership’s MEL framework includes three interrelated mechanisms: periodic grant monitoring and reporting, a portfolio of external and internal evaluations, and GPE’s corporate tools for tracking and reporting results. In the new framework, a gender lens is applied to each of these.
GPE’s grant monitoring tools elevate the collection of information on grant progress and efficacy in gender equality, along with other varied GPE priority areas under GPE 2025. Efforts are made to contextualize results and pinpoint how grants address specific gender-related issues.
Grants’ results framework data are disaggregated by sex, at a minimum, as is the number of beneficiaries for each grant.
Our work to identify grant activities allows us to more easily report on interventions intended to advance gender equality, including targeting gendered barriers to education for girls and boys, social dimensions of gender equality (e.g., early marriage, pregnancy and gender-responsive health and hygiene), gender-responsive systems, gender-related incentives and school-related gender-based violence.
Finally, specific monitoring mechanisms have also been designed for the Girls’ Education Accelerator. Here, the partnership will benefit from specific girls’ education data, including targeted questions and standard girl-focused indicators across the portfolio.
All combined, this quantitative and qualitative information provides a well-rounded perspective on grant-level achievement in gender equality.
GPE’s new evaluation policy requires that all evaluations examine whether and how the partnership’s interventions, programs and policies support or otherwise affect gender equality, equity and inclusion. The composition of evaluation teams also must be gender sensitive.
A thematic evaluation entirely focused on gender equality will be commissioned as part of GPE 2025. Its objective will be to examine the relevance, coherence, efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability of GPE contributions (financing and other) to gender equality.
The evaluation will also cover sector achievements in gender equality, transformations and innovations in this area. Using a cross-country approach, the evaluation will identify the factors that facilitated or hindered the design and implementation of the interventions, programs and policies targeting gender equality.
The 2025 partnership-wide results framework tracks gender-related indicators and continues to require that all people-level indicators be disaggregated by sex and other subgroups.
The results framework also tracks the effects of the levers from the new GPE model on sector-level progress on gender equality outcomes. The list of outcomes has been expanded to go beyond parity in access and now includes the proportion of young women married or in a union by age 18, an important reflection of social norms adverse to girls’ education and their overall well-being.
Finally, building on the results framework data and other GPE monitoring and evaluation sources, our annual results report provides analyses of GPE achievements and opportunities for improvement in the partnership’s priority areas, including gender and equity.
The report particularly focuses on differential results by gender and other underserved or disadvantaged subgroups.
With these comprehensive monitoring and evaluation tools and approaches, we hope not only to support evidence-based learning regarding gender, equality and inclusion across the partnership but also to contribute to their advancement.
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