The report presents the findings of an external evaluation of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation’s Vocational Skills Development activities. The evaluation portfolio covered 10 projects and programmes in 9 countries (Albania, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Mali, Moldova, Nepal, Nicaragua, Peru). The report is structured along the lines of the OECD DAC Evaluation Criteria.
Methodology: This global-level sector analysis is based on information on ten projects. Four of these projects were reviewed on the basis of fieldwork, and six on the basis of documentary analysis. Four of the latter were executed as comprehensive case studies; for the remaining two, brief meta-evaluations of two to three pages were produced. In the context of fieldwork, data for a complementary quantitative analysis were collected in three countries, where tracer studies were implemented.
Main findings: Overall, SDC’s VSD activities can be rated as ‘satisfactory’. The main strength of the programmes under review is their strong orientation towards the needs of their respective national and local contexts, with an awareness of labour market realities. Strong labour market-orientation is also the basis for the contribution to higher employment by SDC’s VSD activities, as well as for their achievements in the domain of more fundamental changes to VSD systems. The main weakness of activities under review is that target populations are not always being reached, particularly when it comes to socio-economically disadvantaged people and females. In a similar vein, evidence from this report shows that many of the activities are not contributing to higher incomes in a significant way. As we have seen, achieving impact remains a challenge, even more so if a long-term perspective is adopted. In order to continue to achieve satisfactory results, it will therefore be important to focus on the key strengths of SDC’s VSD activities, i.e. the strong context orientation and the efforts to involve representatives from the world of work (notably employers and self-employed) in planning and delivery of training. In order to improve performance, however, the team believes that it will be important to increase efforts to constantly and holistically monitor the effects of interventions, not only at the level of individual projects, but also across regions.