Evaluation Learnings Search

Learning Description

Another good practice is the creation of “summer camps,” which generated considerable excitement among NNA beneficiaries. These interventions also reveal the need to design supplementary activities for months when schools are not in session. Though that can require additional resources, these spaces may provide increased opportunities to incorporate families and community members in activities.

Learning Description

A lesson learned is that sustainability must be a multiscalar concern (from national to local levels, from project management to subcontractors to communities) and that it requires sustained attention from the very beginning of the project. While state adoption of project activities is often the best-case scenario, other contingency plans are needed to address the all-too-likely possibility that the state does not take over project responsibilities. A good practice built into the project is an alliance with private sector firms; these alliances have already ensured that several EpCs will continue to function into 2011, past the final project date. Additionally, the efforts of some communities to secure additional funding for their centers are encouraging.

Learning Description

The design of the EpC consortium as a long-term consultative and lobbying group is a good practice, as the development of such spaces constitutes both an intrinsic good (serves as a space of mutual support and enrichment) and an instrumental good that can lead to further gains in securing support from state and civil society.

Learning Description

Nevertheless, work must be conducted to make sure that the EpC consortium continues to function. Some consortium members were openly skeptical. “To tell the truth,” one NGO director commented, “the consortium does not really exist.” While some meetings of consortium members had generated some lasting relationships between individual members, meetings of the directors of the consortium organizations are too rare to generate a consolidated sense of collective unity. As the project ends, there were no plans for future consortium meetings.

Learning Description

Child labor definitions and categories are still under construction, and the ONJOI project, despite its limited scope of action, started a process of including child protection concerns in the policy concerns of different types of stakeholders—government and state level structures; province, municipal, and local level structures; beneficiaries and larger communities; and other civil society structures and organizations.

Learning Description

Despite some initial resistance at the beginning, most project-related extracurricular and literacy activities were accepted by parents and awareness of the importance of school for children has been generally reinforced.

Learning Description

In some areas where the project was implemented, it was difficult to address child labor as the perception of child participation in economic activities is a very sensitive area in rural communities. The ONJOI project confronted communities with a different rationale in the rural areas where the projects developed and initiated processes of community discussion on child labor. Evidence of this effort stands out in parents’ and community members’ speeches. In several locations, the evaluator heard these stakeholders say that if their children had more school activities, they will dismiss the children from their domestic work. Meetings held with the communities, parents associations, and school staff contributed to bringing the issue of child labor and child protection to the discussion and potentially initiated social transformation processes.

Learning Description

ChildFund International had other projects that coincided with ONJOI in the Benguela area, but this is not necessarily representative of Angola’s worst child labor situations. As there is also no national survey on this issue, Benguela may be one of many where similar child labor situations can be found. The project should have taken an initial step to learn about child labor issues more deeply and extensively at a national level.

Learning Description

Types and effectiveness of the services provided contribute to potentially increasing knowledge about child labor in Angola and can contribute to good practices regarding prevention and eradication of child labor. Culturally rooted rural practices, the post-war state, restructuring of child protection mechanisms, and generalized poverty are critical conditions that negatively affected the project and will need to be addressed in a long-term fashion. A project with the timeframe of ONJOI is not sufficient to produce outstanding results regarding child labor.

Learning Description

The monitoring system allowed the creation of a basic instrument that can potentially be successfully used if some of its features are revised according to the experience obtained on the field.