Women building peace: Sharing know-how - Assessing impact
This workshop brought to an end the current phase of the Women Building Peace: Sharing Know-How component of International Alert’s Gender and Peacebuilding Programme. The meeting aimed to identify how women peace activists and practitioners measure the impact of their work, both for their own internal goal-setting and planning purposes, and as a means of communicating their achievements and experiences to their stakeholders.
The Women Building Peace: Sharing Know-How workshop on assessing impact was held in London in July 2004. The meeting brought together women from conflict and transition contexts in Africa (including Uganda, Sudan, and Somalia), the Middle East (Israel), South Asia (Nepal), the Caucasus (Georgia and Abkhazia) and South America (Colombia).
Critical questions informing the workshop included:
- How do women implement, monitor and evaluate their activities?
- What tools do they use for monitoring and evaluation?
- What lessons have they learned?
- How do women plan for miracles?
Women’s work in peacebuilding is varied, complex, and multi-layered, and it is essential that they find ways of reflecting this in their communication with donors and policy makers. This is a major reason for their interest in monitoring and evaluation, along with the need to be constantly improving the quality of their work through reflection and learning, and the need to tell their painful stories amongst themselves as a strategy for healing. Women’s organisations engaged in conflict transformation and peacebuilding work want donors and policy makers to know what peacebuilding means to them.
