Development of Out-of-school Youth Monitoring and Evaluation System (OSYMES) for USAID Opportunity 2.0 Program

Abstract

The USAID-funded Opportunity 2.0 (O2) program supports the Philippine education system in providing second-chance opportunities for 180,000 out-of-school youth (OSY) to pursue employment, entrepreneurship, or further education. A crucial element of the program is the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system, which ensures effective program implementation and resource utilization. However, the current M&E system, M&E Insight, developed by the Education Development Center (EDC) in the US, has faced challenges in meeting the evolving data and reporting needs of the program. The local M&E team, with limited expertise in the system’s underlying programming language (C#), and the complex process of change management with the US office, struggled to address these issues promptly. As a result, the team resorted to manual data entry and consolidation through Youth Trackers, which presented challenges in data validation, deduplication, and report generation.

To address these challenges, the Out-of-School Youth Management and Evaluation System (OSYMES) was created to improve data collection, reduce reliance on manual processes, and ensure more accurate and timely reporting. Built with PHP, OSYMES offers a more flexible and user-friendly interface, enabling the local M&E team to quickly adapt to evolving program requirements. The system also incorporates automated deduplication and multithreading to enhance processing efficiency, while leveraging cloud-based services through AWS Lambda and S3 to optimize resource management. Additionally, the inclusion of a reporting dashboard provides stakeholders with real-time reports to support decision-making. By addressing the limitations of M&E Insight, OSYMES represents a significant step forward in enhancing data management and improving the overall effectiveness of the O2 program's efforts to support out-of-school youth in the Philippines.