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UN Women greatly appreciates the guidance provided by the external evaluation of UN Women’s “Knowledge Gateway on Women’s Economic Empowerment” project ̶ or “Empower Women” (EW) project as it became known as in 2015 ̶ and agrees with the majority of its findings and recommendations. The evaluation provided useful insights on strengths and good practices, and highlighted gaps and areas to further enhance Empower Women. The evaluation applied six criteria: (1) Relevance; (2) Efficiency; (3) Effectiveness; (4) Human rights and gender equality; (5) Potential impact; and (6) Potential sustainability.
Overall, Empower Women was shown to be highly relevant for UN Women, external stakeholders, partners and users to implement their strategic priorities on women's economic empowerment (WEE). In doing so, Empower Women successfully framed WEE from both a human rights – gender equality is the right thing to do – and a "smart economics" perspective.
UN Women effectively positioned Empower Women as a knowledge hub and platform for WEE with positive outcomes and results for its users through its offerings of information, knowledge, capacity building, networks and other engagement opportunities. While the evaluation recognized that project results were likely to be sustainable, it also provided suggestions to strengthen the sustainability of EmpowerWomen.org.
Lessons learned included: (1) Design thinking and a human-centered approach facilitate bottom up innovation and ensure the project’s relevance; (2) The willingness to take risks and test new approaches facilitates innovation; (3) Adopting a combination of complementary online and offline engagement channels through a partnership approach creates effective results; (4) Open and democratic online spaces like EW facilitate participation and ensure that every voice is heard; (5) Partnerships with the private sector can be an effective way to leverage technology and innovation; and (6) Weak monitoring of progress and results limits the capacity to take evidence-based decisions and to demonstrate and communicate results.
The evaluation recommends the following: (1) Leverage EW for the recently created Flagship Programme Initiatives in the area of WEE; (2) Create a resource mobilization action plan for phase two that includes financing key project activities through UN Women core funds, while funding from public or private donors should be mobilized to maintain EW’s flexibility and innovative approach; (3) Develop a comprehensive partnership strategy for WEE to identify those organizations that have the potential to contribute to UN Women’s Economic Empowerment Section (EES) and to EW in particular with the highest added value and prioritize quality of collaborations over quantity; (4) Leverage the global Champions for Change initiative to continue reaching wider audiences, including vulnerable populations; (5) Improve internal communication and better leverage UN Women structures to implement the project more efficiently and improve results; (6) Improve the online platform to enhance clarity on EW’s objectives and target audiences, increase user friendliness and better meet users’ needs; (7) Integrate a Monitoring & Evaluation framework with a results-based management approach into activities to be able to regularly collect and analyze standardized data for informed decision making; (8) Assign a specific section on the platform exclusively to the private sector in order to engage the business community in a more proactive way and maintain the relevance of the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs).
In response to the evaluation, UN Women has made appropriate adjustments to leverage the Empower Women platform for its work on WEE at global, regional and country levels. A breakdown of Empower Women's planned actions in response to the evaluation recommendations is provided below.
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