The United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) is a global partnership hosted by UNICEF. It’s mandate is to advance gender equality in and through education. It does this by providing a platform for coordinated advocacy and collective action in order to break down barriers to education, close the gender gap and unlock its transformative power for all girls, everywhere.
UNGEI brings together international organisations, development agencies, academic and civil society organisations, and private sector representatives. Through its partnership model, UNGEI champions the rights of girls and women who do not have access to global discussions and decisions and holds partners and the broader community accountable for global commitments to girls’ education as laid out by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Our role
Itad worked with UNGEI to help design and develop their strategy for 2023-27. We provided analytical and facilitative support to design an evidence-based, rigorous, high-quality, and learning-based portfolio.
We did this by:
- reviewing and updating UNGEI’s priorities
- understanding the needs and gaps in the ecosystem
- identifying growth opportunities, and
- identifying how to build new partnerships and strengthen existing ones.
Our work, which was undertaken from July 2022 to Sept 2023, focused on five objectives:
- To review, reflect and gather learning from the implementation and results of UNGEI’s strategy 2018-23.
- To review, map and summarise the latest evidence on what works and what doesn’t work to support girls’ education globally and in UNGEI’s priority countries
- To map and document who is doing what in the girls’ education space globally and in UNGEI’s priority countries
- To gain consensus and buy-in from UNEGEI’s partners on UNGEI’s mandate and strategic direction.
- To design an evidence-based, consensus-based and realistic portfolio to guide UNGEI’s direction over the period 2023-27, including a theory of change, results framework, budget, and implementation and governance structures.
Our methods and approaches
We adopted a feminist, participatory and equity-focused approach to deliver this assignment. This was achieved through the delivery of four interconnected modules, underpinned by key methods. Three of those modules were conducted simultaneously: 1) Review of the 2018-23 UNGEI strategy; 2) Sector scan and gap analysis of girls’ education; and 3) Review of UNGEI’s value proposition. These three modules were followed by and fed into one follow-on module: 4) Synthesis, facilitation and design.
Outcomes and impact
Our activities resulted in four outputs which were delivered in UNGEI’s preferred format:
- A set of thematic and geographic priorities
- Portfolio theory of change and linked results framework
- Costed portfolio implementation framework
- Portfolio governance structure.
For more information about this project, please contact Ignacio Torrano.
