The Better Work programme lead by ILO is designed to develop ways to address the issue of poor working conditions which remains pervasive across the global garment industry. The programme implements strategies to improve the working conditions of the sixty million workers across the developing world who rely on the garment industry for their livelihoods, 80% of them female. Better Work has been implemented for over 15 years, and currently covers 12 countries across the world (9 of which are covered by the current project).
The Better Work framework for strategic use of evaluations foresees a global, final independent evaluation of Phase IV in the first half of 2022 for the current funding cycle. The evaluation adopted a “clustered approach” which means that the evaluation built on national-level evaluations carried out in recent years, as well as the work of Better Work Global team, covering July 2017 to June 2022. The evaluation framework followed the OECD/DAC criteria, namely relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability.
Given that multiple national and cross-national evaluations and studies have been carried out already, the initial phase of the evaluation served to aggregate existing evaluation data. The subsequent interview and survey programmes (covering Better Work and ILO staff, as well as national-level constituents, donors, buyers and other partners) focused more on the global and comparative perspective, addressing the gaps between the research questions and desk research results. Five thematic case studies looked more in-depth in specific priorities of Better Work across the countries. The first draft of the evaluation findings, conclusions and recommendations were discussed in a stakeholder validation workshop.
The final result of the evaluation provided insights to ILO on how Better Work Phase IV has performed, but also provided lessons learned and recommendations towards Phase V of the Better Work programme.