KOTO - Restaurant Social Impact - 2021

Description of Project:

KOTO (Know One, Teach One) is a social enterprise that empowers disadvantaged Vietnamese youth through its two-year holistic training program. KOTO aims to enable these youth to lead happy and dignified lives, maintain stable employment and career growth, and contribute to their community. KOTO seeks to achieve this through providing education, employment support, and a safe and supportive environment guided by the ‘Know one, teach one’ (KOTO) philosophy.

The purpose of the evaluation was to assess the attributable outcomes and impacts that KOTO’s programming has had on its graduates. Namely, the evaluation asked whether the larger goal of KOTO has been achieved to produce change—whether KOTO graduates and their communities experience improved livelihoods. From evaluation results, KOTO seeks to identify lessons-learned to improve KOTO programming, as well as better communicate its impacts to current and prospective impact investors, sponsors, and donors.

In February 2021, Mekong Economics Ltd. (MKE) was commissioned by KOTO to undertake a third-party evaluation of KOTO’s social impact since its establishment in 1999. The methodology for this evaluation incorporated quantitative and qualitative research, primarily a quantitative tracer survey of KOTO graduates, which was carefully designed and implemented to maximize the response rate. The approach and design of the survey sought to understand the attributable impact of KOTO where data and reasonable assumptions allowed.

Description of actual services provided by your staff within the assignment:

MKE undertook a mixed-methods approach in order to capture both quantitatively and qualitatively the extent to which KOTO has achieved its objectives and the effect that KOTO has had on both graduates and their communities and/or families. To this end, the evaluation utilized one primary data collection tool: An online tracer survey with KOTO graduates. The survey was developed and piloted on the basis of the evaluation framework, then finalized after discussions with KOTO. A secondary desk review of KOTO entrant’s background information was also conducted to evaluate relevance while establishing a baseline with which to contextualize evaluation findings.