Strengthening children`s rights - Mid term evaluation report 2011 Final

Background:
The Norwegian Lutheran Mission Mongolia (NLM-M) is implementing the Strengthening Children’s Rights Project (SCR) in selected soums and khoroos of Ulaanbaatar city and Khovd Aimag. Main objectives of the SCR project aim to promote the rights of the child and to improve situations of vulnerable children in target areas. Moreover, project activities should focus on building capacity of the target group through raising public awareness, changing behavior and attitudes regarding child rights, and conducting various advocacy actions. SCR has four components: Community development; Children in dormitories; Social work education; Advocacy work.

Purpose/objective:
The purpose of the evaluation was to provide an objective assessment of progress made by SCR towards its objectives and the likelihood of it meeting its overall objectives by 2013; to identify opportunities for improving performance. In addition, the evaluation was required to comment on the continued relevance of SCR to national and local development priorities. It will be used to promote organizational learning within SCR.

Methodology:
The teams relied on qualitative methods, triangulation of information whenever possible, and meetings with a large range of stakeholders. These methods ncluded: Observation, including transect walks with dormitory children, and spot checks; Interviews with key informants; Workshops with dormitory children, and also with Young Journalists in Jargalant; Meetings with Local Working Groups and Bellwether interviews with key informants.

Key findings:
• SCR is one of the successful projects in Mongolia which is intending to contribute to the implementation of child right, to create healthy, safe environment for children.
• Initial efforts making strategy for advocacy should be strengthened and continued; selection of specific provision of rights of the child and develop results based strategy
• Evaluation process witnessed number of positive results in all evaluated project components, in same time revealed concrete critical points that occurred within project implementation.
• The project focus is scattered into too wide audience, defined too many priority goals and objectives resulted  into carrying great deal of activities in a short period of time which lead scattered and loss of human and financial resources. 
• During the project development process national, international policy documents were reviewed and linked with the project policy was good, however, due to lack of analysis of these documents without careful consideration and an adjustment of funding availability, human and financial resources directly copied or imitated this lead into scattered focus, and to have many priority goals and objectives affected negatively to the final result as this is continuing. 
• Strengthening Children’s Rights project intending to increase participation of local partners and stakeholders however due to not having internal monitoring and appraisal system within the project management structure lead into poor result of project activities.
Recommendations:
• To narrow down project priorities based on project objectives, goals and expected outcomes, to improve project coordination and to enhance the current scattered situations;
• To strengthen internal monitoring system within the project management including reporting and accountability mechanisms; 
• To take urgent and consistent actions aimed to strengthen responsibility, transparency and accountability of project management ; 
• To focus on sustainability of project achievements and to develop and implement policy to ensure that local government agencies or NGOs are capable to continue initiatives and strategies provided within the project;
• To introduce internal procurement processes, or adopt and utilize procurement procedures of international organizations.
• To improve community capacity to deal with domestic violence, child negligence and any abuse situations, to strengthen social work education curriculum and syllabus in such regards;
• To expand coverage of trainings while narrowing down training topics, by covering all students, training managers and social workers which will positively impact to project sustainability;

Comments from the organisation, if any:
The project has been restructured and narrowed down to only focus on community development and children living in dormitories. Instead of targeting all the rights of the child, the project is particularly focusing on three of them.