UN WOMEN Jobs – 112849

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing women’s rights at the center of all its efforts, UN Women leads and coordinates United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world. It provides support to Member States’ efforts and priorities in meeting their gender equality goals and for building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors.

The Rwanda Country Office strategic note is the main planning tool for UN Women’s support to normative, coordination and operational work in Rwanda. This evaluation will consider the Strategic Note covering the period January 2019 – December 2024 as a precursor action to the development of a new Strategic Note which will start in February 2024.

The Strategic Note is linked to the UN Women Global Strategic Plan and country-level United Nations Development Assistance Framework 2019-24. The Rwanda Country Office Strategic Note supports and contributes towards the following UN Women 2022-25 Strategic Plan Impact and Systemic outcomes:

The strategic note is aligned to Rwanda’s national development plans, including the National Strategy for Transformation 2017-2024, the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the African Union Agenda 2063, and the East African Community (EAC) Vision 2050.

The Strategic Note is grounded in the standards, principles and obligations of the Convention to Eliminate all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, Concluding Observations of the Commission on the Status of Women, Sustainable Development Goals, and the AU Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, among others.

Description of country portfolio:

The Strategic Note (2019-2023) includes a Development Results Framework (DRF) and an Organizational Effectiveness and Efficiency Framework (OEEF), both with performance indicators. The evaluation is expected to use these to assess organizational performance.

The original total planned budget of the Strategic Note was USD 15.5m, of which USD 1.9m was budgeted from core, $3.0m from Institutional Budget and USD 10.6m from non-core. As of the end of 2022, non-core resources to be mobilized for 2023 was close to USD 0.6m. The Country Office is based in Kigali, with 22 personnel, as of January 2023.

The work of UN Women responds to its three core mandates (normative, coordination and operational/programming). UN Women is a member of the UN Country Team, supporting gender mainstreaming across thematic groups. The main interventions undertaken under the Strategic Note are set out in Annex 1.

The overarching Theory of Change (ToC) of the Strategic Note states that if women and girls participate and lead in decision-making processes; if women’s empowerment and gender equality commitments are translated into practice at national and local governance levels; and if women in urban and rural settings, including the most vulnerable ones, have equal access to and control over economic resources; then women and girls will be able to fully benefit from and contribute to political and economic opportunities; because women and girls will have decision making powers, gender specific needs will have been accounted for in all spheres of governance and barriers will have been removed for women to attain economic autonomy.

The main rights holders’ and duty bearers’ capacities that the Strategic Note is attempting to develop are:

• Duty bearers: Government stakeholders across different ministries, including the National Gender Machinery.

·         Right holders: Urban/peri-poor women, women leaders and gender advocates, civil society, religious and cultural leaders, and youth.

The country office extended the duration of the original strategic note for an additional one year to end in 2024 in order to ensure that it aligns with the UNSDCF Rwanda time frame following a decision made by the UNCT to extend the Cooperation Framework’s life to 2024.

The Country Office has identified the following key lessons learned;

• Importance of collaboration: There is need to deepen and leverage strategic partnerships, and broaden partnerships, by working systematically with non-government institutions including civil society, private sector, religious leaders, men and boys, the media and international NGOs. Need to better leverage UN Women’s coordination mandate.
• Programmatic focus: Need to deepen the impact of programmes interventions by focusing on a few but potentially transformative priorities such as women’s economic empowerment and social norms that have the tendency to be overlooked in part because of the positive narrative on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Rwanda. Additionally, holistic support packages (including livelihood support, capacity building, knowledge enhancement and access to services) developed and implemented with partners have proved to be impactful.

Purpose, objectives and use of the evaluation:

The UN Women Evaluation Policy and the UN Women Evaluation Strategic Plan 2022-25 are the main guiding documents that set forth the principles and organizational framework for evaluation planning, conduct and follow-up in UN Women. These principles are aligned with the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG) Norms and Standards for Evaluation in the UN System and Ethical Guidelines.

The CPE has seven objectives:

1. Assess the relevance of UN Women contribution to the intervention at national levels and alignment with international agreements and conventions on gender equality and women’s empowerment;
2. Assess effectiveness, organizational efficiency and coherence in progressing towards the achievement of gender equality and women’s empowerment results as defined in the Strategic Note;
3. Enable the UN Women Country Office to improve its strategic positioning to better support the achievement of sustained gender equality and women’s empowerment;
4. Analyse how human rights approach and gender equality principles are integrated in the design and implementation of the Strategic Note;
5. Identify and validate lessons learned, good practices and examples of innovation that can be scaled up and replicated to support gender equality and human rights;
6. Provide insights into the extent to which the UN Women has realized synergies between its three mandates (normative, UN system coordination and operations);
7. Provide actionable recommendations with respect to the development of the next Strategic Note.

The Country Portfolio Evaluation (CPE) is a systematic assessment to validate the contributions made by UN Women Country Office’s portfolio of interventions to development results with respect to Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment at the country level. It also assesses the Country Office’s organisational effectiveness and efficiency in delivering the planned results. It uses the Strategic Note (including the DRF and OEEF) as the main point of reference.

The intended uses and users of this evaluation are:

 The evaluation will be utilization-focused, tailored to the needs of the organization through a participatory approach from the inception through to the development of recommendations.

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