Ilo evaluation

1.Background of SCORE project

1.1SCORE background and history

Because of globalization, industrial supply chains are stretching to all corners of the world. In developing and emerging economies, international and domestic markets offer new opportunities for enterprises to grow and create jobs. An increasing number of enterprises are engaging in global activities that involve importing and exporting finished products, components and materials. At the same time they are faced with growing competition from overseas companies entering the local market. Global competition puts pressure on enterprises to continually upgrade their productivity. To improve their competiveness they must invest in technology, reduce costs and modernize management practices.

Barriers to growth

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are generally disadvantaged compared to larger firms in dealing with these challenges. They are especially disadvantaged when it comes to access to finance and often feel the brunt of weak infrastructure and poorly designed policies and regulations. It is harder for SMEs to keep up with new technology and modern management practices. Gender equality is not a key concern of management and because supply chains are often based on low-cost labour, working conditions are poor, which has a negative effect on their economic performance. Factors that influence working conditions are the role of governments in defining and enforcing labour standards, sourcing practices of larger companies with SMEs in their supply chain and management practices that consider the workforce as a key competitive asset. At the same time SMEs play a vital role in the economy by contributing to a large part of the industrial output. They make up the majority of enterprises and are an important source of employment. By providing a more conductive environment and support services, it is believed that SMEs can become more powerful engines of growth.

SCORE: better working conditions to increase productivity

The Sustaining Competitive and Responsible Enterprises (SCORE) programme is a specific ILO response to the challenges of SMEs. SCORE is a practical training and workplace improvement programme to increase the productivity of SMEs while promoting better working conditions. It is a modular training programme that focuses on developing cooperative manager worker relations in the workplace. Workers and managers participate together in a series of classroom training sessions on workplace cooperation, quality management, cleaner production, human resource management and occupational health and safety. Local experts follow up on-site to help enterprises implement what has been learned. The SCORE training programme is built on the assumption that productivity can be upgraded through better people management, better organization of work processes and the application of workplace practices guided by the principles of international labour standards.

The SCORE programme is a direct response to the 2007 International Labour Conference General Discussion on Sustainable Enterprises in which it was concluded that sustainable enterprises not only have to innovate and adopt environmentally friendly technologies, but also need to apply workplace practices based on full respect for rights at work and international labour standards and foster good labour-management relations as means of raising productivity and creating decent work. The programme builds on a history of ILO programmes and interventions to improve labour-management cooperation, such as the Factory Improvement Programme (FIP), the Corporate Social Responsibility in the Chinese Textile Industry project and Better Work.
In 2009, the Job Creation and Enterprise Development Department formulated a comprehensive strategy for the ILO’s Sustainable Enterprise Programme.¹ Strategic pillars and focus areas are shown in the figure below. SCORE is a key element in the programme contributing to focus area 8: Sustaining competitive and responsible SMEs under strategy pillar 3: Sustainable and responsible workplaces. This pillar aims to support member states and their social partners to implement programmes to foster the adoption of responsible and sustainable enterprise-level practices.
figure : Strategy pillars of the ILO Sustainable Enterprise Programme



Source: SCORE Phase II Prodoc (p.12)

SCORE Phase I started in 2009 in China and Indonesia and during Phase I gradually new countries were added until 2011, when the project was implemented in seven countries and later in Phase II Peru and Bolivia were added in 2014 as new SCORE countries.²

Key achievements under SCORE Phase I

Under the first phase of the project from 2009 until 2013, ILO assisted government agencies, industry associations and service providers to offer SCORE training to enterprises. Although business development services that help SMEs to develop their management systems can be considered a crucial part of the enabling environment for SMEs, in many countries the capacity of institutions to deliver support to SMEs is limited. During the first phase the SCORE programme developed a training package consisting of five training modules; a training of trainers and capacity building programme for institutions who want to offer the training package; and a monitoring and evaluation framework to monitor project activities and impact at the company level. In the first phase, the programme has built the capacity of 19 institutions in seven countries: Colombia, Ghana, South Africa, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and China. In total 270 trainers have been trained. These institutions and trainers have trained more than 300 SMEs representing 54,000 workers and conducted over 500 consulting visits. More than 2,400 managers and workers participated together in classroom training sessions.³

Besides these outputs, the first phase generated a number of lessons learned which have been captured in the final evaluation of SCORE Phase I.

• 
  The SCORE training is relevant for SMEs in that it addresses some key aspects of enterprise management and achieves important results.
  
• 
  The programme, however, is not communicating its results enough and should increase its communication and marketing efforts.
  
• 
  Gender is insufficiently addressed in SCORE. It needs to define a strategy for mainstreaming gender equality.
  
• 
  Sustainability remains a challenge. While institutionalization of the programme is progressing, it has not yet reached the point where national institutions are able to organize and fund SCORE training independently from the ILO.
  

The recommendations of the evaluation were used to outline the strategy for the second phase of the SCORE programme.