Monitoring and evaluating the Commonwealth Plan of Action for Gender Equality 2005 – 2015: An illustrative case study: SEWA Bank

The Commonwealth Plan of Action for Gender Equality 2005 – 2015 (PoA) provides the framework within which the Commonwealth contributes to advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. An End Term Review (ETR) report of the PoA will be produced to provide a comprehensive picture of Commonwealth countries’ implementation of the PoA, outlining the policies, practices and mechanisms that were successfully employed. It will be comprised of a trend analysis addressing the PoA’s quantitative indicators and a series of case studies addressing its qualitative indicators. There is a growing consensus that to make significant impact on gender inequity, the institutions (by which we mean stated and implicit rules) that maintain women’s unequal position in societies must be changed. Gender at Work is an organisation that promotes women’s empowerment and gender equality and uses a conceptual model which connects rights with institutions in a process of social change and posits a conception of institutional change as multi-factorial and holistic. To enable a deeper understanding of how to change social institutions and discriminatory norms it is important to produce in-depth case studies which provide information on the theory of change that underpinned the intervention, the context, strategy and impacts of the change. This model and template will be used by the Commonwealth in the production of the ETR case studies. This is an illustrative case study which will assist the Secretariat and member countries in their preparation of good practices at country level to analyse progress achieved in advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. Its purpose is to enable member countries to utilise their specific examples to assess strategies deployed and impact achieved. This is a case study of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) Bank in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in western India. The case study illustrates the strategies that SEWA Bank uses to challenge and change social institutions and discriminatory norms that keep informal sector women workers economically disempowered and destitute. It illustrates a set of significant outcomes using the Gender at Work conceptual model and case study template. The case study provides an analysis of what works and why, in this specific context in terms of advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. It provides an understanding of the theory of change that underpinned the intervention, the context, strategy and impacts of the change.

Publisher: Commonwealth Secretariat
Year of Publication: 2013
Download : 19749_monitoringgenderactionplan2005-2015.pdf