Evaluation Learnings Search

Learning Description

Emerging gendered advocacy approaches. Plan has conducted a gender assessment and also a gender study in the Philippines. Although in the early stages, both Philippines and Indonesia field officers are beginning to work with women in the fisher communities to raise awareness of labor rights. In the Philippines, Oblates of Notre Dame (OND) Hesed has started targeting fishers’ wives in project activities such as group education sessions. The advocacy strategies need further elaboration, including strategies for addressing the needs of women whose husbands are injured or disabled and also in recognizing and meeting the specific needs of women working as fishers in the two countries.

Learning Description

Use of mobile technology to record and store grievance cases. Adapting Plan’s use of the Poimapper mobile application appears to be an emerging good practice to map forced labor (FL) and trafficking in persons (TIP) cases using Android phones.

Learning Description

First and foremost, Verité sees the creation of an Advisory Council as a good practice for facilitating meaningful stakeholder engagement and promoting buy-in. This approach allowed the project to intimately understand key industry actors’ priorities and concerns around social due diligence, which informed a valuable co-design process to ensure the Toolkit meets the needs of end-users. Verité is confident that this meaningful engagement of coffee industry actors and incorporating their feedback throughout the participatory design process will increase buy-in and ultimate tool uptake. Feedback provided by participants in the virtual validation dialogues confirmed that the process was a positive experience for Advisory Council members as well. When asked to rate their level of satisfaction with the workshop on a scale from zero to ten (where zero represents “not at all satisfied” and ten represents “extremely satisfied”), the average rating across the five respondents was 9.2. In the open-ended comment field, participants noted that the workshop structure was engaging and efficient. Multiple participants expressed satisfaction with the use of small breakout groups and the engaging discussions they generated. One participant recommended opening participation to more actors.

Learning Description

Verité recognizes the variety of feedback mechanisms deployed during the Toolkit review and validation process as another good practice. Both Expert Committee and Advisory Council members had multiple opportunities to comment on the tools throughout the review period, including surveys, group dialogues, one-on-one discussions with the COFFEE Project Director, and direct commenting in the tools themselves. Providing several avenues for feedback proved mutually beneficial in that it (a) allowed participants to comment on the tools according to their preferred format and timeframe, and (b) allowed the project to triangulate results across multiple feedback channels.

Learning Description

A key lesson learned through the tool review process is the importance of considering how users will navigate the Toolkit. Questions raised during the Advisory Council 21 | The COFFEE Project Midterm Evaluation Report dialogues highlighted that the connections between related tools should be clear. Furthermore, participants’ feedback emphasized the need for the COFFEE Project to thoughtfully consider the Toolkit navigation, or learning path, by which users will access and browse each tool online. Another important learning extracted from the dialogues is that the project should provide overarching guidance or a pathway to help Toolkit users determine where to start and to quickly identify the most relevant tools and guidance materials to fit their needs.

Learning Description

Development projects that target marginalized populations within an unstable implementing environment can face major challenges to implementation when factors outside the control of the project shift or change. Inclusion of one or more measures to mitigate the risks associated with the critical assumptions can minimize disruptions or delays to implementation by allowing for strategy adaptation rather than a formal project modification.

Learning Description

The development and piloting of all data collection tools prior to project implementation can help ensure ease of administration by project staff and adequate comprehension by the target population. This is especially important in the absence of a project baseline. Furthermore, ongoing coordination of the data collection processes at each level of the performance monitoring chain— data collection, verification, validation and analysis—can strengthen the data veracity.

Learning Description

The systematic collection of baseline data corresponding to the project’s key strategic components can ensure a reliable baseline from which to establish realistic and meaningful target values for subsequent analysis.

Learning Description

Project strategies that have built on existing private sector policies, such as “zero tolerance for child labor,” have helped increase buy-in from stakeholders and encouraged support for additional project strategies aimed at preventing child labor and improving compliance with labor laws.

Learning Description

The establishment of a technical working group in the sugarcane sector has guided and supported project activities, in particular, the Chronic Kidney Diseases of Unknown Causes (CKDu) prevalence study and recommendations based on the study results.