60 Florence Ebam Etta, Ph.D. National General Secretary Nigerian Association of Evaluators
AMPLIFYING THE AGENCY OF WOMEN AND GIRLS THROUGH GENDER-RESPONSIVE EVALUATION To my knowledge, no contemporary human society is organized and running on a system based on gender equality. Rather, societies today are characterized by widespread gender inequity. For human societies to underutilize the assets, skills, capacities, and abilities of women – half of the human population - on the basis of the natural biological characteristic of sex is not only shortsighted but unreasonable and self-sabotaging. This is because gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls through the realization of their human rights are critical to sustainable development. As the former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan so famously put it, “We will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.” Until everyone, including historically-marginalized women and girls, enjoys at least basic human rights, human development will remain stifled worldwide. “The expansion of freedom,” argues Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, “is both the primary end and the principal means of development.” For this reason, the moral imperative of “no one left behind” that is encapsulated in the UN General Assembly’s 2030 Agenda, the contemporary global development compact, must be hailed, valued, and tenaciously upheld as an unwavering standard of all development action. In particular, the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goal 5: “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” must be vigorously and relentlessly pursued until it is realized. Too often, evaluation is used for “box-ticking accountability” or as a punitive means of management control.