Life Skills Collaborative

Decision-maker’s challenge

India’s life skills programs reach millions of young people, but organisations work in silos, lacking the right data to know what really works across the sector and how change sustains over time.

Decision-makers need a shared vocabulary and framework within which to plan and implement programs, as well as a robust toolkit to measure the impact of their work – both at the programmatic and systemic levels. Without this, it’s hard to plan scale-ups, secure funding, or advocate credibly for policy integration. The challenge: make life skills in India measurable, comparable, and visible.

Impact opportunity

More than 40 organizations under the Life Skills Collaborative (LSC) are working to strengthen life skills among India’s youth. Together, they reach millions of children through classrooms and community programs.

During LSC 1.0, 18 organizations came together to develop a common glossary to define life skills in India. By drawing on the expertise of a broader collective, LSC 2.0 is building on this shared language and creating a strong foundation for governments, implementers, and funders to make evidence-based decisions around program design and plan for long-term impact across the ecosystem.

Our approach

We have been working with the collaborative to scope out opportunity areas for strengthened evidence use and collaboration. The first phase of our engagement has been focused on hands-on facilitation and technical guidance to create an evidence use strategy for the collaborative.

In the second phase, we are facilitating the implementation of this strategy and helping organisations co-create resources across four key focus areas of life skills work – using participatory methods, measuring systems change within the ecosystem, improved measurement of life skills, and co-designing a study to understand the long-term impacts and trajectories of life skills in India.

The results

By the end of our work with LSC, the collaborative will have created a set of resources that can be used by organizations across the Indian life skills ecosystem:

• A shared systems change measurement framework aligned across diverse organisations, enabling common tracking of progress.
• An open-access library of life skills measurement tools, validated and organized for easy use by practitioners and governments.
• A study design and pilot data for a longitudinal study of life skills in India, a practical roadmap for generating long-term Indian evidence.
• Learning resources on participatory research methods for life skills work.