ILO

Back to index

Asia Regional Child Labour Programme - Midterm evaluation

eval_number:

3118

eval_url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/eval/3118

lessons_learned:

themes:

theme:

Data collection & analysis

category:

Organizational issues

---

comments:

Development Partners, CSOs, Researchers/ILO constituents

challenges:

The Government of India was not predisposed to allocating resources to generating knowledge on CL because of the sensitivity of this issue at the national level. Engaging with government authorities in support of implementation of child labour survey became a challenge, and the COVID-19 response was often presented as the reason for not going ahead with the survey.

success:

The ILO has continued to make consolidated efforts through different ongoing programmes in the country to engage with the political and administrative authorities to impress upon them the urgent need for conducting survey on child labour.

context:

COVID-19 also had some influence on this reluctance, as focus was on the impact of the pandemic on the economy. The pandemic hampered almost every aspect of the programme in India, and was cited as the major obstacle to carrying out the surveys., and authorities were less enthusiastic about participating in virtual mode, which was a norm during the pandemic.

description:

Data collection on child labour (CL) is not mere statistical work. The feasibility of such activities might require prior high-level dialogue to give a political and administrative green light for statistical work. This lesson was drawn from Component 1 of the Asia Regional Programme on Child Labour intending to create a credible knowledge base on the extent of child labour, its drivers and causes that informs policies. The proposal was fully relevant for India where there had been no fresh data on child labour in India since 2011. The programme had planned to conduct national and state surveys on child labour, with disaggregated data by gender and age group and a technical and financial proposals with a national agency. However, the proposal received a lukewarm response from the government due to the sensitivity associated with child labour and the implementation was delayed. It was concluded that high-level engagement of policy makers and bureaucrats would have been needed since very beginning of the programme.

administrative_issues:

The project design did not foresee advocacy activities specifically to raise government support to data collection on CL.

url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/lessons/249153

---

location:

country:

Asia and the Pacific - regional

region:

Asia and the Pacific

---

eval_title:

Asia Regional Child Labour Programme - Midterm evaluation