This short document presents the progress of YES! at three levels:
- Number of NEETs benefitted from our project’s interventions as of 31st March 2021;
- How we work to organise our Trust-based Model and interventions, increase outreach and target better our services to NEETs; and
- How we assess what we are doing in order to constantly improve our services and monitor results, in both quantitative and qualitative dimensions.
1 – Number of NEETs
The number of NEETs who benefit from implementing partners’ interventions per country and per activity, as of 31.03.2021 was the following:
KPI’s selected from the above mentioned data are presented in the infographic that follows.
2 – How YES! Works to increase outreach and improve interventions
To understand better how we organize our work, we offer as an example how our IT partner (Micro) describes its experience and qualitative dimensions of their work under YES!, which result from the trust based partnership approach – the core idea that our project builds upon.
Microfinanza: how we employed our Trust based Partnership approach to improve our territorial expansion and service offers to NEETs.
During the first 2 and a half years of the project Microfinanza had the chance to work and cooperate with many public and private entities, such as ANPAL Servizi (Sicilia), Associazione Ulisse, CISL Vicenza (with the Partita Viva project), Forward Advisory Srl, Associazione Microlab (part of the YBI), Insieme società cooperativa sociale a responsabilità limitata, Aquaponic Design, and Extrafondente Open Source, in different regions, Veneto, Sicilia, Puglia, Calabria, Emilia-Romagna. In the meanwhile, we also strengthened our contacts with microfinance institutions, such as Banca Etica and Permicro, and two funds focused on impact investing, as potential funding partners for beneficiaries.
The aim has always been to build a broader and broader “Trust-Based Partnership Model”, and we are still building some more collaborations with other private and public entities with the aim of widening the training offer, but also to reach out a “darker side” of beneficiaries and meet the “real” demand of those harder to reach NEETs. There is actually a vast offer of trainings and path dedicated to NEETs, but in many cases what is really missing, especially in times of COVID-19, is a one to one long lasting support provided to the beneficiaries involved.
Starting from all the lessons learned, and the challenges we had to face, there is the need to broaden the partnership, to expand in different regions and strengthen the ongoing relationship, also exploiting synergies with and national programmes, other projects, and entities, which work with the same target (just think about Invitalia, or Garanzia Giovani). We are gathering very positive feedback and results from the services provided, in terms of proactivity, self-efficacy, and positive results also in terms of jobs found.
Still, there is so much to be done. Different regions and beneficiaries display and deserve different services, so that’s key to widen the extent of the implementation, and deepen the analysis and assessment of territorial particular features, to come up with a more and more efficient and effective service and functioning model.
Implemented by MicroFinanza
3 – How YES! Works to assess its progress and impact on NEETs
Our impact management framework assesses the end beneficiaries’ progress via different steps on the staircase to self-/employment or education. The ongoing impact evaluation shows an increase in proactivity (“I want to do it”) and self-efficacy (“I can do it”) for participants to the assessment in all four implementation countries.
Additionally, 11% of the people who were not in employment nor education at the beginning of the intervention reported a positive change in labor status from pre- to post-intervention given that they found a job, started their own business, or enrolled in a formal education institution (“YES! I did it!”).
