Date: Thursday, January 1, 2026
Greetings! We are a team of Global South feminist evaluators, Sonal Zaveri and Sibongile Sithole, based in South Asia and South Africa. Over the past year, we have been working with our colleagues who work in Asia, Africa and Latin America to ask a simple question: “What changes when we stop centering Global North frameworks and instead look at gender evaluation through Global South feminist lenses?” Short answer: A lot!
Across regions, we noticed that many “gender-responsive” evaluations still treat women and marginalized groups as beneficiaries or data points, rather than as knowledge holders or agents shaping their own realities. We are reminded that gender work in the Global South cannot be detached from the legacies of colonialism, patriarchy, and racialized power forces. This narrow framing often leaves small room for change, raises deeper questions about power systems and leaves colonial legacies unchallenged.
As part of our inquiry, we conducted a “future of evaluation” exercise using the Three Horizons Framework and case studies from Latin America, South Asia, and global feminist initiatives. We examined the cases of how power, inclusion, intersectionality, methodology, and ethics don’t work in isolation, but rather how they strengthen each other in evaluation practice. We began to reframe how we think about gender, power and evidence. Instead of asking “Who benefits?” we further asked, “Who holds decision-making power?”, “Whose knowledge counts?” These questions invite evaluators and practitioners particularly in the Global South to move beyond just inclusion but rather meaningful redistribution of power on how evidence is produced and utilised.
In Latin America, colleagues developed a “Power Blindness Wheel” to ask: “Where does power hide in our evaluations?” It lies hidden in the small choices such as who gets interviewed, who does not, which languages and terms we use (“beneficiaries”), whose knowledge is treated as “data,” and therefore included and how we define success.
For us, the big lesson is that power is all encompassing. It shapes our questions, methods, and judgments. When we fail to notice power, our evaluations will either ignore it or worse, risk reinforcing the very inequalities we say we want to transform.
Through CREA’s Feminist Accountability Project, sex workers, queer and trans collectives, women with disabilities, and other structurally excluded groups did not just answer MEL questions but helped redesign the MEL system itself.
They used participatory workshops, peer interviews, and creative methods to name what change looks and feels like defined in their own terms. This led to a feminist MEL toolkit that communities owned, while still ensuring rigour in the implementation of MEL.
We learned that tweaking indicators won’t be enough. We need to ask: “Who decides what counts as change and how can they sit at the design table with you?”
In the Feminist Collaborative Evaluation of UN Women’s Approach to Social Norms Change, evaluators combined power mapping, storytelling, social norms analysis, and participatory tools, using a bricolage of methods and tools to understand how norms are created, enforced, and resisted.
What matters is that while selecting an approach or method, ask whether it: 1) Honors local knowledge in design and analysis 2) Embeds ethics and social justice beyond a consent form 3) Treats those most affected as decision makers and 4) Engages“target” groups as partners in change, not just data sources.
For us the core message is this: Global South worldviews are not a footnote to mainstream evaluation but essential for transforming entrenched inequalities. Furthermore, meaningful transformation requires moving away from one-size-fits-all, Global North universalism, and toward approaches that are contextually grounded and justice-oriented.
For more on this, await the JMDE special edition on Evaluation and the Transformational Imperative, to be published in early 2026.
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