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Evaluating Women's Empowerment: Experimenting with a Creative Participatory Self-evaluation Methodology in Papua New Guinea

This article introduces a participatory evaluation methodology that can be used with very low literacy groups of women to capture change experienced in their voice, participation, and decision-making abilities at the household and community levels. Central to this methodology is the process utilised to enable a personal determination of the level of change that has taken place according to individual baselines and circumstances, and using this information to present a more accurate picture of how much change has occurred for some women versus others and use percentage break-ups to show the different change-level-groups of women in a community. Whereas one can easily make the mistake of generalising change levels for all the women based on the responses of a few outspoken ones, this evaluation methodology captures the richness and diversity that exists even among a small group of women. Utilising such an evaluation approach makes one recognise the complexities that come with measuring change in women's voice, participation and decision-making in very low literacy settings. Developed in haste and used for an internal CARE International end-of-project evaluation in early 2014, the author shares her original experience of utilising this new self-developed participatory evaluation methodology. The article is sequenced so that the reader is presented with the circumstances out of which this evaluation methodology was developed, the benefits discovered from utilising it, shortfalls of the original methodology, and improvements that will be made to further develop and strengthen the methodology.