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International labour and environmental standards application in Pakistan's SMEs (ILES) - Midterm Evaluation

eval_number:

2607

eval_url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/eval/2607

lessons_learned:

themes:

theme:

Planning and programme design

category:

Organizational issues

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comments:

ILO personnel involved in reviewing and validating project documents: country office personnel, Pardev and others.

challenges:

Reasons given for the lack of a detailed project document include: The project was sole-sourced, in other words the Country Office did not have to compete for the project. Although not stated explicitly by key informants during the evaluation, the former may partially explain why the project design and review process was not sufficiently rigorous to catch some of the design issues. According to ILO Country Office personnel, when the ILES Project was designed in 2015, Labour Standards were relatively high on the agenda of the Government. Nevertheless, the design team highlighted that the project design was complicated by the fact that government counterparts were relatively new to labor affairs. The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis & Human Resource Development, previously as Ministry of Labour, had only been in place for two years. In addition, labor affairs had been relatively recently devolved to the Provincial government.

success:

n/a

context:

The lengthy project revision and budget realignment in the project inception stage suggests that ILO project design review processes should be strengthened. The nature of some of the required changes – ensuring multiple ILO projects did not duplicate the others’ efforts and adequately budgeting enterprise level activities are basic issues that should be caught during the initial project document review stages.

description:

Importance of a thorough project design and review process. In 2017/18, the labour component underwent a lengthy strategy redefinition following an ILO-mandated evaluability assessment, which found weaknesses in the original intervention strategy including significant overlap with other ILO projects and some inconsistencies in resource allocations. Following the assessment, ILO updated its logframe, provided more detail on enterprise level strategies and narrowed planned policy and capacity building interventions somewhat to focus on four priority topics: informality, labour protection frameworks, Occupation Safety and Health (OSH) and minimum wage setting mechanisms. While the evaluability assessment is a safeguard to improve the project intervention strategy in its inception phase, it is not meant to be a “redesign” exercise or to be a cause of a significant delay in project implementation. More generally, project documents should answer basic who, what, where, when, how and how much questions about what the project intends to do rather than describing broad areas of work and suggesting existing ILO methodologies without detailing how they will be adapted to a particular context.

administrative_issues:

n/a

url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/lessons/221743

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location:

country:

Pakistan

region:

Asia and the Pacific

---

eval_title:

International labour and environmental standards application in Pakistan's SMEs (ILES) - Midterm Evaluation