Monitoring and Oversight of Technical Cooperation Projects
OCFT carries out monitoring and oversight activities to assess the performance, effectiveness, and impact of DOL-funded technical cooperation projects to combat exploitive child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking internationally. The principal monitoring and oversight tools used by OCFT to ensure all project activities are covered and results are achieved in a timely manner and in compliance with U.S. regulations are:
- Project workplans and performance monitoring plans
- Technical and financial progress reports
- Site visits
- Project audits and attestation engagements
- Project evaluations
- Impact Evaluations
Project Evaluations
Midterm evaluations take place as close as possible to the mid-point of the project. Their intended purpose is to evaluate the project to date and to provide recommendations regarding possible changes that may improve project performance during its second half of implementation.
Final evaluations take place close to the end of the project and focus on assessing project impact, identifying lessons learned and good practices, and considering how project-supported efforts might be sustained in the country. Certain projects undergo expanded final evaluations that often include a limited "repeat baseline" or follow-up study. The aim of such evaluations is to try to look at the details of a sample of beneficiaries to document how involvement in project activities may have affected their lives, and to learn from these experiences.
Many evaluation reports of OCFT-funded projects are available on this website. These reports can be accessed via the map on ILAB's home page by clicking on the region and country of interest.
Impact Evaluations
OCFT has also funded impact evaluations of specific project interventions to assess their effectiveness in reducing child labor in seven projects in Bolivia, Egypt, El Salvador, Ghana, Peru, Philippines, and Thailand. The impact evaluations will help to address existing knowledge gaps on what types of interventions are most effective in preventing or combating child labor, and assist OCFT in designing more effective and sustainable technical assistance projects. The results of the impact evaluation work will also provide policymakers, donors, project implementers, and other interested parties with tangible evidence of what specific types of interventions (including such services as education, training, and livelihood assistance) have a positive impact on reducing child labor. Additionally, the information generated through this work will identify replicable and scalable activities that can be used to guide policies and improve program design and effectiveness. The datasets and reports for the Bolivia and Egypt baselines are available at https://OCFTdata.dol.gov.
