The development of a Monitoring and Evaluation system for the Migration project.

Secours Catholique – Caritas France is a service of the Catholic Church and a member of the Caritas Internationalis confederation. The organization’s main mission is to respond to humanitarian disasters, promote comprehensive human development, and advocate for the elimination of the root causes of poverty and violence. The organization aims to actively partner with organizations that share its goals to promote social justice in local, national, and international policies.

The long-term project “Promoting the Protection of Migrants in the Russian Federation through Enhanced Regional Partnerships,” implemented in Russia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, was initially established on an experimental basis by Secours Catholique Caritas France in 2016. Since then, given the project’s relevance in meeting the constantly growing needs in this field, the project is renewed every year with the same goal: to promote and protect the rights of migrants and their families in the Russian Federation as a destination country and in countries of origin, in accordance with international conventions and agreements. The “Migration” project pursues three specific goals:

• Active participation of migrants and members of their families in defending their rights, freedoms, and interests.
• Efficient provision of legal assistance to migrants through an effective referral system.
• Active and effective cooperation with relevant stakeholders and/or interested parties influencing the situation of migrants in countries of origin and destination at the national and international levels.

From September to December 2022, the Evidence team completed a mission to consolidate monitoring and evaluation for a partnership of six organizations working together as a regional network. Since April 2023, Evidence has been serving as a consultant for the Monitoring and Evaluation project. The goal of monitoring is to provide an objective assessment of the project’s implementation level to promptly identify and address any deficiencies during the project’s ongoing implementation and the provision of services outlined in the project.

Monitoring tasks include:

• Ensuring a database based on actual data collected by partner organizations, verifying data collected by partner NGOs.
• Analyzing best practices, lessons learned, and improvement needs of each partner NGO implementing the project.
• Assessing the effectiveness of project implementation.
• Identifying barriers that have arisen during the project implementation.
• Recommendations for enhancing the project’s effectiveness.

The data collection methods in this project include:

• participant observation of trainings
• verification survey of training participants
• selective in-depth interviewing of participants
• analysis of the legal aid database
• content-analysis

Based on the monitoring results, significant gaps in interventions were identified, along with the labor needs of migrants. Recommendations were proposed to improve these interventions according to the needs of migrants.