The Oslo Center
Program Background
The Oslo Center (TOC), with support from The Royal Swedish Embassy in Kenya, has been working to strengthen political institutions’ performance in the electoral cycle. The Oslo Center has since 2019 been implementing the program: Strengthening Political Institutions to Enhance Responsiveness, Accountability, and Transparency in the Electoral Cycle. The program aims to assist political parties in structuring county assembly groups to drive a policy plan responsive to citizens’ needs in the county assemblies, enhance transparency by operationalizing political parties’ policy documents, and empower women’s political participation processes and decision-making within political parties. The program also assists the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties (ORPP) to perform its roles and responsibilities better and contributes to the electoral reform’s agenda through the review of party primaries law.
The program’s main objective is to enhance responsiveness, accountability, and transparency in Kenyan political institutions. The program outcomes focus on the four components which formed the pathways towards achieving the main goal.
Outcome 1: Strengthening Political Parties County Elected Members Groups to Respond to the Needs of the Citizens.
Outcome 2: Promoting Accountability and Transparency by Assisting Parties to Operationalize Party Constitution.
Outcome 3: Assistance to Strengthen the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties (ORPP).
Outcome 4: Strengthening Women’s Participation in Political parties’ processes and decision making
Target Groups
The program target groups correspond to the different outcomes. They include County Assembly groups, Political parties, the Office of the registrar of political parties, women’s leagues, and women in politics. The program worked with seven major political parties based on a developed selection criterion that included political party viability, and a measure of representation in the National assembly, and Senate.
Context of the evaluation
The evaluation is set to take place in the month of July and August and will take about 20 days.
Purpose of the evaluation
The evaluation is oriented toward assessing the program achievements and learning towards future programming. Therefore, it shall, firstly, target the Program’s implementation dynamics and the level of achievement of its objectives. It shall help the Oslo Center to understand the results of the program and help the donor to understand the results of their funding. Secondly, it shall gather lessons learned, challenges faced, and best practices and use such insight to generate recommendations that can help the Oslo Center design and undertake similar initiatives in the future
Objectives of the evaluation
The objectives of the evaluation are as follows:
1. To assess the extent to which the program has been relevant, effective, efficient, and has contributed to the achievement of the impact, and the outcome level results in relation to the four programmatic components.
2. Identify the results, impact, and successes of the program and how the results will define the next programming.
3. Identify key lessons learned and recommendations, strengths, and weaknesses of the program based on evidence, so as to improve relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability of Program results, and also document knowledge basis on the program design and implementation to inform similar future initiatives.
Methods
The Program’s results chain was defined in a logical framework during the design phase. The logical framework included four outcomes, which were broken down using Outcome Mapping. The Program team, therefore, tracked instances of progress for each of the four outcomes and the associated progress markers. The Evaluator shall consider the descriptions of progress as one of the key sources of evidence. It is expected that the evaluation will use Outcome Harvesting to identify key results of the program and measure to what extent has the program contributed to the overall objective.
Other methods to be used include interviews and focus groups (including with the Program team)
Qualifications
The Evaluator – as a whole – must fulfill the following criteria:
● Degree in Monitoring and Evaluation, Social Sciences, or any other relevant field.
● Proven and strong track record of conducting Program evaluations in the field of democracy is required.
● Proven experience in conducting end-of-program evaluations in the field of democracy and governance.
● Strong understanding of Kenya’s political party legal frameworks and policies.
● Experience working with political party officials, elected representatives, government officials, and complex political processes in Kenya.
● Demonstrable previous experience in collecting project results using an outcome harvesting approach.
● Strong analytical and report writing abilities.
● Team player and willing to work with program staff, Political party officials, elected representatives, and government officials to discuss the administrative and technical pieces of the evaluation.
● Fluency in English, Kiswahili a plus.
How to apply
Interested candidates/institutions should submit a technical and financial proposal and two samples of similar previous assignments. Applications should be, submitted to [email protected] with the subject line: END OF PROJECT EVALUATION – 5300-PROGRAM on or before 26th August 2022.