EVALUATION OF THE SOUTHERN INDIA HOTSPOT

Grantee: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex

The Institute of Development Studies will partner with the Freedom Fund in the evaluation and learning activities of its anti-slavery work in southern India. The Praxis Institute of Participatory Practices will also provide technical assistance.

The Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK (IDS) has a global reputation for its work on International Development. IDS was ranked as the top UK University affiliated think tank and third in the world by the 2012 Global Go to Think Tanks report conducted by the University of Philadelphia.

The Participation research cluster at IDS is probably the leading participatory research methods centre in the world. It has over 20 years experience of pioneering and disseminating new participatory research approaches.

The main components of these learning and evaluation activities are:

1. Assess the relevance of partners’ interventions and identify priority socio-economic indicators.

IDS will work with most of our partner NGOs in southern India to engage in a comprehensive process of collection and analysis of “causal accounts”. This process will provide IDS with an unbiased and rigorous means of assessing the relevance of the hotspot interventions, and for partner NGOs to identify several issues where concentrated action research would be most useful.

The process has now been completed, and the report is here.

2. Measure the change in slavery prevalence and the associated socio-economic changes

IDS will work with Praxis to train partners to conduct baseline and follow up assessments in a sample of the communities they work in to measure the prevalence of different kinds of slavery and other key indicators related to slavery. A participatory group method that can provide robust measurements will be used.

3. Support selected partners to strengthen their strategic planning, M&E and learning

IDS will undertake action research alongside our partner NGOs on several key issues related to slavery, using this to document how partners generate their change strategies. It will also assist them to improve their collection of data for their on-going monitoring of work and to inform program planning.

4. Assess the hotspot as a whole for the relevance and effectiveness of the interventions

IDS will provide an overall evaluation of the results achieved by the three-year hotspot program, highlighting learning for the Freedom Fund, its local partners and the wider anti-slavery movement. This will include a reflection of how local factors have influenced partners’ work and the hotspot as a whole and an assessment of whether the program is, and is likely to, contribute to a reduction in levels of slavery.

5. Disseminate ongoing findings through the research accompaniment.

IDS and the Freedom Fund will share findings of the “causal narratives” analysis with media inside India and through the Freedom Fund’s Research Bulletin, and will share findings of the prevalence study with relevant officials within the districts and at state level. The final evaluation will be available through the Freedom Fund’s website, and components of the research will be turned into journal articles and other social media articles.

The IDS Mid-Term Review of the program completed in October 2016 is available here.