‘Measuring gender’ in peacebuilding: Evaluating peacebuilding efforts from a gender-relational perspective

This report aims to help peacebuilders to better capture the impact of integrating gender into peacebuilding projects. It is based on a review of existing design, monitoring and evaluation tools and approaches to examining gender in a peacebuilding context, discussions with practitioners and academia, as well as case studies.

How do you measure something that is so central to peacebuilding as gender, but that often proves to be so elusive to efforts to quantify it beyond counting numbers of women and men?

How can we better understand our impacts on conflict-affected societies and improve our peacebuilding practices by comprehensively taking gendered identities, dynamics and norms into account?

The main objective of our project is to help identify innovative, comprehensive and realistic ways of measuring the interplay of peacebuilding projects and gender relations. We do not present one overarching gender indicator or one ‘measuring gender’ method that would be applicable in all cases, as this is an impossibility. Rather, we will examine different tools for measuring different kinds of gendered impacts of peacebuilding efforts on beneficiary individuals and communities.