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Improving China’s institutional capacity towards universal social protection - Final evaluation

eval_number:

3087

eval_url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/eval/3087

lessons_learned:

themes:

theme:

Planning and programme design

category:

Organizational issues

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comments:

PARDEV, country directors, project designers, project managers, project officers

challenges:

The project theory of change was not submitted to a rigorous logframe analysis. This led to numerous gaps in project design (notably regarding outcomes and impact) which in combination with the selection of irrelevant indicators from a limited donor catalog under a specific facility effectively disallowed formally according the project positive marks because its success could not be measured using the indicators selected. Also, risk register and logframe were not aligned which could lead to monitoring the wrong risks.

success:

n.a.

context:

Project staff (apparently) has never been trained in project planning techniques and project design and may therefore treat planning tools like mere application forms to fill in without understanding the purpose and the correct procedure.

description:

Project design and project management, including logframe design, selecting and gauging of indicators, risk management, etc. are skills that need to be acquired. Technical qualification for a specific area of intervention does not qualify for project design and management. Managers should not assume that they temselves, CTAs, or NPOs possess project management skills. Managers should also not assume that donor staff will find and correct any mistakes. A very successful project could formally not be rated as successful because indicator selection unnecessarily was erroneous, outcome was unnecessarily by definition unachievable, and logframe defective. There are effective limitations for evaluators to recognize success -- namely when they need to invent the appropriate indicators for the project at the time of the evaluation and then speculate about their values because the project would not have collected them based on erroneous planning.

administrative_issues:

It is imperative to ensure that project managers and ILO staff involved in the technical preparation of project documents are sufficiently trained (including regular refresher trainings) in project design, logical framework analysis (including indicator formulation and gauging), project planning, and risk management and the linkages between them because these skills are indispensable for drawing up project designs that work. It is also good practice to develop these project designs jointly with the stakeholder institutions to achieve sustainable results.

url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/lessons/244053

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location:

country:

China

region:

Asia and the Pacific

---

eval_title:

Improving China’s institutional capacity towards universal social protection - Final evaluation