Third Party Monitoring Services for CARE Somalia’s ADOLESCENT GIRLS’ EDUCATION IN SOMALIA (AGES) PROJECT

Terms of Reference

Third Party Monitoring Services for CARE Somalia’s ADOLESCENT GIRLS’ EDUCATION IN SOMALIA (AGES) PROJECT

1. SUMMARY

CARE Somalia is seeking to procure the services of a consultant or team of consultants to conduct third party monitoring of the Adolescent Girls’ Education in Somalia (AGES) project. AGES is jointly funded by United Kingdom’s (UK) Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the FCDO’s Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) initiative.

The consultant/s will be contracted to be responsible for the design and execution of third party monitoring including the preparation and refinement of tools as required and manage data collection.

2. BACKGROUND TO THE AGES PROJECT

Operating in Somalia since 1981, CARE currently works through three main programs: the first, CARE’s rural vulnerable women’s program supports poor rural women and girls in addressing long term underlying causes of poverty and vulnerability, addressing social, economic, cultural and political obstacles to positive change. We help women and girls improve their economic status, access education and support them to play a greater role in local leadership and conflict resolution. Our second program area, the youth program, focuses on job creation and livelihood opportunities for poor youth through e.g. secondary education, vocational training, small business development, and microfinance. Thirdly, our emergency program provides direct humanitarian relief to victims of drought and conflict in Puntland, Mogadishu, and Lower Juba. CARE has its main offices in Hargeisa, Garowe, Mogadishu and Erigavo, and satellite offices in Burao, El Afweyn, Kismayo and Bossaso. We work with a large number of local partners and maintain excellent relations with local governments.

Adolescent Girls’ Education in Somalia (AGES) project is a long-term project funded by both FCDO and USAID which aims to improve learning outcomes and positive transitions for ultra-marginalized adolescent girls in the Banaadir Regional Administration, Hirshebele, Jubaland, and South West States of Somalia. The project is targeting over 80,475 ultra-marginalised and out‐of‐school girls to enrol in formal education, accelerated education, or non‐formal education classes. The FCDO component targets 42,000 girls across the 3 pathways; Formal Education (FE), None Formal Education (NFE) and Accelerated Basic Education (ABE) while the USAID component targets 38475 girls with Non Formal Education. The project also indirectly benefits 14,000 boys enrolled in targeted formal schools. The project works with teachers, participatory governance mechanisms (Community Education Committees (CECs)), parents/caregivers, and education officials to address barriers to girls’ attendance, retention, and learning. AGES is also supporting schools and learning centres to implement activities to develop student leadership skills and financial literacy and to improve girl’s knowledge of reproductive health and menstrual health management.

Furthermore, the project’s objectives include but are not limited to the expansion of critical life skills around finances to prompt girls to stay in school, re-enrol in school, enrol in alternative education, or move into meaningful and dignified employment opportunities. Given the context and the barriers girls in the targeted areas face, the project takes a multidimensional approach while addressing these key barriers affecting most marginalized girls. At the individual and household levels, the project is sponsoring Village Savings and Loans (VSL) groups; providing bursaries to 959 girls with disability; providing girls with essential life skills related to resilience building and socioemotional learning through Girls’ Empowerment Forums (GEFs); mentoring boys through parallel Boys’ Empowerment Forums, and sensitizing mothers to pro-education norms, especially for girls and learners with disabilities. At the community level, religious leaders have been mobilized to advocate for inclusive education and trained on Islamic principles that emphasize gender equality and girls’ education, delivering pro-education messaging through radio and social media.

3. THIRD PARTY MONITORING PURPOSE AND DESIGN

Monitoring Objective

Conduct a monitoring exercise in hard-to-reach locations to identify potential gaps in activity implementation. Monitoring findings will be used to verify program implementation and quality in hard to reach project locations.

Data collection locations and sampling

The Third Party Monitoring will only target the USAID component in the hard to reach project locations

The distribution of learning centers, facilitators and enrolled girls in the targeted hard-to-reach NFE centers across the three zones and districts is given in the table below.

District / zone

Learning centers

Facilitators

Enrolled girls

South West

19

60

2700

Afgoye

8

30

1375

Walanwayn

8

21

936

Diinsor

3

9

389

Hirshabelle

15

45

2095

Balcad

5

15

675

Jowhar

8

24

1149

Mahaday

2

6

271

TOTAL

34

104

4795

For the purposes of this third party monitoring, the following sample size is expected:

• All learning centers (34) to be surveyed
• One facilitator randomly selected from each learning center surveyed (34 total, 33% of full sample)
• 10 girls randomly selected from each learning center surveyed (340 total, 7.0% of full sample)

Data Collection Methods

The primary data collection method will be through school visits and interviews will be conducted with respondents in all the target locations to assess;

• Attendance vis-à-vis learners’ enrollment
• Whether the facilitator is the correct facilitator and they are receiving stipends
• Practices with 10 girls randomly selected at each of the 34 locations.
• Existence and functionality of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLA) groups
• Existence and functionality of Girls Empowerment Forums (GEFs)

Data to be collected

Data will be collected with NFE learners (girls) and facilitators.

1. With learners:

• Enrolment data vs presence in class (e.g. potential for presence of non-registered learners; number of dropouts)
• Attendance data
• Participation in GEF meetings and VSLAs
• Experience / witnessing of any form of verbal and physical abuse
• Knowledge of FCRM mechanisms
• Impact of the floods
• Facilitators’ attendance

1. With NFE facilitators

• Records of formative assessment – only for in
• Attendance register/tracking – only for in
• Verifying the facilitator surveyed is the actual facilitator
• Verifying whether facilitators are receiving stipends
• Verifying the existence of VSLA groups (number of groups for cohort 6, number of members for each group, names of the groups, the group officials)
• Verifying the existence of GEF groups (number of groups for cohort 6, number of members for each group, names of the groups, the group officials)

Ethical protocols

The monitoring must consider the safety of participants and especially children at all stages of the data collection. The selected consultant/s will need to demonstrate how they have considered the protection of children through the different data collection stages, including recruitment and training of enumerators, data collection and data entry/storage.

The selected consultant/s is required to set out their approach to ensuring complete compliance with international good practice with regards to research ethics and protocols particularly with regards to safeguarding children, vulnerable groups (including people with disabilities) and those in fragile and conflict affected states. Consideration should be given to:

• administrative, technical and physical safeguards to protect the confidentiality of those participating;
• physical safeguards for those conducting research;
• data protection and secure maintenance procedures for personal information;
• parental consent concerning data collection from children or collation of data about children;
• age- and ability-appropriate assent processes based on reasonable assumptions about comprehension for the ages of children and the disabilities they intend to involve in the research; and
• Age-appropriate participation of children, including in the development of data collection tools.

Risk and risk management

Risk management plan: It is important that the successful bidder has taken all reasonable measures to mitigate any potential risk to the delivery of the required outputs for this monitoring. Therefore, the selected company / consultant once contracted will be required to submit a risk management plan covering:

• the assumptions underpinning the successful completion of the proposals submitted and the anticipated challenges that might be faced;
• estimates of the level of risk for each risk identified;
• proposed contingency plans that the bidder will put in place to mitigate against any occurrence of each of the identified risk;
• specific child protection risks and mitigating strategies, including reference to the child protection policy and procedures that will be in place; and
• Health and safety issues that may require significant duty of care precautions.

Professional Skills and Qualifications

Qualifications: the selected consultant/s is required to clearly identify and provide CVs for all those proposed in the team, clearly stating their roles and responsibilities for this monitoring.

The proposed person or team should include the technical expertise and practical experience required to deliver the scope of work and outputs, in particular, with regards to:

• Design: the team should include skills and expertise required to design, plan and conduct electronic data collection in fragile contexts;
• Experience with the implementation of phone surveys in Somalia;
• Relevant subject matter knowledge and experience: knowledge and experience required on conducting research with children and adolescents, the education sector, disability and gender to ensure that the design and methods are as relevant and meaningful as possible given the aims and objectives of the project and the context in which it is being delivered;
• Data collection management: manage a data collection process from end-to-end;
• Country experience: it is particularly important that the team has the appropriate country knowledge /experience and ability to interpret findings from a contextual perspective, as required to conduct the research;
• Data management and data cleaning. Ability to supervise the collection, entry (if required), cleaning and management of large data sets.
• Safety and ethical considerations: Ensuring the whole process adheres to best practice for research with children including the implementation of child protection policy and procedures to ensure safety of participants.

Day–to–day project management of the monitoring will be the responsibility of the M&E and Knowledge Manager, AGES project/ CARE Somalia.

Expected duration of the assignment

• The successful bidder is expected to conduct two rounds of third party monitoring with the first round in March/April and the second round in May/June 2024
• The expected duration of each round of third party monitoring is one and a half months.
• Each round of the third party monitoring will be treated as a separate assignment and the costing of the bid should therefore be for one round

Deliverables and Schedule

1. Expected Tasks
2. Review the project’s MEL framework and monitoring reports;
3. Submit an inception report (draft and final), that outlines the monitoring methodology, including data collection tools and detailed work plan outlining all tasks to be completed by each of the members of the team;
4. Finalization of tools, including back-translation where required;
5. Enumerator training on data collection tools and their application;
6. Collect data according to work plan
7. Validate all datasets and collate data as necessary for analysis;
8. Submit a final report analyzing the results of the data.

Deliverables

In reference to the scope of work above, the consultant team led by a quantitative research expert is expected to accomplish and submit the following:

1. An inception report including:

• Monitoring methodology including the sampling methodology
• Draft data collection tools,
• Detailed work plan outlining all tasks to be completed by each of the members of the consultant team for the duration of the baseline.

1. Data collection protocols;
2. Enumerators training plans;
3. Complete clean datasets in Excel;
4. An independent report that provides an analysis of the data

The consultant/s will be expected to identify a Project Director for communication and reporting purposes. At the Inception meeting the Evaluation Team Project Manager will be expected to submit a full contact list of all those involved in the data collection.

Budget

The budget prepared by the consultant/s should cover all the activities outlined above, including design, data collection, cleaning, analysis and reporting. This budget is inclusive of all costs covering team member costs, travel, research costs and any other costs associated with the completion of the work including where required costs for reasonable adjustment. The selected consultant is required to organize and fund their own duty of care arrangements as required.

The consultant/s is required to provide a fully costed proposal in the form of a price schedule that as a minimum should include:

• Sub-total of fees for the delivery of any task or deliverable;
• Sub-total for number of days per partner organization (as applicable);
• Expenses and overheads broken down by the project cost categories;
• Reasonable adjustment costs; and
• Total costs before and after any taxes that are applicable.

The selected consultant/s are required to provide a payment schedule on the basis of milestone payments for the successful delivery of each deliverable.

Proposals should include the following:

• Technical proposal –approach to the monitoring; work plan with milestones; how meet qualifications.
• Financial proposal
• CVs of all involved persons

Submission Information

• The deadline for submission is 15/03/2024
• The submission should be emailed to: [email protected]
• Questions about TOR should be sent to [email protected]

How to apply

Submission Information

• The deadline for submission is 15/03/2024
• The submission should be emailed to: [email protected]