Trócaire Panel of consultants – MEAL advisors

About Trócaire

Trócaire is the official overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Trócaire works in over 15 countries across the developing world. With our partners we work with some of the world’s poorest people, supporting women, men and communities for long term change. In Ireland, we raise awareness about the causes of poverty through our outreach programmes in the education sector, through parish networks, and through our public campaigns and advocacy work.

More information about Trócaire is available at www.trócaire.org.

Context of Work

Trócaire has recently embarked on the delivery of a new strategic plan that puts effectively managing high quality programmes at the centre of all that it does. In 2023 Trócaire will commence a new five-year multi-country multi-million-euro grant funded by Irish Aid covering programmes working on human rights, climate & environmental justice, women’s empowerment & GBV and humanitarian response.

The fifteen country offices (DRC, Ethiopia, Honduras, Guatemala, Lebanon, Malawi, Myanmar, OPTi, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Zimbabwe) that will participate in this grant have designed their programmes and prepared concept notes, logic models and results frameworks as part of this process. Between July and December 2022 these countries will further prepare and refine their country level programmes. This will involve the undertaking of a programme specific context analysis and the design of programme level MEAL plans. Country offices will also conduct baselines for their Irish Aid grant.

The grant management frameworks consisting of country level logic models, results frameworks and risk registers that have already been developed will need to be refined and updated following the development of more robust MEAL plans for the programme and the analysis of the baseline data.

The purpose of this expression of interest is to identify a small pool of MEAL experts that Trócaire head office and country teams can call on to support the development of country level MEAL plans, primarily but not exclusively focusing on the new Irish Aid grant, and other MEAL priority areas as they arise, such as the undertaking of baseline processes. Some country teams may manage the development of a MEAL framework and the baseline development as one overall process.

Scope of the Work

It is envisaged that the main MEAL support needed by country offices will be:

1. Develop robust country level MEAL frameworks, including data collection tools, to ensure all grants, including the new Irish Aid grant, have clear MEAL plans that feed into one overarching country level MEAL framework
2. Support the country office to adapt the Irish Aid MEAL plan to project level plans for partners and provide support in rolling out guidance to partners
3. Support the undertaking of detailed baseline processes[1] for the new Irish Aid grant. Depending on the country, this will include baselines for two or three of the following thematic areas; human rights, sustainable livelihoods (including agroecology and market systems development), women’s empowerment & GBV and humanitarian response.
4. Support the roll-out of a new suite of organisational indicators, tools and guidance material to staff and partner organisations to help monitor and report on programme impact.

Timeline

The panel will be in place by June 2022 with draw down of support envisaged between July 2022 and March 2023. The use of the panel will be reviewed in early 2023 to determine next steps.

For panel members that are contracted to support country teams the average consultancy per country is likely to be approximately 20 days. Panel members can be contracted to support more than one country so securing multiple contracts is possible.

Experience/Skills:

Essential:

• Proven expertise and experience in the MEAL sector in an international NGO environment.
• Prior experience of developing gender-sensitive country level MEAL frameworks
• Prior experience of undertaking baseline processes and data collection tool development in at least one of the following thematic areas; human rights, sustainable livelihoods (including agroecology and market systems development) ate and environmental justice, women’s empowerment and GBV, humanitarian response
• Excellent communication, facilitation, analytical, communication and presentation skills.
• Proven expertise in a Results Based Management (RBM) approach to MEAL.

Desirable

• Experience of using the GBV in Emergency Guidelines
• Knowledge and experience of using the FAO TAPE Tool
• Prior expertise and experience in peacebuilding and/or social cohesion in humanitarian context.
• Prior expertise and experience in working on MEAL systems with local NGOs.
• Experience of working with digital data collection platforms such as CommCare