Creating Change in Children’s Lives – with focus on Child Ombudsperson: An Evaluation of Save the Children’s Child Rights Governance Programme, North West Balkans Case Study

Background   
The regional programme has activities in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH), Serbia and Montenegro with regional networking among Ombudspersons’ institutions via the Child Rights Ombudsman’s Network in South and Eastern Europe (CRONSEE).  Support has been provided to Ombudspersons in the region since 1997 with regional support to Ombudspersons’ institutions provided and coordinated by the Sarajevo North West Balkans office team since around 2000. It has broadly consisted in:
(i) institutional support including operating and staff costs,
(ii) support for regional networking and building the evidence-base through research and special reports, and
(iii) Ombudspersons’ outreach with information and setting up regular communications mechanisms with children (including building skills to communicate with children).

Purpose/objective (including evaluation questions)   
This report is one of 4 country studies focusing on Child Rights Governance (CRG) theme and informs the overall evaluation of CRG globally. The purpose of the overall evaluation were to:
• Provide an overview of types of CRG interventions, including a system to classify types of outcomes and impacts.
• Provide SC with evidence of outcomes and impacts (positive, negative, intended, and unintended) and establishing the causal link between outcomes at system level and outcomes and impacts in children’s lives.
• Provide SC with a manageable methodology to capture outcome and impact from various CRG programmes.

Methodology   
In-country work between 30 Sep. and 7 Oct. 2013 covered three Ombudspersons institutions at national level in BiH and in Montenegro, and at entity level in Republika Srpska (as part of BiH). The team also looked at civil society support and spoke to representatives from child-led groups in Sarajevo and Banja Luka. In Sarajevo. The main framework of analysis was based on Save the Children’s Theory of Change (ToC) from a longer-term perspective to map out change trajectories over time since support to the Ombudspersons institutions was initiated.

Key findings   
Overall Theory of Change level
It was found that the long-term horizon, the shifting roles and the evolving ways of SC’s approach to working with partners, while systematically bridging new forms of interaction were important factors in building and strengthening a child rights implementation system in the region over time. Such longer term systems strengthening, rather than specific CRG interventions, in turn enabled results at scale for children in conjunction with other SC thematic programs.

1. Innovation: From a longer-term perspective, it is clear that there has been major ‘systems innovations’ over time in the way SC managed to position itself in relation to supporting and facilitating the institutional strengthening of Children’s Ombudsman institutions in the post-conflict and volatile transition in the region. It was a niche that other actors and donors either were prevented from entering into (coming with too strong external agendas); or being seen to represent foreign interests whereas SC used its comparative advantage as a ‘neutral’ broker to advance the institutionalization of governance systems for children. The experience illustrates that there is scope for SC to influence governance issues in volatile governance settings and in post-conflict situations by applying some of the lessons learned in NW Balkans.

2. Advocacy around the establishment of the institutions along with quiet diplomacy and knowledge brokering led to the fact that Ombudspersons institutions now are able to exert additional leverage for accountability both nationally and in the region for child rights. In a context where political deadlocks prevail, the regional approach proved to be very valuable to rise above that and to concentrate on issues across the divides

3. Voice: The report found strong evidence of the fact that the voice for children (and to a certain extent of children) has been duly amplified by the establishment and wider recognition of Children’s Ombudspersons institutions nationally and at entity level, as well as regionally through CRONSEE. Ombudspersons’ skills to directly communicate with and involve children in their activities have also been strengthened, as well as their ability to handle individual complaints as an added channel for children to directly voice their concerns

4. Partnerships: The importance of long-term trust building with key institutions like the Ombudsmen’s offices have been highlighted throughout the report. Long-term and trusted partners within the CSO sphere is needed to bring in the long track record and in-depth knowledge about child issues. However, the methods of working of some of these long-term and ‘trusted’ child NGOs may not be the most innovative and up to date. There is a clear danger in being too ‘inward looking’, talking to like-minded, and sharing lessons in the form of published reports only (which someone who is not already in your own ‘interest sphere’ would pick up and read in full).

5. In NW Balkans, SC was identified to be in the phase of systems strengthening at present, moving towards being more of an equal partner rather than the key driver and funder. It will be vital to continue to monitor how well the child rights implementation system functions, and to what extent it interacts with other change systems to effectively integrate child rights into wider social change. 

6. Many of the emerging patterns of interaction are still in need of outside facilitation to bridge divisions or minimise the risk for politicisation. Sustainable funding is also an issue, particularly for Ombudspersons’ institutions and the regional network which, as public institutions, do not have the same opportunity to engage in fundraising. Save the Children could potentially make a contribution – not only in providing the funding from the outside – but to analyse and monitor national budgets to build a case for secured funding through national budgets for the Ombudsperson’s office to fulfil its mandates.

Recommendations   
1. It is of major importance that the system Save the Children have built up, specifically CRONSEE, receives continues support. The system is working well today, but it is still not completely sustainable. There is a risk of losing the long term effects on all the investments if the system loses funding now. This is something to keep in mind when the CRG global initivative launces new working methods and guidance on other interventions.
2. Tracking child rights system performance: Important during the current and future phase of SCI NW Balkan’s CRG interventions will be to set up monitoring systems that will regularly capture child rights systems performance:
a) How well the inter-linkages between the different levels (ombudsperson, children, CSOs, and government) work, to what extent to actors just keep monitoring each other, and to what extent do they align to shift paradigms in the legal or normative frameworks (official or public domains).
b) Better define the desired effects of support to different sub-systems, such as e.g. the support to Children’s Ombudspersons in terms of their perceived legitimacy, reliability (validated through child engagement), credibility and interconnectedness.
c) Self-critically reflect on SC’s added value and role, as well as what types of expertise it needs to draw on as a global movement to usefully tap into and enhance performance.
3. Avoid the ‘bubble effect’ (i.e. only talking to like-minded groups and individuals): monitor how ‘child rights system’ interacts with other systems and movements for social transformation so that children’s issues are not side-lined as a separate issue but are integrated as a core human rights and socio-economic factor at the very heart of the country’s development path.
4. Save the Children needs to strengthen the documentation of results. Efforts to come up with global indicators across the SC movement have clearly called for many quantitative measures being introduced. These are useful for aggregation, but may mean very little in the broader CRG context. We should consider other alternative approaches and other sources of data. The REAL-framework for indicators is one option suggested by the evaluators
Follow up (with reference to Action Plan) 
A follow-up plan of the CRG evaluation with SCN Management response has been developed and is currently being implemented. See document #269796.

Specific follow up points for North West Balkans:
1. Continue the support of CRONSEE and ombudsman institutions, with a focus on establishing sustainability. Save the Children Norway to inform previous donors of this recommendation from the team.
2. Strengthen the interlinkages between the different program elements, trough common participatory planning, activities and reviews.
3. Establish tools for monitoring the performance of the systems that they are supporting.