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In the past few years women’s empowerment and gender equality initiatives have been under increasing pressure to measure their impact. This thesis explores the stakeholders’ experiences with the monitoring and evaluation practice with a case study of a women’s fund that provides grants to grassroots women’s organizations in South Africa. The study is based on previous research, the grassroots development framework, and a combination of principal-agent theory and Kabeer’s (1999) women empowerment framework. Through a content analysis of interviews with staff members and grantees, as well as the review of documents, challenges and opportunities experienced in their current monitoring and evaluation practice are identified. It is argued that the principal-agent constellation is a key factor that creates challenges in conducting monitoring and evaluation. Furthermore, it is claimed that there is currently a gap between widely used tools and practice at grassroots level as well as between the stakeholders’ different understandings of success and how to monitor and evaluate the work of women’s organizations in the context of a grassroots women’s fund. This leads to the postulation for an alternative monitoring and evaluation model, which strengthens the systematic use of informal methods, is oriented on the agents, and captures the link between individual experience and structure.

In the past few years women’s empowerment and gender equality initiatives have been under increasing pressure to measure their impact. This thesis explores the stakeholders’ experiences with the monitoring and evaluation practice with a case study of a women’s fund that provides grants to grassroots women’s organizations in South Africa. The study is based on previous research, the grassroots development framework, and a combination of principal-agent theory and Kabeer’s (1999) women empowerment framework. Through a content analysis of interviews with staff members and grantees, as well as the review of documents, challenges and opportunities experienced in their current monitoring and evaluation practice are identified. It is argued that the principal-agent constellation is a key factor that creates challenges in conducting monitoring and evaluation. Furthermore, it is claimed that there is currently a gap between widely used tools and practice at grassroots level as well as between the stakeholders’ different understandings of success and how to monitor and evaluate the work of women’s organizations in the context of a grassroots women’s fund. This leads to the postulation for an alternative monitoring and evaluation model, which strengthens the systematic use of informal methods, is oriented on the agents, and captures the link between individual experience and structure.