Endline Evaluation for Sponsorship for Refugees

Common Ground Solutions is carrying out the endline evaluation of the Sponsorship for Refugees programme in Greater Cairo for Save the Children International, Egypt Country Office. The evaluation measures endline values for the programme's outcome indicators, assesses what changed across its basic education, health, child protection and livelihood components, and draws lessons for future flexible-fund programming for displaced children.

The current phase focuses on unaccompanied and separated children, mostly aged twelve to eighteen and largely from the Sudanese community, alongside other nationalities. Programme participants are concentrated in identifiable clusters in Giza — around Dokki, Ard El-Lewa and Faisal — and in Cairo around Maadi and Ein Shams.

Three features set this apart from a standard endline. Its scope reaches beyond the current phase: primary data covers 2025 onward, while earlier phases from 2019 are examined through desk review, so that the coherence of the design can be assessed across a period in which the target group narrowed from refugees and migrants generally to unaccompanied children specifically. The programme has run through two delivery modalities — directly and through national partners — and the sampling frame is tagged by modality so that differences between them can be surfaced. And because the programme is in active transition to local partners ahead of phase-out, sustainability is examined as a live question rather than a retrospective one.

The design is theory-based. With no practical counterfactual and no comprehensive baseline for the phase, the evaluation reconstructs and tests the programme's theory of change through contribution analysis, assembling reference points from intervention reports, indicator tracking tables and monitoring data, and weighing alternative explanations for the changes observed. Comparisons are caveated where the underlying evidence is partial.

Data collection is mixed-methods, participatory and child-centred. Quantitative tools are scripted on Kobo and analysed in SPSS; qualitative material is analysed thematically. All primary data is disaggregated by gender, age and ability, using the Washington Group Short Set on disability, and sampling deliberately includes girls, children with disabilities, and children from different nationalities and backgrounds. Enumerators are gender-balanced and recruited with priority from the Sudanese and other refugee communities, and the full field team completes Save the Children's child safeguarding induction before any contact with children.

Deliverables include an inception report with an evaluation matrix mapping every question to its indicators, sources and methods; data collection tools in Arabic and English; a draft and final evaluation report in both languages with encrypted raw data; and a dissemination workshop supported by a findings presentation and a two-page child-friendly summary.