Women Lead in Emergencies Global Learning Evaluation Report

CARE’s Women Lead in Emergencies (Women Lead) model has been developed to operationalise CARE’s commitment to women’s leadership as one of our four focal areas for Gender in Emergencies. Women Lead supports women within communities at the frontline of conflict, natural and climate-related hazards, pandemics and other crises to claim their right to a say over the issues that affect them, and to participate in emergency preparedness, response and recovery. 

Since 2018, CARE has piloted Women Lead in 15 locations in Colombia, Mali, Niger, the Philippines, Tonga and Uganda. In 2020, Women Lead worked directly with 804 women’s groups. Through piloting this approach in diverse locations and within different types of humanitarian crisis, Women Lead has sought to understand challenges, barriers and enablers regarding this kind of programming in different contexts. This evaluation seeks to evaluate the outcomes of the approach across these pilot programmes as a critical learning juncture before it is scaled up.

The evaluation uses mixed-methods data from across the six pilot areas, with a particular focus on the longest-running pilots in Niger and Uganda, to understand:

1. What outcomes have we seen from Women Lead in Emergencies?
2. What are the ways in which change happens?
3. How is the project implemented and what room is there for improvement?

This report outlines findings against these three domains and also provides recommendations on how to improve future programming as Women Lead looks to move past this pilot phase and become more widely implemented as part of CARE’s humanitarian response portfolio.