Two steps forward, one step back – measuring social change in women’s rights through feminist values : An intersectional feminist critical content analysis on two NGO reports

Sammanfattning: The need to measure and track both people and processes involved in change is increasing. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), states, and research need to find tools to ensure that the treaties, programmes, and strategies meant to reduce poverty and increase equality are working. This thesis aims to study how Oxfam and ActionAid measure social change in women’s rights. Regarding women’s rights, gains and losses can occur frequently and can be illustrated by how the development often takes two steps forward and one step back. Therefore, NGOs work to develop tools and methods to measure change within the Monitoring, Evaluating, and Learning (MEL) framework of a programme to ensure sustainable and holistic results. The purpose of this paper is to examine if and how Oxfam and ActionAid incorporate feminist values within their MEL- frameworks. Additionally, this paper examines how a feminist theoretical framework affects the outcomes of a developmental project. To study this topic, gendered critical content analysis is applied to two final reports, one from each NGO. The main conclusion is that the reports apply feminist values such as participation, intersectionality, awareness of the context-specific and power dimensions, as well as acknowledge that change is non- linear, in multiple ways. It can be through the involvement of multiple actors and levels of change as well as engaging the constituency in the change processes. The incorporation of feminist values leads to the use of well-motivated and context-specific methods to measure social change which results in holistic, sustainable, long-term, and anti-colonial outcomes.