Monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) is a field of continually growing importance in international development. As the gender and inclusion focus has developed throughout WFD, the MEL team have been working to understand how our monitoring, evaluation, and learning can be gender-sensitive and effectively measure change in women’s political participation (WPP).

The literature on women’s political participation is clear: meaningful change in the participation of women in politics goes beyond counting the number of women involved in a given activity, project, or institution, or the existence of laws and policies that might have unexpected consequences or simply not be enforced. What is more, gender theorists have demonstrated that participation and leadership by women – in politics, but also in other spheres of life – might look very different to established ideas about participation and leadership. In sum, counting women or counting laws is a flawed way of measuring and evaluating women’s political participation, but it is not immediately obvious what to do differently.