Growing effectively: scaling projects against child and youth poverty - Life Goals project
Project Context
One in five children in Austria is at risk of poverty. While children's basic needs may be met, poverty in Austria is usually associated with marginalisation and lack of participation. To improve children's prospects, the project aims to improve psychosocial skills such as frustration tolerance, perseverance and personal responsibility through football-based workshops. As an extension of existing initiatives, the project will scale up existing local project structures to several regions in Austria and establish a network of experienced facilitators and multipliers through capacity building measures and local support structures. The objective of the Mainlevel’s assignment is to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the scaling-up of the programme and to aid in monitoring the project’s progress.
Challenge
- Involving many stakeholders as data collectors: This is a complex project with many stakeholders who need to be involved in data collection but must not be overburdened with M&E tasks due to time constraints (as many multipliers of the projects will be schoolteachers)
- Collecting data from children and adolescents: The project needs to collect some data from children and adolescents involved in the project, which presents particular challenges in terms of ensuring that they can understand the evaluation questions and that the data is collected using child-friendly, engaging and innovative methods wherever possible. In addition, some children face language barriers.
Solution
- Close collaboration with project team and vigorous testing of proposed M&E tools and methods: This way, difficulties in using the tools and everyday usability are being assured before launching the system.
- Lean monitoring systems and sustainable monitoring burden. The monitoring system will be designed to shift as much of the monitoring burden as possible from the multipliers "on the ground" to project staff, without loss of data.
- Lean evaluation methods. The same will apply to evaluation methods and tools - collecting no more data than absolutely necessary and taking into account the time constraints of multipliers and the motivation constraints of participating children and adolescents.
- Child-friendly evaluation methods. In order to address language barriers and difficulty in understanding the questions, imagery, playful methods and short, concise questions in simple language will be used.
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