Issues Affecting Women Programme's New Strategy and Strategic Learning and Evaluation System

Abstract

The Issues Affecting Women Programme (IAWP) developed a new strategic plan over the course of 2011 with two pillars: building women's rights movements and combating violence against women. These pillars branch out into four core Programme Areas: movement building; intra-familial violence; trafficking & exploitation; and violence in situations of crisis. Our Programme strives for impact at the individual, community and systemic levels. As illustrated in Figure 1, we do so by applying a comprehensive social change model to our work through three levers of change: promoting a human rights-based framework; creating networks and building/strengthening movements, and striving to transform individuals and systems. In order to affect change, we will leverage a variety of instruments grantmaking, including advocacy, learning, donor "education" and engagement, networking, coalition building, and gender mainstreaming across the Oak Foundation. This includes collaborating with peer donors and funding sectors to inform philanthropic practice in particular gender mainstreaming and to mobilize increasing resources for women and girls. 2012 will be the first year of implementation of the new strategy. A critical aspect of the implementation plan will be a strategic learning and evaluation system which will allow us to track our progress and evolve our strategy based on what the Programme and our learning. This is especially critical as the strategy calls for an experimental approach, hoping to determine tactics and interventions that work. Further, as our Programme works very closely with a community of partners in a cluster-approach, it is vital that key partners understand and support our learning and impact goals and work in partnership with us to answer key learning questions.A cluster approach refers to either a geographic or thematic group of grants and partners whose work is inter-related and iterative. Thus, the learning and evaluation from one grant is relevant to the work of the other organisations that form the cluster