Suchergebnisse

The employment social enterprise (ESE) model can provide an opportunity to create a financially viable business that helps individuals with employment barriers become integrated into the labor force. This research studied eight ESEs. Findings suggest that by applying private‐sector business principles to a workforce development programs, social enterprises can provide participants with meaningful and valuable work experience, while offsetting program costs. Analysis identified four promising practices that social entrepreneurs should adopt when setting up a new enterprise. Enterprises should (a) provide soft‐skill training and social services to participants; (b) operate at a size that allows for economies of scale in production and the provision of support services; (c) have few occupational skill requirements; and (d) hire supervisors with both industry knowledge and the capacity to support individuals with employment barriers.

AbstractThis article examines the effects of "intensive services" provided by the Adult and Dislocated Worker programs, two of the largest employment service programs in the United States. Intensive services include one‐on‐one staff assistance—assessments, coaching, career counseling, and service referrals. The study was a randomized controlled trial conducted in 28 randomly selected sites, with the randomization of job seekers to research groups with or without access to intensive services, yielding study findings with both internal and external validity. Using survey and administrative earnings data, we find that access to intensive services increased earnings by between 7 and 20 percent over a three‐year follow‐up period; these benefits exceed program costs from the perspective of both taxpayers and society as a whole. Although impacts were larger for more educated job seekers and in areas with higher rates of unemployment, impacts were similar across many other subgroups, including for adults compared with dislocated workers.

BackgroundThe Government of Bihar (GoB) in India, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and several non-governmental organisations launched the Ananya program aimed to support the GoB to improve reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health and nutrition (RMNCHN) statewide. Here we summarise changes in indicators attained during the initial two-year pilot phase (2012-2013) of implementation in eight focus districts of approximately 28 million population, aimed to inform subsequent scale-up.MethodsThe quasi-experimental impact evaluation included statewide household surveys at two time points during the pilot phase: January-April 2012 ("baseline") including an initial cohort of beneficiaries and January-April 2014 ("midline") with a new cohort. The two arms were: 1) eight intervention districts, and 2) a comparison arm comprised of the remaining 30 districts in Bihar where Ananya interventions were not implemented. We analysed changes in indicators across the RMNCHN continuum of care from baseline to midline in intervention and comparison districts using a difference-in-difference analysis.ResultsIndicators in the two arms were similar at baseline. Overall, 40% of indicators (20 of 51) changed significantly from baseline to midline in the comparison districts unrelated to Ananya; two-thirds (n = 13) of secular indicator changes were in a direction expected to promote health. Statistically significant impact attributable to the Ananya program was found for 10% (five of 51) of RMNCHN indicators. Positive impacts were most prominent for mother's behaviours in contraceptive utilisation.ConclusionsThe Ananya program had limited impact in improving health-related outcomes during the first two-year period covered by this evaluation. The program's theories of change and action were not powered to observe statistically significant differences in RMNCHN indicators within two years, but rather aimed to help inform program improvements and scale-up. Evaluation of large-scale programs such as Ananya using theory-informed, ...