Achieving gender equality and realising women’s’ and girls’ empowerment and rights are critical elements of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, progress varies as young women still find their voices silenced in patriarchal families, communities and political spaces, and are subject to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). This calls for deeper understanding and intensified efforts to contribute towards meaningful change for women and girls.

Programme Overview and Outcomes

Through the Young Women for Awareness, Agency, Advocacy, and Accountability (YW4A) programme, KIT works alongside the other YW4A partners to defend and expand the fulfilment of the human rights of young women to dignity, bodily integrity and equal participation in decision-making, through the implementation of gender-just policies and laws.

The programme was implemented in Egypt, Kenya, Palestine, and South Sudan between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2025. Its long-term outcome is to strengthen and diversify young women’s participation and amplify their voices to effectively influence decision-making towards gender-just laws, policies, norms, and practices related to their bodily integrity and equal participation. This is achieved through four interconnected intermediate outcomes referred to as Pathways:

The Four Pathways

1. Strengthen the advocacy capacity of 27 women’s rights organisations to amplify young women’s voices.
2. Enhancing the leadership of 13,700 young women to effectively engage in collective action and decision-making in public, private, and civic spaces.
3. Transforming social norms and practices of 18 faith-based organisations that constrain young women’s rights.
4. Influencing the adoption, amendment, withdrawal, or effective utilisation and implementation of 21 laws and policies towards promoting young women’s rights to leadership, participation, and ending of sexual and gender-based violence.

Facilitating gender-transformative monitoring, evaluation and learning

Under the YW4A programme, KIT managed the design and implementation of the programme’s outcome Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL). This included: (1) The design of baseline studies, mid-term review and end-line outcome monitoring and learning, including applying a gender-transformative approach to MEL processes; (2) Organisational and Advocacy Capacity Assessment (AOCA) with WROs and FBOs and facilitating collective learning; and (3) Developing and implementing a learning agenda to ensure adaptive programming.

Gender-transformative monitoring and learning mechanisms were co-created with a Young Women Reference Group in each country. Each group consisted of young women who were staff or volunteers of the partner organisations. These groups played a critical role in contextualising the programme’s MEL in the lived realities of young women and in harvesting collective learning around changes in behaviour and practices of partner organisations, state actors and young women groups throughout the programme period.  Members were engaged in data collection, reflection and sense-making throughout different key monitoring and evaluation moments.

Baseline studies

In the first year of implementation, KIT led the design and coordination of several baseline studies. KIT designed and implemented the Advocacy and Organisational Capacity Assessment (AOCA) method to track capacity development of women’s rights and faith-based organisations throughout implementation of the YW4A programme. Unlike external evaluations the AOCA was conducted as a facilitated self-assessment, allowing the organisations to engage in an empowering self-reflective and learning process about strengths, weaknesses and gaps in the organisation’s capacity. The workshops provided insights into the organization’s capacity strengthening needs and recommendations, which informed capacity strengthening interventions under Pathway 1 and 4 and supported organisations in planning and strategising their (advocacy) work.  

KIT also led the design and implementation of the Young Women Leadership / Competency Assessment, which allowed tracking of progress of the Pathway 2 indicators. The Young Women Leadership score was calculated based on a quantitative survey conducted with representative samples of young women participating in the Rise Up! Leadership training programme in the four implementation countries. KIT also provided technical advice to the other consortium members for the implementation of their baseline studies for pathways 3 (Gender Capacity Assessment of FBOs) and pathway 4. 

During this period, KIT co-designed a gender-transformative approach to monitoring, evaluation, and learning with Young Women Reference Groups in each country. These groups defined the changes that young women wanted to see in their countries’ contexts, which served as programme benchmarks. Findings were captured in Pathway-specific synthesis reports and consolidated into the brief “What young women would love to see”, summarising the desired changes around the behaviours, practices and actions of key actors. The brief is available in English and Arabic.

Mid-term review

In 2023, KIT coordinated and implemented the internal mid-term review (MTR), which was designed in close collaboration with the YW4A consortium partners. Besides accountability to the donor, the MTR aimed to learn from implementation so far, and to inform strategic decision-making and corrective actions, such as refinement of certain outcome indicator targets and adjustments of interventions.

A mixed-methods approach was applied, collecting quantitative and qualitative data through Key Informant Interviews, Focus Group Discussions, stories of change with young women (using the Sprockler tool) and online surveys. Following feminist evaluation principles, the MTR provided opportunities for reflection and learning, including on the programme’s Theory of Change (ToC), by a diverse group of stakeholders, including representatives from women’s rights and faith-based organisations and the programme’s Young Women Reference Groups. This group analysed preliminary findings and provided recommendations during country-level sensemaking workshops, informing the overall MTR report and recommendations.

Theory of Change Reflection Brief

Following the implementation of the MTR, KIT developed a Theory of Change MTR reflection brief (available in English and Arabic). This brief laid the foundation for country specific ToC reflections sessions in 2024, with the purpose of identifying unplanned, yet significant activities implemented, to align the country-specific ToC with on-ground realities and resulting in updated country ToCs.

Endline studies and Participatory Evaluation

In the final year of YW4A, internal endline studies were conducted to track programming on the outcome indicators and for learning purposes. The assessment methodologies designed at baseline were reviewed and subsequently adapted to fit the endline purpose, and KIT supported other technical partners in their endline study design, apart from implementing Pathway 1 and 2 studies.

A two-day AOCA endline reflection and learning workshop was conducted with each Pathway 1 partner organisation to examine changes in organisational capacity, how YW4A and other (f)actors contributed, and identifying key achievements and learnings in their organisation’s ability to undertake advocacy for young women’s rights and in amplifying young women’s voices and leadership. Each organisation captured their capacity enhancement journey through a creative associative thinking exercise. KIT compiled these stories into the YW4A Transformation Journeys booklet.

For Pathway 2, the Young Women Leadership Assessment was refined into a mixed-methods study (survey and Stories of Change) to measure the conditions for, and exercise of, leadership among young women engaged in Pathway 2. The Young Women Reference Group members gathered stories of changes from their peers, were trained as enumerators to collect the survey data, and played a key role during reflection and sense-making of the data.

Mid 2025, the implementation of the four internal pathway endline studies converged in a two-day Participatory Evaluation Workshops with young women in each programme country. Workshops allowed Young Women Reference Group members and other engaged young women to collectively reflect on the endline findings, assess how these aligned with their lived experiences, and explored transformations they experienced across the various programme pathways. Regional YW4A Impact Symposia held in July and September shared key findings from the internal pathway endline studies with actors from Kenya and South Sudan (first symposium) and Egypt and Palestine (second). The internal pathway endline studies concluded with the finalisation of the study reports in November 2025. These reports guided the development of the YW4A Best Practices brief and will inform the desk review as part of the programme’s External End Evaluation.