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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:

Planning and programme design

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action_plan:

The management agrees with all the recommendations above: 1. On Governance and Management Structure Establish Strategic Bi-annual Briefings: The management commits to regularize the convening of the PSC every 6 months; and pursue adhoc high-level strategic between the ILO, the Government of Bangladesh, and Global Affairs Canada (GAC) to ensure continuous oversight, in addition to or regardless of formal Project Steering Committee (PSC) schedules. Formalize a Technical Working Group: Regularize the PIC meetings. At the same time create a smaller thematic meetings involving main partners and stakeholders particularly TMED, DTE. Internally, convene team meeting on a monthly basis with CO backstopping officer to handle major and rapid decision-making to maintain momentum between the larger meetings. 2. On Results Framework and Log frame Refinement Perform Log frame "Hardening": Immediately update the results framework to replace placeholder targets (e.g., "percentage of TBD") with baseline-informed, specific numerical values and clear definitions for all indicators. Shift from National to Project-Specific Data: Phase out reliance on macro-national statistics and replace them with project-generated primary data (surveys, assessments) to ensure indicators accurately reflect the project’s direct impact. Standardize Reporting Templates: Develop a multi-year reporting dashboard that maintains consistent indicators year-to-year, allowing for clear longitudinal tracking of progress.

management_response:

Completed

progress:

Partially achieved

admin_units:

CO-Dhaka

title:

Strengthen the results framework by ensuring greater conceptual clarity on how the projects’ interventions generate transformative and measurable change (the theory of change) and support this with the identification and regular collection of indicators that measure key outputs/outcomes of each of these steps. Greater conceptual clarity of the project’s results framwork is needed to ensure a better understanding of how how the project’s interventions generate the transformative and measurable change envisioned. To address this the it will be necessary to strengthen the existing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to ensure coherence between goals and indicators. The system should not only track outputs but also support evidence-based decision-making, encourage reflection, and generate timely, actionable insights. This should differentiate between different types of constituents, differentiating between implementation partners, and, most importantly, can measure results for women and disadvantaged groups. At present, data collection is systematic, disaggregated and mostly quantitative. Many targets remain unspecified (or unmeasurable), and there is limited consistency between the targets and the indicators being monitored, resulting in fragmented reporting. ProGRESS has laid important groundwork for systematic implementation and has begun to develop indicators that capture change, including those addressing gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) transformation. However, further effort is needed to strengthen the conceptualization of measurable indicators that go beyond outputs to capture transformation and systemic change meaningfully. Recommended changes required include: Agree on a practical management structure that can bring together ILO and the Governments of Bangladesh and Canada with certain regularity. The ILO can organize biannual strategic meetings to ensure progress is shared and decisions are made, even if the full project steering committee or the project implementation committee are unable to meet. Agree on the monitoring tools to be used and discard others. Currently, there are too many monitoring tools (logframe, M&E plan, BLIMS, detailed activity mapping, results chain, annua work plan). Some suggested actions to achieve this include o Identify clear and measurable targets in the log frame (some are still to be defined or left undefined, such as “percentage of…” or “# of workshops”). o Ensure indicators selected have realistic measuring tools (and do not rely on national figures) and are regularly updated. o Ensure reporting derives from these and year-to-year consistency in reporting, which shows continuity. Incorporate qualitative monitoring to understand the underlying variables that will enable the identification of variables contributing to success, such as the type of partner and contextual considerations. The BLIMS currently focuses on output level (number of events, number of persons trained, etc.) the evalution recommends the introduction of change indicators (qualitative in nature) to understand, for example, which trainings have a higher employment success rate; what is the employment rate for each partner, by distric, gender, sector and beneficiary group. Which types of events have led to measurable impacts (e.g., agreements or new partnerships)? Versus others that have not. Increased focus away from the activities and towards understanding what if those activies led to any changes. Systematize post-training monitoring. The project has begun post-training monitoring in the form of the tracer survey. Soon to be launched, the Graduate Tracking and Management systems and standards for post-training follow-up must be systematized. Promote partners’ participation in and use of monitoring systems for their own successful management and quality oversight, with the hope that they will incorporate good practices (such as data disaggregation or post-training monitoring) i

project_symbols:

BGD/20/05/CAN

url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/recommendations/2370909

information_source:

Country Office

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