Association for Promoting Social Action (APSA) – A Critical Review of the Organisation and its Programmes for the Urban Poor and Vulnerable Children

Background

The Association for Promoting Social Action (APSA) is a non-governmental organisation that works with child labourers, street children and other children in distress as well as the larger communities of the urban slums in Bangalore and Hyderabad through a combination of institutional and outreach projects. Motivated by the motto 'For Development without Exploitation', it has worked at the grassroots and the national and state policy levels in partnership with communities to help them realise their rights as humans and citizens for twenty-six years.

Purpose/objective

The evaluation is a mid-term evaluation, being conducted within the agreement period of 2004 - 2008 between FORUT and APSA. The evaluation is intended to be a useful tool for APSA internally, with an impact assessment as a valuable input in their project planning for the years to come, and might provide inputs for learning and for further development of the organisation.
The evaluation was conducted in two parts and has two virtually parallel perspectives;
1. The first is a standard project follow up evaluation addressing the progress of the project and the results achieved.
2. The second looks into the hypothesis of whether APSA as an organisation is a learning organisation? And if this is the case - is there a connection between this organisation's ability to learn and the impact of its project activities?
The following issues should also be covered: efficiency, effectiveness, impact, relevance and sustainability.

Methodology

Methodology: The methodology used in the evaluation of APSA was as indicated in the terms of reference, and was carried out over a period of a month - over three weeks. The methodologies were largely qualitative, and included:
- Sharing objectives. In initial sessions, the objectives of the evaluation were comprehensively shared with staff in Kannada (in Bangalore) and Hindi (in Hyderabad) to ensure comprehension and rapport building.
- Project presentations, followed by group interviews of project staff. Staff associated with different projects made presentations related to the vision, objectives, history, and major achievements, and challenges of the project. This was followed by group interview of the project staff by the team for clarifications, challenges of assumptions, understanding constraints, etc.
- Extensive interviews with senior management. Interviews were carried out with the three directors to understand historical, strategic and context-related issues.
- Field visits were made to representative project areas in Bangalore and Hyderabad to understand representative sections of the urban poor and areas of the city worked with, nature of service delivery and to interact directly with primary stakeholders of projects
- Group and individual interviews with primary beneficiaries. Interviews were carried out with different groups of beneficiaries related to service delivery carried out by APSA and benefits.
- Interviews with secondary stakeholders, including representatives of government departments and organizations. Interviews on awareness of APSA's work was carried out in interviews with many different secondary stakeholders including: representatives of local NGOs, representatives of multilateral organizations, representatives of banks, representatives from education (schools), Government departments, elected local government representatives, representatives of CBOs.
- Use of instruments to study organizational capacity. The Discussion-Oriented Self Assessment Questionnaire was used to stimulate discussion and assessment of different aspects of organizational capacity among staff at the coordinators level in Bangalore and Hyderabad in a whole day session.
- Interactive exercises were used for rapport building and reducing stress related to the evaluation, as well as to understand APSA's history and organizational structure.

Key findings

APSA's work has been successful, innovative and beneficial for its partner communities throughout its wide range of projects and the wide range of issues with which it deals, especially those related to child rescue, care and rehabilitation, youth development and working for the rights and financial sustainability of the urban poor. All this is underpinned and focused by a consistent adherence to the application of a coherent, rights-based perspective. Its list of achievements encompasses, among many others, housing rights for slum communities, education and training provided for children and youths from disadvantaged backgrounds and the creation of a replicable, sustainable group savings model that has led to women from these vulnerable communities accessing national loans totalling approximately $1.2 million.

APSA's work has been consistent throughout the project, policy and advocacy levels. Beneficiaries and partners communities, from the rescued child labourers who go to school through the education project to the urban homeless communities who have secured voting and food rights with the help of the urban homeless project, expressed a high level of satisfaction with APSA's work and many also noted that, due to the success of APSA's intervention they were no longer dependent on their help. The overall view we gained from external stakeholders such as other NGOs and government officials was of a reliable organisation of probity.

Main findings from Part 2
Part 2 examines the contextual framework for APSA and considers how it might be relevant to others, as well as explores how its specific experiences may be relevant for a more general audience. The experiences and lessons learned from APSA should be interesting for a wider audience of stakeholders and development actors due to the socio-economic context. APSA demonstrates that it is affordable to combine top-down, policy driven and bottom-up, people-oriented development action for the poor. Such a strategy compensates for donor policies and practices that are splitting implementations and channels of money between the state, private sector and civil society. APSA demonstrates that it is a learning organisation, consistently and flexibly applying action-oriented learning from the field in monitoring, evaluation and re-design of policy and practice at different institutional levels. By following a participative and democratic tradition, APSA opens up for transparent and open communication in decision processes among involved stakeholders.

Recommendations

Needs are primarily related to necessity for consolidation-related measures at this stage, and to secure greater corpus and administration related funding, which can be used to improve areas such as documentation and staff welfare.
The principal recommendations are:
• The board be expanded in size and constitution, and governance and executive functions be separated
• A variety of consolidation measures aimed at improvement and formalisation of governance and internal systems and improved staff welfare
• Staff compensation be improved to take account of increased living costs in Bangalore and Hyderabad
• Focus on documentation and wider communication of APSA's considerable achievements
• Learning from APSA's experience should be transferred among stakeholders in the FORUT-network by the use of case studies and documents that are already available at APSA.