Background on the Gender, Evaluation and

Background on the Gender, Evaluation and Empowerment Series:
Over the last few decades, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of
women in development. Women’s empowerment can lead to economic growth, better
health outcomes, reduction of poverty, and increased educational attainment. However,
there are very few mainstream tools or indicators to accurately measure female
empowerment outcomes. Measuring women’s empowerment is challenging, as its
definition and conceptualization can vary geographically, culturally, socially, and
politically. Organizations and researchers often face challenges in defining, capturing
and comparing measures of women’s empowerment across regions and sectors.
CLEAR South Asia, hosted at J-PAL South Asia at IFMR in collaboration with Community
of Evaluators (CoE) and UN Women initiated a series of roundtable discussions on
‘Gender, Evaluation and Empowerment.’ These roundtables aim to create a forum for
researchers, M&E professionals, and civil society organizations to showcase their
experiences capturing the concept of ‘women’s empowerment’ in their own
projects. The roundtables include key gender and M&E experts in South Asia,
highlighting the challenges in defining and measuring gender outcomes and providing
insights to new and innovative gender measures, which can be applied within South
Asia and globally. These include global composite indices of empowerment, as well as
more sector-specific measures spanning economic empowerment to violence against
women and shifting gender norms among adolescents. The roundtables draw upon
several disciplines, backgrounds, and research methodologies, creating a forum for
researchers, M&E professionals, and civil society organizations working on issues of
gender and female empowerment. As the first roundtable in Sri Lanka, this roundtable
will focus on adolescent and gender perspectives in evaluation.
Speaker Profiles:
Mallika Samaranayake
President – Community of Evaluators South Asia
Chairperson- Institute for Participatory Interaction in Development
(IPID) Sri Lanka
Ms. Mallika Samaranayake is founder member and first president of the Community of Evaluators
(COE), South Asia. She was also founder member and past president of the Sri Lanka Evaluation
Association (SLEvA) from 2006 to 2009. She is the Founder Director and Chairperson of the
Institute for Participatory Interaction in Development (IPID) Sri Lanka promoting participatory
methodologies in development through training and consultancy services for national,
international, bilateral & UN Agencies with emphasis on results-based monitoring and evaluation.
She has functioned as a Team Leader / member of a large number of research assignments,
evaluations and social assessments with rich consultancy experience over 30 years. She is
currently serving as a Consultant Sociologist, Gender Specialist, Community Development
Specialist, Monitoring & Evaluation Specialist and Workshop Facilitator/Trainer in
Participatory Evaluation. She has presented papers at several Evaluation Association
Conferences sharing experience of evaluations and research.
Sonal Zaveri
Secretary – Community of Evaluators South Asia
Senior Evaluation Specialist
Sonal Zaveri, is a Senior Evaluation Specialist with over 25 years of experience, in India and
internationally in over 20 countries in strategic planning, program design and evaluation. In the
field of evaluation, she has a special interest in developmental, feminist and utilization-focused
evaluation. She is a founder member and Secretary of the Community of Evaluators, a group of
evaluators spanning seven countries of South Asia; an International Advisor to the Child-toChild Trust, University of London; and a Fleishman Fellow, Duke University, USA. Sonal is a
contributing author in two publications, the South Asian Volume on Evaluation, “Making
Evaluation Matter” (2014) and ‘Evaluation in Extremis’ (2015, forthcoming) and has presented
papers and conducted workshops at various international evaluation conferences. She has
provided technical expertise on rights based approaches, evaluation, gender, children and youth
to NGOs, foundations, UN organizations and multilaterals. She has expertise in gender,
empowerment and capacity strengthening. Her sectoral experience includes HIV/AIDS,
community systems, reproductive health, education and rights based programming.