UNCDF has launched the Mid-term Evaluation for the “Jobs, Skills, and Finance (JSF) for Women and Youth” Programme.

Launched in 2018, the JSF Programme is funded by the European Union (EU) and is implemented by UNCDF in partnership with the International Trade Centre (ITC) and under the tutelage of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs of The Gambia.

JSF aims to contribute in stabilizing the economic, social and security situation of the country during the democratic transition by facilitating social inclusion and employment of the youth and women, with a specific emphasis on promoting gender equality and addressing climate change.

The Evaluation is designed and managed by UNCDF Evaluation Unit and will be conducted by independent experts from Oxford Policy Management.

Support to Youth and Women in the Gambia

JSF was designed to address persistent challenges in The Gambia such as lack of job opportunities for youth and women, low levels of financial inclusion, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. To overcome these challenges, the Programme focuses on fostering inclusive and sustainable growth as well as creating employment for youth and women by establishing a local ecosystem where youth, women, local governments and SMEs are supported to access the resources they need to grow. It does so by working on three distinct, but interlinked, result areas:

• Creating sustainable and equal employment opportunities for youth and women;
• Improving Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET), skills development and apprenticeship opportunities, and making them more accessible to youth and women;
• Improving the regulatory framework on the financial sector.

As part of the JSF Programme, UNCDF is also implementing its Local Climate Adaptive Living (LoCAL) Facility in The Gambia. LoCAL is designed to help governments channel global climate adaptation financing to the local level. The innovative performance-based climate resilience grant (PBCRG) approach of the Facility is used in the Gambia to support job creation, particularly in the green economy. Local authorities and communities are supported in identifying needs in priority sectors and in planning investments accordingly.

Details of the evaluation

The evaluation will provide UNCDF and partners with evaluative evidence to answer questions around the relevance, coherence, efficiency, effectiveness, and the likely pathways towards impact and sustainability of JSF while understanding the context and challenges in which JSF operated. It is expected to assess results to date from the first years of implementation, as well as the likelihood of JSF meeting its end goals on the basis of current design, human resources, choice of partners, and implementation strategy. It will also help understand better how the Programme is working with UN agencies and other UNCDF partners.

Based on the results of the evaluation, and in support of the principles of adaptive management, the evaluation will validate and/or refine JSF’s theory of change and intervention logic as necessary to support onward implementation.

The evaluation will be transparent, participatory and ready to use. It will use a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to capture direct results as well as (likely) contributions to improved opportunities in education, skills development and employment of youth, women, and the most vulnerable, as well as improved financial market development and the financing and functioning of climate-adaptive local economic development systems in the Gambia.