Monitoring and evaluation

A huge amount of resources are directed towards recovery programmes for children affected by trafficking and exploitation every year. Although funders and donors are often able to calculate the 'inputs', how much money was spent in what area, rarely are donors able to show what impact their funds have had on affected children and what outcomes, whether positive or negative, were due to the funded programmes and projects. 

Outputs versus outcomes

Most organisations are able to provide numbers, 'outputs'; how many children they saw, how many children they provided beds for, how many police officers they trained and how many posters they printed. Although this is all useful information, providing a picture of the scale of the organisation and the types of activities undertaken, this level of information does not allow organisations, or others, to really learn what works and what doesn't and where they may improve work in the future.

Output data tells us little about the child and how they were supported during their recovery. It does not tell us if the child made friends, was able to return home, managed to secure an appropriate job or access education and gain a qualification, or build meaningful and appropriate relationships with adults and carers. Without this information we are not able to learn what works and why for children.

The challenges of monitoring and evaluating programmes

Monitoring and evaluation in the field of recovery is challenging due to the number of actors who are usually involved in the recovery phase which may include health professionals, education providers, social workers, counselors, project workers and family members or carers. Due to the impact of exploitation and trafficking on many different areas of a child's life, 'measuring' how they are recovering and progressing in these different ways can be a huge undertaking.

In many cases project staff are the ones who may be responsible for filling in monitoring and evaluation forms, and may have several different forms and systems in place to meet the demands of a multitude of different bodies. External evaluations do happen in some cases, however an end of programme evaluation may not be able to tell the evaluator much if there is no baseline data available or major gaps in the data.

There are numerous challenges in monitoring and evaluating how effective recovery programmes are, it is one thing to monitor a child whilst in the programme, but once the child leaves or returns home, follow up is tricky and in some cases may not be in the best interests of the child.

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