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Effective Practices |
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What
is an Effective Practice?Determining Best Practices and Lessons Learned
| The debate about effective versus best practice is academically contentious - and there is a definite difference. Here are some basics on best practice: |
The YES Campaign's Global Knowledge Resource (GKR) provides a central location for what is already considered best and effective practices in the field of youth employment and livelihood promotion. This has resulted in a collection of what others (for example the ILO, OECD, UNDP and USAID) consider as best or effective practice.
Good practice in the field of youth employment and livelihoods refers to approaches, which deliver the most beneficial outcomes. It can be defined in terms of both the impact on the development of the actual livelihood programme (for example entrepreneurship training) and the performance of the programs in achieving its objectives. In this context, impact refers to changes in capacity and performance at four levels: the individual level (or in terms of a livelihood index); micro-level or institutional level; broader changes in society, especially at a household level; and macro-level changes in the policy and regulatory environment.
The following are the general performance criteria that most best practice studies use:
- Outreach - in terms of the numbers of individuals, enterprises and organizations reached by an intervention;
- Efficiency - which refers to the cost and rate at which inputs are converted to outputs, although it should be emphasized that 'efficiency' in itself is not an indicator of the impact of an intervention;
- Effectiveness - in achieving the various objectives of the employment or livelihood interventions, which often means the extent to which they are relevant to development goals, including a comparison of impact with cost; and
- Sustainability - which can be considered, in terms of both the extent to which the service provided can be financed through client fees, and the degree of durability of the resulting changes in the employment / livelihood and at other levels.
All of these criteria relate to certain aspects of youth employment promotion and livelihood support. However, there are very few interventions for which it is possible to measure performance in relation to all these criteria. In general, a combination of factors are considered, especially based upon availability of information and data.
In essence, the collection of best practice requires field evaluation and to some extent longitudinal studies to be truly considered "best". As opposed to this, effective practices are much more simpler to collect and source, and are basically a series of "principles" and "processes" of what works in the field - in other words, the distillation of lessons learned from the field.
The GKR strives to centralize and collect both best and effective practices.
