A collection of resources to help you measure the success of your work or find out about the impact of sport in projects with refugees.
Monitoring and evaluation enable organisations to assess whether initiatives deliver meaningful change that meets the needs of refugees. Key benefits of monitoring and evaluation for sport initiatives include:
- Assessing impact: Evaluate if programmes promote well-being, social integration, and a sense of belonging, using data and feedback from participants.
- Adapting projects: Identify and adjust activities to better suit the needs and interests of refugee participants, ensuring cultural sensitivity and inclusivity.
- Allocating resources: Determine where resources are most effective and make informed decisions to maximise impact.
- Demonstrating accountability: Provide evidence to stakeholders about programme outcomes and responsible resource use.
- Fostering learning: Share best practices and lessons to improve sport initiatives globally and build an evidence base for effective interventions.
- Ensuring sustainability: Use evaluation data to plan long-term strategies, foster community ownership, and strengthen partnerships.
Impact measurement resources for sport for refugee projects
Below is a selection of resources designed to assist you in monitoring and evaluating the impact of your initiative, as well as some key examples of research papers on the topic of sport and refugees.
- Child Friendly Participatory Assessment Tools: A Toolbox of Ideas
The 16 child-friendly participatory assessment tools in this set can be adapted for rapid assessments, monitoring or evaluation. - Child Protection Rapid Assessment Toolkit
This toolkit encourages the use of consistent assessment processes across the child protection sector to minimise required resources, collect data that can be compared across locations and time, and deliver results that are more persuasive to planners, funders and other decision-makers. - Ethical Approaches to Gathering Information from Children and Adolescents in International Settings: Guidelines and Resources
This publication draws attention to commonly accepted principles of medical ethics and human rights as applied to the special needs of young people. It suggests measures that an adult working with children and adolescents must implement throughout the activity’s duration to prevent unintentional harm. - Global Refugee Youth Consultations: Toolkit for Consulting with Youth
A framework within which interested parties can meaningfully consult with the young people they work with. The exercises in the toolkit support young people to better understand and analyse their situations by examining causes and impacts and identifying solutions to the challenges they face. - Listen and Learn: Participatory Assessment with Children and Adolescents
This tool provides a practical, specific ‘how-to’ guide on the participatory assessment process with adolescents and children. It advocates a range of alternative methods that specifically target girls and boys, address the power differential between children and adults, and help build trusting relationships. - Project Cycle Management in Emergencies and Humanitarian Crises Handbook: Situation analysis, strategic planning and monitoring
These methodological guidelines describe approaches, attitudes, methods, techniques and tools that can be adapted for emergency and humanitarian crisis contexts. They consider specifics related to context, pace, timeframe, beneficiaries, stakeholders, needs, access, security and volume — both financial and operational. - The Child and Youth Resilience Measure
A tool that measures the resources (individual, relational, communal and cultural) available to individuals that may bolster their resilience.
- Better Evaluation
This website offers extensive resources on the different types of evaluation, how to select an appropriate evaluation for your context, methods for analysing data, ethical considerations and much more. - Child and Youth-Centred Accountability: A Guide for Involving Young People in Monitoring & Evaluating Child Protection Systems
This guide provides a number of qualitative, participatory tools that can be used to involve young people in monitoring and evaluating protection outcomes. - Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth: A Manual for Participation
A practical manual on how to conceptualise, structure and facilitate youth participation in community development. - Equal Access Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit
Module 3 of this toolkit discusses the collection and interpretation of rich qualitative data, key qualitative methods and short surveys as well as the importance of good facilitation. - A Toolkit for Monitoring and Evaluating Children’s Participation: Tools for monitoring and evaluating children’s participation. Booklet 5.A
Tools to use with stakeholders, including children and young people, to gather and analyse information to monitor and evaluate the scope, quality and outcomes of children’s participation. - Evaluation of Humanitarian Action Guide
This guide supports evaluation specialists and non-specialists in every stage of an evaluation. - Impact Evaluation in Practice, Second Edition
A comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policymakers and development practitioners that incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing impact evaluations. - A Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework for Field Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings
Guidance for assessing, researching, designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating mental health and psychosocial support programmes in emergency settings. - Inter-Agency Guide to the Evaluation of Psychosocial Programming in Emergencies
A guide to assist organisations working on psychosocial support programmes. - Evaluating the Impact of Sport for Development Activities on Children through Observational and Visual Data Collection and a Guiding Framework – Journal of Sport for Development (jsfd.org)
This article explores methods for evaluating the impact of sport for development activities on children, utilizing videos and drawings as tools for data collection. It introduces a guiding framework created in collaboration with academic institutions to integrate observational and visual data into monitoring and evaluation practices.
- Football and Refugees: Addressing key challenges
A collection of good practices shared by UEFA member associations. This guide shows how football can have an impact in lessening difficulties that have emerged because of recent displacement crises in Europe. - Mapping of good practices relating to social inclusion of migrants through sport
This study, initiated by the European Commission, provides an analytical overview of the types of sports-related projects and interventions used to support the social inclusion of migrants and identifies best practices in their design, implementation, and measurement. - Sport & Peace: Mapping the Field
Supported by a partnership between Generations For Peace and the Georgetown University Master of Arts Programme in Conflict Resolution, this report highlights findings from a one-year international mapping project to identify promising practices in the design, implementation, and evaluation of sport for peace programmes. - Sports as a tool for refugee empowerment
The study explores the use of sport as a psychosocial intervention. It looks at the ways in which sports programs enhance the quality of life and improve the psychosocial development of refugees, particularly youth. - Sport, Refugees, and Forced Migration: A Critical Review of the Literature
This literature review offers an integrative, critical review of scientific literature on the topic of sports, refugees, and forced migration. It analyses academic literature published in this domain derived from fourteen languages between 1996 and 2019. - The Roles of Sport and Education in the Social Inclusion of Asylum Seekers and Refugees
This project, part of a policy initiative of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament, seeks to identify the ways in which sport has been used for the social inclusion of asylum seekers and refugees in UK contexts. - Understanding Community-Based Protection
Drawing on documents, interviews with practitioners, and field visits, this document sets out key lessons that have emerged in recent years during the delivery of Community-Based Protection. It aims to help UNHCR staff and partners integrate community-based approaches to protection in their humanitarian work.
- Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit
- This section aims to provide an introduction to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) together with suggested further reading, tools and guidance. The section focuses mainly on monitoring and evaluation in the development context, and draws from experience and resources generated by other sectors where this can be applied to sport and development.
- Monitoring and Evaluation in policy
- An overview of the key principles for measuring the impact of sport and development policies, including guidance relevant to practitioners.