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The IIP initiative is generally well received by and made a positive impact on the participants and their communities. It reaches out to community-based groups and forges some community-level inter-agency networks.

IIP represents a change towards more community-centred programming, without being a community-based initiative. It integrates upgrading, life skills, career and personal counselling within the projects, a clear step forward from the fragmented delivery of many government services at the community level.

The participants and their communities clearly benefit from the projects and there is a general desire on the part of the communities to have more IIP-type projects. That said, the communities express the desire to be more involved with the projects and there are indications that the more community-based WAPs were better received than the NSDPs, which are based in the Colleges. Lack of input from the communities and elders is frequently cited as one of the weaknesses of the initiative.

Although IIP integrates some components that have been delivered traditionally by different programs, there remains a lack of coordination with other services available to people in the communities. Most notably, the lack of coordination with the child care allowance system causes problems for many participants. In a broader context, IIP adds to the wide range of programming available to the communities and thus, from a community perspective, to the complexity of getting funded support services.

IIP projects are better at building skills and academic knowledge than at dealing with personal and cultural issues. This reflects that IIP emphasizes ABE and work placement, supported by life skills training and counselling. The initiative draws on the relatively rich ABE and life skills training resources, but experiences a lack of materials to support work placements. This latter resource constraint makes work placements, although well received by most respondents, less effective than they might have been.

Another important constraint relates to the limited orientation of instructors, project and work placement sponsors, and as well in many instances participants to the projects. A number of projects were implemented within very tight timeframes that hampered their eventual effectiveness.

The evaluation suggests a number of recommendations, including:

• more community involvement in the planning and execution of projects and amendment of planning timelines to allow for this;
• increased integration of the program with support services, such as child care allowances;
• more intense orientation of all people involved in the projects, including more instructor orientation to life skills training and counselling;
• retention of the attendance allowance and placing the allowances in the context of celebrating participants' involvement in projects;
• development of support materials to aid the implementation of work placements;
• development of a management information system that will assist day-to-day management of the projects and aid in ongoing self-monitoring; and
• increased linkages to other training and work placement opportunities for project graduates to make participants' training paths more seamless.

The evaluation findings can be interpreted within the context of the political move towards more community-based programming. The experience with IIP supports a number of observations that suggest that program effectiveness may well be enhanced by this move.

Future programming should build on a key IIP strength: the integration of a number of different services, such as ABE, work placement, personal and career counselling, and life skills training.

Future programming should extend the inter-agency cooperation that crystallized around IIP projects, especially in their start-up phases. Community-based programming should provide a yet stronger focus for inter-agency cooperation. It should try to avoid the insufficient coordination with other support services.

Any further move towards community-based programming will need to reflect the evaluation findings with respect to information systems. The IIP information systems show a financial or budget compliance bias and generally inadequate information needed on a day-to-day basis by project staff in the communities and other program staff. Community-based programming will need both financial and management information systems to work effectively and within a defined accountability framework.