Monitoring and evaluation practices in the Program for the Eradication of Slave Labor

Abstract

Formal evaluation is a powerful tool for ensuring the transparency of public action and in the management of policies and programs, pinpointing necessary measures for a policy's sustainability, for resource optimization and social control. This paper utilizes evaluation far beyond simple theoretical abstraction, applying it to the Program for the Eradication of Slave Labor, which functions to eliminate this grave violation of human rights, still being practiced in Brazil. In order to investigate the characteristics of the present monitoring and evaluation system adopted at by the program's managers, an applied-exploratory research approach was instigated using secondary data. It was verified that the characteristics of the monitoring system adopted by the program managers are closer to a performance follow-up than to a de facto monitoring or evaluation of the program as pointed out in the literature. Although abundant, the available data needs practical handling to be transformed into a tool of monitoring and evaluation. With that objective, this study uses the methodology of formal evaluation from various theoretical references aimed at the development of a system of monitoring and evaluation that can be used to improve the program's management.