Background on the Gender, Evaluation and Empowerment Series: Over the last few decades, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of women in development. Women’s empowerment can lead to economic growth, better health outcomes, reduction of poverty, and increased educational attainment. However, there are very few mainstream tools or indicators to accurately measure female empowerment outcomes. Measuring women’s empowerment is challenging, as its definition and conceptualization can vary geographically, culturally, socially, and politically. Organizations and researchers often face challenges in defining, capturing and comparing measures of women’s empowerment across regions and sectors. CLEAR South Asia, hosted at J-PAL South Asia at IFMR in collaboration with Community of Evaluators (CoE) and UN Women initiated a series of roundtable discussions on ‘Gender, Evaluation and Empowerment.’ These roundtables aim to create a forum for researchers, M&E professionals, and civil society organizations to showcase their experiences capturing the concept of ‘women’s empowerment’ in their own projects. The roundtables include key gender and M&E experts in South Asia, highlighting the challenges in defining and measuring gender outcomes and providing insights to new and innovative gender measures, which can be applied within South Asia and globally. These include global composite indices of empowerment, as well as more sector-specific measures spanning economic empowerment to violence against women and shifting gender norms among adolescents. The roundtables draw upon several disciplines, backgrounds, and research methodologies, creating a forum for researchers, M&E professionals, and civil society organizations working on issues of gender and female empowerment. As the first roundtable in Sri Lanka, this roundtable will focus on adolescent and gender perspectives in evaluation. Speaker Profiles: Mallika Samaranayake President – Community of Evaluators South Asia Chairperson- Institute for Participatory Interaction in Development (IPID) Sri Lanka Ms. Mallika Samaranayake is founder member and first president of the Community of Evaluators (COE), South Asia. She was also founder member and past president of the Sri Lanka Evaluation Association (SLEvA) from 2006 to 2009. She is the Founder Director and Chairperson of the Institute for Participatory Interaction in Development (IPID) Sri Lanka promoting participatory methodologies in development through training and consultancy services for national, international, bilateral & UN Agencies with emphasis on results-based monitoring and evaluation. She has functioned as a Team Leader / member of a large number of research assignments, evaluations and social assessments with rich consultancy experience over 30 years. She is currently serving as a Consultant Sociologist, Gender Specialist, Community Development Specialist, Monitoring & Evaluation Specialist and Workshop Facilitator/Trainer in Participatory Evaluation. She has presented papers at several Evaluation Association Conferences sharing experience of evaluations and research. Sonal Zaveri Secretary – Community of Evaluators South Asia Senior Evaluation Specialist Sonal Zaveri, is a Senior Evaluation Specialist with over 25 years of experience, in India and internationally in over 20 countries in strategic planning, program design and evaluation. In the field of evaluation, she has a special interest in developmental, feminist and utilization-focused evaluation. She is a founder member and Secretary of the Community of Evaluators, a group of evaluators spanning seven countries of South Asia; an International Advisor to the Child-toChild Trust, University of London; and a Fleishman Fellow, Duke University, USA. Sonal is a contributing author in two publications, the South Asian Volume on Evaluation, “Making Evaluation Matter” (2014) and ‘Evaluation in Extremis’ (2015, forthcoming) and has presented papers and conducted workshops at various international evaluation conferences. She has provided technical expertise on rights based approaches, evaluation, gender, children and youth to NGOs, foundations, UN organizations and multilaterals. She has expertise in gender, empowerment and capacity strengthening. Her sectoral experience includes HIV/AIDS, community systems, reproductive health, education and rights based programming.