Evaluating Women for Peace: WILPF Programme Assessment 2022–2024

Evaluating peacebuilding programmes is among the most complex challenges in international development evaluation. The causal chains are long. The counterfactuals are invisible. And the most important outcomes shifts in power, changes in agency, reductions in violenceare notoriously difficult to measure.

When LPIC was engaged to evaluate the WILPF programme for 2022–2024, we faced all of these challenges and one more: evaluating gender-specific outcomes in conflict-affected settings.

The Evaluation Challenge

WILPF's work operates at multiple levels simultaneously: international advocacy, national policy influence, and grassroots women's leadership. A credible evaluation had to track impact across all three with methodologies appropriate to each.

We used a theory-based evaluation approach, building a detailed Theory of Change that mapped pathways from WILPF's activities to their intended outcomes in women's political participation, policy influence, and protection mechanisms.

Key Findings

• Women's participation in formal peace processes increased in contexts where WILPF maintained sustained, multi-year presence

• Policy advocacy was most effective where national networks had strong government relationships and media access

• The programme demonstrated important contributions to norm change at the international level, though attribution remains methodologically complex

• Monitoring systems needed strengthening to capture long-term behavioural change beyond direct programme activities
  

Methodological Note: The Counterfactual Problem

In peacebuilding, the absence of violence is the most important outcome and the hardest to attribute. Our evaluation developed a contribution analysis framework that allowed us to document WILPF's plausible contribution to specific outcomes without overclaiming causality.

This approach rigorous, honest about limitations, and still useful for decision-making is at the core of how LPIC approaches complex evaluations.

Evaluating women's contributions to peace requires both technical rigor and deep contextual understanding. The data matters. So does knowing what the data can and cannot tell you.

→ Contact LPIC to discuss evaluation approaches for gender and peacebuilding programmes: lidapatty.com