13 Oct External Midterm Evaluation

Mercy Corps (MC), in a consortium led by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) and including Aga Khan Foundation – Afghanistan (AKF-A) and the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees (DACAAR), work jointly to promote inclusive (re)integration of returnees, internally displaced people (IDPs), and potential migrants in 12 provinces, which are highly susceptible to migration and/or experience high return rates. Mercy Corps is the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) lead of the consortium, providing leadership in tools’ design and standardization as well as M&E coordination among the partner NGOs. MC contracted ACE to perform the midterm evaluation for this project. This midterm evaluation aims at generating lessons learnt and guiding the consortium partners to adjust their implementation activities for the second half of the project in order to achieve the expected outcomes and contribute towards the overall objective. The primary users of the mid-term evaluation are consortium partners and the donor, EU. ACE will develop the final report after performing below main activities:

• Assess TAALIM’s effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, sustainability, impact, and gender mainstreaming.
• Identify if there are significant gaps in the theory of change  and make necessary recommendations to the consortium on what adaptive measures to take.
• Identify the contribution that TAALIM has made on strengthening the non-formal technical vocational education training in Afghanistan and recommend areas of further improvement.
• Recommend context-specific remedial actions that would result in greater assurance that TAALIM achieves its expected outcomes, and there is greater synergy with all stakeholders. These recommendations will pay particular attention to the challenges associated with post-graduation support and linking graduates to the private sector.