Evaluation Observatory

Suresh Kumar, Executive Director, Centre DIRECT, has some interesting into the and abolition of trafficking.

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A snippet of what S Navin Sellaraju, CEO of Railway Children India, shared in our on the of .

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Child should be everyone's top priority.

PM Nair, Chair Professor at Tata institute of social sciences, went over this topic in depth in our webinar on November 29th.

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Here's a glimpse of Priti Patkar's thoughts on why bridging the word gap with is the need of the hour.

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Prerana Anti-Human Trafficking

Hear what Priti Mahara has to say about the role of in improving 's lives.

The relationship between child labour, child marriage, and child sexual abuse is porous, inter-linked and has massive implications on designing the preventative, rehabilitative, restorative and reintegrative strategies of policy interventions. It could be further argued that both child marriage and child sexual abuse could fall as a subset of child labour.

As a preventive policy intervention, focus on education programs have been evidenced to play a strong role in preventing child labour. However, it’s measurement poses complex questions. Often, an all-pervasive mantra that evaluators have adopted is to track performance indicators, illustrating the effectiveness of school enrolment and dropout rates as protection parameters to child labour.

While educational programs could prevent communities engaging in child labour at a systemic level, it remains to be said, if educational interventions effectively change social norms which prevent child marriage, or at the very least delay them, in high child marriage propensity cultures. Furthermore, do indicators such as school enrolment and drop-out rates in anyway tangibly influence the prevention and prevalence of child sexual abuse or trafficking, which has its roots often in the debt- traps?

This webinar will explore the different kind of interventions, implementation challenges, and risks involved in understanding the role of education and skill development initiatives under the child social protection program. The following questions will be addressed:
(i) How we arrive at indicators to assess new education programs which are looking beyond enrolment and dropout rates, while studying the role of education and skill development in preventing child malpractices.
(ii) Envisioning indicators for reintegrative policy interventions, such as skill building exercises and livelihood promotion programs, that bring the victims of child labour back into the fold of mainstream society.

Ved Arya, Founder, Buddha Fellowship Program and Self-Reliant Initiatives through Joint Action(SRIJAN), reflected on the learnings from an intervention on how -based participatory forms the bedrock of the intervention's success.

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Is with a purpose a key to achieving impact?

Listen to what Maaike Bijker has to say about it.

Social enterprises have the potential to make a meaningful impact on the , but they struggle to find sustained .

Can the Social Exchange (SSE) help bridge this gap?

Hear Aparajita Agarwal's thoughts on this.

Social enterprises have gained ground since the 2000s in India attracting over US $5.2 billion in investments. These entities could be legally registered as for-profit enterprises (FPEs) or not for profit organizations (NPOs), with the key difference being the former can raise equity-capital while the latter cannot, while engaging in solutions for social impact. This is complemented by partnerships between the public and private social sector to deliver critical citizen services as joint solutions. India is exploring a Social Stock Exchange (SSE) as a means to channel capital to create sizeable and measurable impact across these solutions. But this calls for a common minimum standard or a standardized framework for measuring and reporting social impact. Current frameworks to manage and measure social impact suffer from several challenges such as:
a) the prioritization of profits, with social impact appearing as a by-product, thereby defeating the purpose or end goals of social transformation, or
b) the inability to objectively monetize or standardize the different conceptions or levels of social impact achieved – such as life-skills developed or the concept of women empowerment, or
c) the lack of engagement with, and accountability to, the end user or beneficiaries when identifying outcomes, among many other challenges.

This webinar explores the business case for evaluative thinking as it draws from the best practices of the evaluation community and the MEL (monitoring, evaluation, and learning) processes that may be embedded among social enterprises. Learning from a panel of impact agents – from investors to solution-engineers and evaluators – this webinar explores the shared commitments to sustainable social development and the emerging social-impact economy. A holistic framework that captures relevant, and meaningful metrics of impact requires all stakeholders involved in the process to understand the pros and cons of different approaches for measuring impact