Gender Links Organizational Evaluation Final Report

Background
Gender Links (GL) is over ten years in existence. It is characterized by a culture to learn as an organization and empower both its management and staff to be passionate. It is SADC focused and is mandated to mainstream the SADC Gender Protocol into the SADC civil society for adoption and implementation.

Purpose/Objective
To evaluate the whole organization and its work for the purpose of organizational development and improvement of its work.

Methodology
The use of two independent evaluators to interview some relevant members of the Gender links and the analysis of Gender Link’s reports, publications and other important documents related to Gender Links’ work.

Key Findings
It mainstreams the Protocol through advocacy, lobbying and partnership management. GL also uses research, media, publications and productions to support its lobbying and advocacy. The partnership management relates to the management of its donor relations and CBO networks. For the overall support of its mainstreaming agenda, GL has progressed well to develop an accredited training curriculum and use training for its implementation.

The context within which GL works is characterized by the political, economic and social marginalization of women and GL has used aspects of the Protocol such as governance, justice, care work and media to pursue Gender Equality for women in SADC. Although GL is SADC focused, the Protocol aspects aforementioned are linked to the MDG3 at the global level and cascaded into national and local government levels within countries. In the overall, in terms of strategic positioning, GL has performed above the average of 80%. This rating was done in relation to the vision, mission, values, and legitimacy of its work and relevance of its strategies. In terms of the programme of action, related to planning, follow-ups, working methods and reporting and documenting, GL has performed at the average of 80%.

Recommendations
The strongest recommendations is that, given the nature of the work of GL – dependent on a successful partnership management,  the highest leadership of GL should be more involved in the management or the decentralization of it and in the improvement of GL’s partnerships. Significant aspects of these management and partnership are the management in 5 of its sub-regions and the donor partnership.

In the year 2010/11 GL’s income was at 27.6 million ZAR which was four times than that of 2005/6. This growth of funding is against a background wherein GL reduced the number of its funding partners from 24 in 2005/6 to 13 in 2010/11. This reduction was influenced by GL’s new strategy which had begun to move focus from basket funding to large bilateral funding. The latter is seen to be providing more money and flexibility in the spending of that money.  Further, GL’s income growth occurred despite a background wherein the global economic crisis occurred. However, GL’s top management will have to be more involved as there is a deeper need for GL to seize opportunities for GL to further diversify its resources base in respective countries of the SADC.    

Programmatically, Gender Links is advised to include the economic element in order to deal with the aspect of Gender violence holistically. Further, Gender Links is to invest more capacity into the analysis of its monitoring and evaluation results.

Comments from NCA (if any) – none.