An evaluation framework for USAID-funded tip prevention and victim protection programs

Did USAID (US Agency for International Development) programs reduce the vulnerability of the victims to trafficking? The purpose of this report is to develop an evaluation framework for USAID prevention and victim protection programs that address trafficking in persons (TIP).

The paper illustrates that prevention programs support campaigns focusing on public awareness, education, advocacy, income generation, and demand reduction. However, protection and victim assistance programs provide shelters and targeted services for identified and potential victims of trafficking. The document presents the following set of recommendations for USAID:

• hire professional evaluators who carefully review the logic model and develop evaluation questions in conjunction with stakeholders involved in the program design
• review the program in context of other work being done to identify common intervention components
• set priorities for information to be collected, based on the logic model; utilise indicators to measure what is needed, and provide training to those collecting the data
• maintain a record of local patterns of trafficking to build a representation of what populations need services and who is at risk
• collect and disseminate lessons learned about effective practices and their relative and absolute impacts for different groups and different ways of being vulnerable to or emerging from trafficking
• in the long term, consider mission-wide or sector-wide evaluation plans to ascertain how different TIP prevention and protection programs work together to affect the incidence of trafficking
  

Furthermore, the authors suggest developing multiple databases to help consolidate data collected for the impact evaluation.