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Description
The project aims at supporting organisations focused on enhancing youth employment and entrepreneurship to develop tailored impact evaluation strategies. We also focus on creating transnational expert network to increase know-how in the field of impact evaluation, and on encouraging excellence in impact studies among young researchers.
Starting point of our project was to undertake research and draw up a report on existing evaluation standards and practices in partner countries – Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. The work was led by the German expert partner and it served as a foundation for design and development of following outputs: practical tools, e-learnings and workshops created to support the organisations to develop their evaluation competences.
The toolkit „Your leverage to better youth employment projects“ and e-learning “Towards better youth employment projects” are published on the project platform in 4 language versions. The first round of workshops took place with a great success. More than 70 participants underlined the necessity of such activity in the field of impact evaluation and they claimed to learn much more than they have expected.
Currently we are finishing the toolkit and blended-learning under the entrepreneurship evaluation package. We have also started research on how to adjust the tools for organisations working with the specific age group: 25-29 years old. We organise sets of round tables in each country, involved experts are also authors of experts’ studies. This year the Research Excellence Programme was launched – cooperating evaluators will select in total 10 young researchers in each country to lead them in their impact evaluation studies.
Results of the project will be presented during the conferences in every country. Outputs of our project are continuously presented on project platform and promoted via Facebook page.
Summary of project results
Youth Impact project aimed at supporting organisations focused on enhancing youth employment and entrepreneurship by helping them to improve their activities.
As impact evaluation is quoted as one of the weak spots of their interventions and activities organised for young people, we decided to create sets of tools and accompanying methodologies to help them understand better the necessity and advantages of impact evaluation.
But not only we wanted to focus on beginners, we also wanted to support researchers in the respective field in their work, and last but not least we set up a plan to interconnect these two worlds.
Along 3 and half years of implementation of the project our international partnership composed of Czech leading, Polish and Slovak cooperating and German expert partners succeeded in delivering toolkits and accompanying e-learnings focusing on the main themes connected with the impact evaluation. We focused on organisations supporting employment, entrepreneurship of young people between 15 and 24 years old but also we tackled the special group of NEETs from 25-29. All these outputs are available for free on the project platform www.youth-impact.eu in English, Czech, Slovak and Polish.
We tested these outputs with cooperating organisations in each country and we trained more than 150 people to use the tools, to be familiar with the impact evaluation and to be able to implement the use of the tools in their organisations.
We also launched the Excellence programme where we were able to support more than 30 researchers. We supported their work and enabled them to consult their results with mentors but also among each other.
Workshop participants, researchers, beginners and professionals, had also the possibility to meet, discuss and share good practices along round tables or conferences that took place in all countries. They could and still can learn even more from the articles, expert studies or conference publications published also on the project platform.
The wide network of evaluators was created. We were successful in interconnecting more than 200 organisations from participating countries.
The external evaluation of the project itself shows that the participants involved in the project claim their knowledge growth and skills improvement and we are glad that the financing from EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment enabled us to deliver these quality outputs and outcomes.