Evaluation Learnings Search

Learning Description

OFFSIDE - The developmental and flexible approach to project design and implementation has enabled the project to respond to changing needs on the ground

Learning Description

OFFSIDE - The project has benefited from synergies and complementarities with other United Nations (UN) system actors

Learning Description

OFFSIDE - Partnering with institutions with established networks has increased the project’s coverage, with large multiplier potential.

Learning Description

Intensive interactions with key stakeholders during project design and inception period. The key stakeholders involved in the project design and start-up period effectively identified and involved other important actors. These actors then played an important role in determining the directions the project should take. This is important as it led to early buy-in to the project, but also high expectations for continued involvement.

Learning Description

Focus on range of actors in the vanilla value chain, including exporters. The project design is oriented toward change in vertical and horizontal parts of the vanilla value chain. Rather than fixate on change on separate levels, a broad group of actors at each level is addressed. The four project components have cross-cutting links that tie the actors together. At each level, horizontal efforts were designed to address the needs of actors who could effectively eliminate child labor. While some components have a higher orientation on one level of the value chain—such as component four on livelihoods for producer households—they are still interlinked.

Learning Description

Need for continuous verification of technical support for the project implementation team. The project is complex as it addresses an entire value chain on a new subject area (vanilla) in remote locations. No single person has the all the needed types of expertise to implement such a project. While efforts to address the challenges can be intensive, teams in such situations need a great deal of technical support from the primary grantee. In this case, the International Labor Organization (ILO) is well placed and has the experience to tap into and provide technical support. This would include verifying good practices and lessons learned from other child labor projects, in Madagascar and elsewhere, to help inform the SAVABE project on an ongoing basis.

Learning Description

Indicator definitions should fully describe the expected measures needed to ensure which level of service is acceptable (at a minimum) for households or beneficiaries to be counted. Counting households after only short modules of two to four hours, for example, leads to uncertain impact quality. Details on measuring implementation of training should also be defined.

Learning Description

There should be continued and repeated engagement with key stakeholders throughout the project to ensure expectations are realistic. Focus is needed on continued transparency and buy-in to build capacity and sustainability.

Learning Description

Adolescent girls’ and women’s needs in rural communities in Zambia are different in terms of skills training and entrepreneurship group formation, implying that services are best delivered separately. At a broader level, vocational skills development and employment pathways for adolescent girls require distinct strategies and interventions. While the project varied the content of the life skills module for women and girls, the evaluation found that girls did not fully benefit from the combined women and girls training and business group model, where group dynamics meant that girls’ opportunity to take leadership roles were not optimized and they were not comfortable with the group operations. In keeping with the central aim of broadening adolescent girls’ employment options, a more diverse range of vocational skills options should ideally be offered adolescent girls in the context of emerging skills markets. Interviews suggested that the girls took up the training offer because no other options were available, rather than through a considered choice of vocational preference.

Learning Description

Substantial financial and human resources are required to deliver a range of vocational training services in rural areas in Southern Africa, indicating that sufficient resources required for optional vocational tracks and delivery modes need to be costed in the project design. EMPOWER’s eventual decision to deliver only two vocational tracks for adolescent girls and women, post the pilot, was based not only on the market assessment that identified viable markets for poultry and goats, but also the budget and time required for developing and delivering a range of vocational tracks (such as other livestock and crop production models). There were benefits of running only two tracks in terms of the quality of the training and management efficiency, but the choice did not fully meet the original project aim of providing adolescent girls with a range of vocational opportunities. A related Lessoned is that the delivery options and partners need to be investigated during the design and confirmed early in implementation stage, to identify what accredited providers, or custom-trained facilitators such as local crafts persons or government agricultural extensionists, can feasibly deliver the training. EMPOWER investigated all these options, but somewhat late in the first year, thus delaying the delivery and resulting in a narrowed range of options.