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Promoting Gender Responsive Enterprise and Skills Development Systems (ProGRESS): Feminizing Bangladesh’s Skills and Enterprise Systems and Labour Market - Midterm evaluation

eval_number:

3337

eval_url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/eval/3337

location:

country:

Bangladesh

region:

Asia and the Pacific

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eval_title:

Promoting Gender Responsive Enterprise and Skills Development Systems (ProGRESS): Feminizing Bangladesh’s Skills and Enterprise Systems and Labour Market - Midterm evaluation

recommendations:

date:

2026-05-24 00:00:00.0

themes:

theme:

Organizational issues

category:

Knowledge management

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action_plan:

The project agrees with the need for systematic knowledge integration. To address this, M&E Officer will increase focus to synthesize existing studies and BLIMS data into accessible knowledge products. Crucially, this exercise will be sequenced to follow the Strategic Review to ensure relevance. We will also implement a 'Learning-to-Action' protocol where component leads must formally integrate these findings into their bi-annual work plans, ensuring that the evidence base directly informs project replication and scaling efforts. This will be further supported by the Employment Sub-Cluster to ensure cross-project synergy and prevent the loss of institutional memory. Employment Sub-Cluster and Cluster 1 (Jobs and Social Protection), will allow for leveraging resources from other projects, continue the co-creation and launch of joint activities. These will lead to avoiding overlap, greater impact and better value for money. The cluster will also serve as the platform for immediate knowledge sharing, along with respective DWT, ROAP and HQ relevant colleagues. This process will match strategic priorities and ILO tools, like skills needs anticipation, market systems development, and GESI, to improve implementation quality, encourage the use of effective models, and support inclusive outcomes by coordinating better with national stakeholders and partners.

management_response:

Completed

progress:

Partially achieved

admin_units:

CO-Dhaka

title:

Ensure that success stories, lessons learned, and findings from knowledge products collected during the first half of the project feed into and inform the three project components going forward. The project has generated a considerable body of studies and analytical work, many of which are still in the process of being finalized and/or published. Alongside these outputs, substantial data have also been collected through the BLIMS system, tracer surveys, and a series of strategic reviews. Taken together, these represent a rich evidence base with significant potential to inform decision-making, strengthen implementation, and enhance accountability. However, the lessons and findings emerging from these studies and research initiatives have not yet been fully capitalized upon—if at all. Similarly, insights and learning from other previous and ongoing projects have been only marginally incorporated. This lack of systematic knowledge integration limits the project’s overall effectiveness and constrains its ability to leverage existing evidence for larger-scale planning, replication, and impact. Addressing this gap will likely require additional resources dedicated to knowledge management, documentation, and harvesting of lessons learned. One option would be to engage an independent consultant, a young professional, or an intern to support the systematic organization and synthesis of findings. Such a role could focus on developing a structured process for consolidating evidence from diverse sources and ensuring that knowledge products are not only produced but actively used. This would involve an initial step of systematizing findings from studies, reviews, and monitoring systems, followed by close collaboration with component leads to ensure these insights are disseminated and embedded across the project cycle (see figure 17). To maximize value, this process should be carefully aligned with—and ideally undertaken right after—the strategic review under Recommendation 1. By doing so, the project can ensure that the documentation and learning system is coherent, strategically relevant, and positioned to inform both ongoing implementation and future programming directly. Over time, a stronger culture of learning and knowledge sharing would also contribute to greater efficiency, adaptability, and sustainability of results.

project_symbols:

BGD/20/05/CAN

url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/recommendations/2370899

information_source:

Country Office

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