Evaluation of Oxfam Kenya's Gender Justice and Women's Rights Programme at Oxfam

Core Projects Driving Gender Justice and Women’s Rights Programme

• The Impact Small and Medium Enterprise (iSME) Project supports women entrepreneurs through business development services, including financial modeling, fundraising, and investor engagement. It also focuses on policy advocacy, network strengthening, and gender mainstreaming to promote inclusive financial ecosystems and drive women’s economic empowerment in Kenya.
• The We-Care Project addresses the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work on women and girls. It works to recognize, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care responsibilities, promote gender-equitable norms, and advocate for supportive policies.
• The Time to Care Project aims to improve gender equality and care infrastructure. It focuses on addressing unpaid care work, supporting paid care workers’ rights, shifting social norms, and influencing care-related policies.
• The Transformative Women Leadership Project enhances women’s leadership capacities and promotes gender-responsive policies across governance, economic, and decision-making spaces.

Justification: 

As Oxfam in Kenya moves toward achieving affiliate status by April 2025, conducting a comprehensive evaluation of the Gender Justice and Women’s Rights Programme is both timely and essential. This evaluation will provide critical insights into the program’s effectiveness, relevance, impact and strategic contribution to Oxfam Kenya’s Country Strategy. It will serve as a foundational tool for strengthening strategic direction, enhancing program impact, and ensuring alignment with Oxfam’s broader goals on gender equality and women’s empowerment. By offering an evidence-based assessment, the evaluation will identify key challenges, highlight successes, and provide actionable recommendations to enhance gender justice interventions.

This evaluation is driven by several factors. It will assess program strategies, implementation, and outcomes, providing insights into the program’s effectiveness and whether strategies achieve the intended results in Oxfam’s gender justice objectives. It will also analyze feminist approaches, examining how Oxfam’s principles influence outcomes and inform future programming to enhance the organization’s feminist agenda. Stakeholder engagement will be assessed, focusing on key contributors, including Women’s Rights Organizations, feminist movements, government officials, and marginalized groups, identifying strengths and collaboration opportunities for systemic change. Finally, it will offer strategic recommendations for future programming, guiding interventions, strengthening donor engagement, and ensuring relevance within Kenya’s evolving landscape. This consultancy is essential for aligning Oxfam Kenya’s efforts with its strategic objectives, ensuring the Gender Justice and Women’s Rights Programme remains impactful and responsive to women and marginalized communities' needs.

The report will serve as a critical tool for Women’s Rights Organizations (WROs) by providing evidence-based insights to inform program design, strengthen advocacy efforts, and support resource mobilization. It will help WROs engage policymakers with credible data, influence policy and budgeting processes, and identify areas for capacity strengthening. Additionally, the report will foster collaboration through shared learning platforms like validation workshops and peer reviews, enhance monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and boost the visibility and credibility of WROs in advancing gender equality initiatives.

Purpose and Scope of the Consultancy

The purpose of this consultancy is to evaluate the Gender Justice and Women’s Rights Programme in alignment with Oxfam’s strategic objectives. The evaluation will assess the program’s impact, identify key challenges, and provide actionable recommendations to strengthen gender justice interventions.

Objectives of the consultancy

• Assess the overall impact of the Gender Justice and Women’s Rights Programme against its strategic objectives, highlighting key successes, challenges, and gaps in implementation.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of feminist approaches and gender mainstreaming in advancing gender justice outcomes.
• Analyze stakeholder engagement and partnerships, including the role of feminist organizations, government officials, and marginalized groups in achieving program objectives.
• Provide recommendations to strengthen feminist leadership, gender justice interventions, and inclusive decision-making processes.
• Assess the sustainability, scalability, and adaptability of program interventions in response to Kenya’s evolving political, social, and civic landscape.
• Review the effectiveness of Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) systems to support continuous learning and program adaptation.
• Identify opportunities for innovation in gender justice programming and provide evidence-based recommendations to inform future programming and donor engagement.

Indicative evaluation questions

The evaluation will incorporate questions and analysis to:

• Establish the extent to which Gender Justice and Women’s Rights has shifted power in favour of women in their struggle to fight inequality and injustice.
• Understand the process through which the shift in power has occurred, taking into account pre-conditions, internal and external factors and program Theory of Change.
• Understand Oxfam’s contribution to the shift in power in favor of women.
• Understand contribution of partners and other factors.

Identify and document evidence-based cases, stories, signs of change, lessons learned and including recommendations for improvements for the next strategy period.

The consultancy will focus on the following key areas of evaluation

• Program Impact and Outcomes – Assess planned and unplanned, positive and negative outcomes, including the effectiveness of program design, execution, and alignment with Oxfam Kenya’s gender justice objectives.
• Empowerment, Leadership, and Systemic Change – Evaluate how Oxfam’s strategies empower women and girls, foster leadership, and drive systemic change through innovation and advocacy.
• Inclusive Stakeholder Engagement and Intersectionality – Analyze engagement with key stakeholders, including WROs, government officials, and marginalized groups, while assessing how the program integrates masculinity, non-binary perspectives, and intersectional approaches.
• Program Performance and Accountability – Review resource utilization, MEAL systems, and efficiency in achieving program outcomes, ensuring effective monitoring and adaptive management.
• Sustainability, Scalability, and Future Recommendations – Assess the sustainability and scalability of interventions, providing actionable recommendations to strengthen future programming, enhance donor engagement, and ensure ongoing relevance in Kenya’s evolving context.

Methodology
The consultancy will adopt an intersectional feminist approach that centers the voices, experiences, and agency of women and marginalized groups Including women we work with and their organizations The evaluation process will be participatory, ensuring meaningful engagement of all stakeholders and upholding the principle of “nothing about us without us”. A gender-sensitive and ethical data collection process will be prioritized, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative methods to capture diverse perspectives across grassroots communities, feminist movements, government actors, and policy influencers. The methodology will also critically acknowledge and address structural barriers—such as unpaid care work, limited access to funding, and systemic inequalities—that affect women’s and marginalized groups’ participation and empowerment. Mixed methods will include in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, surveys, Most Significant Change Stories (MSC), Outcome harvesting,stakeholder analysis  and participatory workshops to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the program’s impact. Additionally, the evaluation will integrate a power analysis to assess underlying gender dynamics and social norms, ensuring that findings and recommendations are contextually grounded and reflective of the lived realities of those most affected by gender injustice.

Ethical considerations 

The consultant will put in place measures to ensure data collection adheres to all necessary ethics and guidelines provided by local laws on data protection and ‘Do no Harm’ standards, Oxfam safe programming and feminist principles.

 Key Activities and Deliverables

Activities/Tasks:

• Conduct a comprehensive desk review of program documents, relevant policies, previous evaluations, and other pertinent literature.
• Apply participatory feminist methodologies, such as Outcome Harvesting and Most Significant Change (MSC), to guide the evaluation process.
• Engage a diverse range of stakeholders, including WROs, feminist movements, county government officials, private sector actors, and marginalized communities (domestic workers, persons with disabilities, LGBTQI+ groups).
• Analyze the effectiveness of program interventions in promoting women’s empowerment, advancing feminist leadership, and driving systemic change.
• Identify strategies to strengthen feminist partnerships and enhance inclusivity by integrating non-binary and intersectional perspectives.
• Facilitate a validation workshop with key stakeholders to present preliminary findings and gather feedback.

Academic / Professional qualification

• Advanced university degree in social sciences, gender studies, public policy, development studies, or a related field.
• Expertise in gender-responsive budgeting (GRB)
• Proven experience in conducting stakeholder mapping and analysis, particularly within gender-focused programs.
• Practical experience applying feminist Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) principles and practices.
• Strong facilitation skills with the ability to engage stakeholders at multiple levels, including government officials, civil society organizations, and marginalized communities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, with proven ability to present complex information clearly and effectively.
• Strong analytical, communication, and report writing skills, demonstrated by at least three published research pieces, evaluation reports, or policy documents.
• Proficiency in spoken and written Kiswahili and English
• Knowledge of Kenya’s governance structures and legal frameworks
• Experience working with Women’s Rights Organizations (WROs), feminist movements, and other gender justice networks in Kenya.