International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 3 No. 2 [Special Issue – January 2013] 228 Negotiating Fieldwork Politics in Development Evaluation: A Case Study of a Women’s Empowerment Project Thulani Dube Department of Development Studies Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Lupane State University P.O Box AC255, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe Abstract This paper is an experiential review of two major challenges faced by the author in carrying out fieldwork in development evaluation for a women’s project. The paper reviews two particular challenges that are common but often neglected in field work of this nature. The first challenge is being male and studying projects meant for female beneficiaries in an African culture. The second challenge comes from eliciting information from donor dependent communities who understand the value of information given to donors as far as their livelihoods are concerned. Despite the importance of the latter issue, this area of study has a dearth of information. The article is based on experience from development projects evaluation in Zimbabwe, but more specifically from a gender project evaluation exercise in Matabeleland North Province in Zimbabwe. Recommendations are made on how to safeguard the reliability of collected field data in the face of these challenges. Key Words: Evaluation, fieldwork, gender, empowerment, curbstoning, donors, politics 1.0 Introduction This paper is based on reflections from a fieldwork exercise that was carried out to evaluate levels of women‟s empowerment in a Women‟s project in Matabeleland North in Zimbabwe. The author also draws from a variety of other experiences in evaluation field work. The paper discusses some of the challenges that the researcher had to deal with in fieldwork relating to the nature of the research being carried out. The nature of the problem was two-fold. The first set of problems was associated with the fact that this was a gender project. The first part of this paper will comment on gender related issues in evaluation fieldwork. Secondly, the paper comments on emerging issues that affect the authenticity and validity of evaluation research data in aid dependent communities. Therefore, the paper is divided into two major sections. The first one deals with gender related data collection politics and the second one deals with development evaluation related data collection politics in aid dependent communities and how they were both dealt with. The project being evaluated was run by a Women‟s organisation whose primary objective was to empo wer women through various avenues. The projects included income generation through making traditional crafts, candles, soap and cooking oil. The project also assisted women with leadership skills development, marketing enhancement for local women‟s products and conservation farming training. The evaluation sought to achieve two major objectives. The first one was to determine the impact against specific project indicators that the aforesaid interventions were having on the livelihoods of the participating women and the households that they belonged to. The second key objective was to evaluate the levels of empowerment that these women were receiving. The purpose of this second objective was to ensure that the project was achieving high level and sustainable empowerment for women. For this second objective the evaluation made use of the Women‟s Empowerment Framework and also partly drew from the Moser Framework on issues of strategic and practical gender needs. The second objective of the evaluation thus sought to establish the levels of empowerment that the project was affording women according to the Women‟s Empowerment Framework‟s five levels of Welfare, Access, Conscientisation, Participation and Control. Three major types of data collection tools were employed. These were focus group discussions, key informant in-depth interviews and structured questionnaires.