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Economic empowerment and HIV vulnerability reduction along transport corridors in Southern Africa - Final Evaluation

eval_number:

1566

eval_url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/eval/1566

lessons_learned:

themes:

theme:

Gender equality

category:

Conditions of work & equality

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comments:

Young women and men workers in the target countries infected and affected by the impact of the HIV and AIDS epidemic including mobile workers, women and men workers in the formal and informal economic activities in corridor areas.

challenges:

Key challenges included: (i) Initial lack of appropriate cooperatives and/or association apex organizations in some countries-e.g. in South Africa leading to the delay in initiating CEEIF component of the project; (ii) Drought conditions in some of the beneficiary countries e.g. Zambia and Zimbabwe which adversely affected performance and in some cases loss of business (e.g. poultry farming); (ii) initial misconceptions that ILO funding under the CEEIF component was a grant– resulting in low repayment in some countries, but which the project responded to by stepping up requisite sensitization during the last half of the project period.

success:

Successful implementation of the development model was strongly linked to: (i) relevance of interventions to the socio-economic development aspirations intermediate and ultimate beneficiaries; and (ii) requisite sensitization and capacity building of target beneficiaries by the project.

context:

Key context and precondition for successful application of the model entails the co-existence of high vulnerability to HIV infection, poverty, gender inequality and lack of relevant knowledge in the target project area; complemented with requisite sensitization and capacity building.

description:

Economic empowerment (EE) and gender equality (GE) model is an effective and sustainable approach for addressing vulnerability to HIV infection and mitigation of impact of AIDS, but its application by way of only providing business finance to informal economy MSME business starters without complementary business and financial skills training is not a sustainable approach and is likely to have limited and/or short-lived impact.

administrative_issues:

Key administrative issues included: (i) Lack of adequate ground-level administrative support capacity for NPCs –resulting in the officers having to deal with the whole range of administrative matters at the expense of technical matters; and (ii) Unexpected foreign exchange loss amounting to about US$ 66,188 occasioned by the weakening of SEK against the US dollar consequently reducing the budget from the original US$ 7,816,790 to US$ 7,750,602 forcing PMT to cut-back on some planned activities.

url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/lessons/168894

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location:

country:

Africa - regional

region:

Africa

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eval_title:

Economic empowerment and HIV vulnerability reduction along transport corridors in Southern Africa - Final Evaluation