CEP External Impact Assessment – 3/3 – Key Outcomes

As part of its holistic approach to eradicate child labor in mica collection and mica mining in India, the Responsible Mica Initiative has developed Community Empowerment Programs (CEP). Implementation of these programs in two sets of 40 villages has been carried out by two consortium of local CSO partners.

The two consortium, BJSAM and CESAM, started the implementation of CEP in 2018 and 2019 respectively, each of them over a three-year period.

CEP implementation by BJSAM comes to an end in March 2021, after three years marked by an extensive baseline assessment, the building of a close relationship between mica-dependent communities and program partners, key successes achieved thanks to coordinated, efficient and targeted actions, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Focused on the continuous improvement of its approach, the Responsible Mica Initiative has organized an external impact assessment of CEP to confirm their effective impacts, identify areas for improvement, develop a model-village concept and challenge programs’ and impacts’ sustainability.

Methodology & data sources

The impacts of CEP were assessed based on data coming from four different sources:

Quarterly monitoring & evaluation documents and financial reports, that were provided by RMI,
354 household surveys conducted with a representative sample of households,
30 semi-structured interviews conducted with community leaders, NGOs, teachers and Anganwadi center (AWC) workers,
Where possible, data at endline were compared to comparative data at baseline to assess change over time. Dose-response analysis was used to assess attribution.

Monitoring & Evaluation Results

102% target achievement overall for social security component

194% target achievement for budgeted activities in the livelihood component

99% overall achievement of targets in the health component

94% overall achievement of targets in the education component

Financial Results

Total expenditure was 36.6 millions INR over the 25 months of the program.

Impact results

On the whole, many of the impact results confirmed the relationships outlined in RMI Theory of Change.

Some of the main results are highlighted below:

The installation of resource centers led to more linkages with social security services that in turn led to reduced households’ spendings.
23% more households had a secondary income at endline than at baseline and this was linked to receipt of CEP assets and trainings.
Enrolment in school at endline in the whole population of children aged 6-14 years was high, at 96%.
49% more children were attending school full time at endline compared to baseline, but this was not linked to scholarship grants.

Recommendations

On top of confirming the effective impact of CEP for mica-dependent communities, Im-prove and Y-East teams highlighted areas for improvement:

Strategically, it is recommended to continue with the implementation of efficient activities:
- Keep developing resource centers,
- Keep and optimize start-up grants,
- Keep providing trainings and assets,
- Keep organizing health and nutrition camps,
- Keep modeling Anganwadi centers.
In order to reinforce RMI approach, it is recommended to carry on with the monitoring of all activities implemented under CEP. Key recommendations were shared toward the improvement of RMI monitoring and evaluation framework.

Conclusions – Executive Summary of the study

The Responsible Mica Initiative deeply thanks all stakeholders that took part of the program and the assessment of its impacts, starting with mica communities, as well as RMI CSO partners, Im-Prove and Y-East teams and local community leaders.

Community Empowerment Program will benefit from this first external impact assessment: activities will be optimized, approach will be strengthened. We invite you to follow up with the upcoming implementation of CEP in a new set of villages of the mica belt !

The Executive Summary can be found here.

CEP External Impact Assessment – 3/3 – Key Outcomes

RMI

MICA

PROGRAMS