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Monitoring and Evaluation Manual for

Sport-for-Employability Programmes

Objective

To develop a user-friendly monitoring and evaluation Manual that can help sports-based organisations that aim to increase the level of employability of the young people they work with.

The Manual should enable these organisations to work in a more efficient and effective way for delivering their programmes. It should help them to design and organise sport-for-employability programmes more systematically and should provide them with a better understanding on how to measure the outcomes and impact.

To include as wide a variety of programmes and activities as possible, the Manual explores the ambiguous term employability and distinguishes between hard and soft skills and outlines research-based and employer-defined components of employability. It is argued that sports represent a variety of different social relationships and social processes, in which it is assumed that certain types of learning may occur. Reflecting this variety the Manual adopts the Council of Europe’s Revised European Sports Charter Definition of Sport (2001):

“Sport means all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim at expressing or improving physical fitness and mental well-being, forming relationships or obtaining results in competitions at all levels.”

The Manual argues that sport on its own will make a limited contribution to developing employability skills and that sport plus is required – sport needs to be amended and/or supported with other activities and workshops, with an especially important role for mentoring. The Manual defines a series of relevant outcomes related to employability and provides scales with which to measure them and explains how to interpret the data.

The Manual uses a Theory of Change methodology, while applying best practice data from Europe and India, supported by diverse stakeholders. By mid 2021, this multi-stakeholder cooperation will publish a user-friendly Manual that will help sports-based organisations to increase the level of employability of the young people they work with.

The MONITOR project is a collaborative partnership, coordinated by the VUB with input and expertise from different sport-for-employability partners (Street League, Sport 4 Life, Oltalom, Rheinflanke, Rotterdam Sportsupport, and Magic Bus), executed with assistance from ENGSO Youth and with support from ILO.

Workshops

After a review of relevant M&E measures, the project coordinator (VUB) visited the sport-for-employability partner organisations. Apart from assisting the organisations with developing their programme theory, the workshops explored how each of the sport-for-employability partner organisations organises their M&E. Based on these insights, a draft manual – that includes an introduction to programme theory development and M&E, tools for data collection, specific Excel spreadsheets for data analysis and information regarding interpretation of results – is produced.