We are hiring! external evaluator

TERMS OF REFERENCE FOR THE FINAL EVALUATION OF THE WEGO 2 PROJECT - REC-AG-2017/REC-RDAP-GBV-AG-2017

Background

Violence against women is widespread in Europe and the scaling up of intimate partner violence (IPV) is alarming. According to the European Agency for Fundamental Rights, almost one in four women (22%) experience physical and/or sexual violence in a relationship with a man. Its causes are often interrelated with poverty, economic dependency and gender discrimination.

The lack of economic independence is one of the main challenges women face when they try to leave their abusive partner. Anti-violence centers across Europe recognize that women often remain in violent relationships because of their financial dependence on the violent partner. This issue is coupled with the fact that women are considerably under-represented in the labour market and in management roles, with the overall female employment rate still being lower than that of men.

Gender-based violence (GBV) is understood as violence directed against a person because of that person's gender: it is not just a quantitative issue, but qualitative too because it is rooted in gender inequalities, violence against women affects women and girls disproportionately.
GBV represents a serious violation of human rights and takes many forms in both the public and private sectors, including physical, sexual, psychological, or economic suffering, threats of violence and the restriction or arbitrary deprivation of freedom.
It is a structural problem common to all countries of the world and to all social groups, regardless of culture, religion, wealth, and development.

ActionAid International Italia Onlus (hereinafter ActionAid) works to prevent and fight violence against women in all its forms at national, European, and global levels.

In the last five years ActionAid Italy together with several partners among NGOs, Research Institutes and Anti-violence Centers from across Europe, developed a program¹ to understand and overcome the main obstacles to a life free from violence, focusing on supporting women in their path to self-determination.

 

Project overview

ActionAid is currently coordinating the WeGo2- “Building economic independence: the way out of intimate partner violence (IPV)” project, financed by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme of the European Commission-DG Justice and Consumers. The project shall have lasted from December 1^st, 2018 to November 30^th, 2020, but a no-cost extension was required because of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and related national restrictions on project implementation. For this reason, the closure of the project was postponed to March 31^st 2021.

WeGo2 aims at supporting the economic empowerment of women who survived domestic violence by strengthening local, national and European support systems and multi-disciplinary cooperation among private and public stakeholders.

Specific objectives:

• enhance, systematize and transfer the knowledge and know-how acquired in the previous WE Go project;

• enlarge, mainstream and scale-up the knowledge related to economic empowerment of IPV survivors;

• create an enabling environment, within the legislative EU framework already provided, able to sustain the economic empowerment of the women IPV survivors assisted by the specialised centres

• raise awareness of GBV, especially of intimate partner violence against women, among employers, staff and directors of enterprises

• support a trail of self-evaluation and company internal discussion on how to give responses to women affected by GBV

• facilitate job inclusion of women IPV survivors increasing collaboration/coordination among public/private services.

 

The project’s main activities include

• personalized development activities for women (social relationship plan, balance of competences, career plan, job matching);

• capacity building of antiviolence center professionals/operators;

• strengthening stakeholder networks;

• GBV training for private companies’ employers and employees.

The project is implemented in Italy, Bulgaria, Greece and Spain. The partnership is composed of ActionAid Italy (coordinator), Center for Sustainable Communities Development (CSCD - BG), Institute for Social Research (IRS - IT), Rel.Azioni Positive Cooperative (IT), SURT Foundation (ES), Women's Center of Karditsa (WCK, GR).

This project is the continuation and scale up of WEGO!, a project implemented in 2016-2018, and a slightly modified partnership has already been granted funds for a third edition. WEGO! aimed to strengthen support services for women survivors of IPV in Europe, with the development and promotion of training toolkit strengthening shelters/centres capacity to promote IPVs socio-economic empowerment. In WEGO2, partners focused on women social network development and on improving the local support systems, with the creation of Territorial Protocols, exchanging good practices and establishing public-private cooperation networks. WeGo3 will increase local multi-agency networks capacity to promote women IPV survivors’ socio-economic independence through the design and adoption of gender-responsive labour policies.

The creation/strengthening of multi-stakeholder networks is a strong focus of this and other ActionAid Italy projects. We indeed acknowledge that violence against women involves actions that occur across different environments and targeting a range of groups including workplace settings, schools as well as individuals or families and affects different dimensions including health, education, legal rights, protection etc. Thus, it requires a wide range of stakeholders and the broader public to be involved in developing and implementing strategies to prevent and/or address acts of violence. For this reason, ActionAid Italy has recently developed a framework to evaluate women empowerment which shall be taken as reference and discussed also within the present evaluation.

 

Purpose of the Final Evaluation

The objective of the external evaluation is to provide an overall independent assessment of the project performance, paying particular attention to the impact of the project actions against its objectives. It is also to identify key lessons learnt and to propose practical recommendations for follow-up and future similar actions at European level.

Main objectives can be summarized as follows:

• To assess how effectively the project as reach its results and expected social impact

• To assess project efficiency

• To assess expected sustainability of the WeGo model

The external evaluation will build on the internal project assessment which is performed by IRS.

 

Evaluation Questions

The evaluation plan shall include at least the following evaluation questions:

• Relevance: Does the project answer to relevant needs within target regions? Are the needs mapped in the project still relevant to rights holders ? Did new needs arise? How did the project cope with new needs? How is the European approach relevant to tackle the needs of project targets?

• Effectiveness: Did the project reach its objectives Did objectives change? If yes, how and why? Did partners adapt strategies to reach set objectives?

• Efficiency: Did the coordinator manage the partnership in an efficient way? Was the partnership efficient in producing project outputs and managing project activities? value for money was ensured?? With reagrds to the partnership, were both roles and resources adequately allocated (e.g. project management roles, expert roles, monitoring and evaluation, grant management, etc)? Was the partnership built in an efficient way with respect to specific skills and competencies? Were internal procedures suitable for project management? What could be improved?

• Sustainability: Are achieved changes sustainable? What measures have been taken to ensure sustainability? Who are the main actors ensuring sustainability? What are the arrangements made in this regards?

• Impact: On the basis of available impact analyses developed within the project by IRS², and complementing these, which is the project social impact? 

• Coherence: Did the project logic and objectives contribute to the longer-term programme strategy of partners³? Was the project coherent with the HRBA approach? Did the project promote synergies with other interventions on the same topic / with the same target group, both at the level of each partner network, and at the European level?

Additional evaluation questions will be: How did the project impact on the socio-economic empowerment of IPV survivors on the one side and the partners and stakeholders’ strategies on the other side? Comparing it with other similar projects, what are the project's strengths and what could have been done differently? Taking into account the organisational work on women’s empowerment, please provide recommendations for improvement and future strategies.

 

Evaluation Methodology

The consultant/agency is expected to use different tools. This will include but not necessarily be limited to:

• Qualitative tools to provide a comprehensive understanding of the perceptions of the different target groups the project has worked with/impacted upon

  • Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) in each country or transversally by group of involved stakeholders,

  • Key Informant Interviews,

  • Interviews with ActionAid Italy and project’s partner staff.

• Desk review of project records including partner reports, activity reports, progress reports, training pre and post questionnaires, internal evaluation documents.

An Impact Value Chain approach shall be followed to assess and describe the project social impact.

Example of indicators to be used for the project assessment: N. of actions implemented on time; N. of budget items accounted as planned; N. of services mapped; N. of experts met; Data added to existence knowledge.

 

Scope of work

The main focus of evaluation will be WeGo2, but the evaluator is expected to provide an assessment of the evolution of the project from its first edition towards the third one, especially providing lessons for the implementation of WeGo3, which will start in April 2021.

The evaluation is expected to cover all countries of implementation of WeGo2 (Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain). Due to the existing Covid19 related restrictions to national and international mobility, the evaluation is expected to be conducted using adequate online tools. The consultant/agency is expected to present the tools and previous experiences with online evaluations in the technical proposal. All costs related to technological tools and platforms should be bear by the consultant/agency and included in the financial proposal.

 

Evaluation deliverables

• Evaluation Plan with the Evaluation Methodology and a detailed WorkPlan

• Evaluation tools including FGD and KII templates

• Draft Evaluation Report

• Detailed Final Report. This must include i. Table of content ii. Executive Summary iii. Introduction iv. Evaluation Objectives v. Methodology vi. Findings of the evaluation viii. Recommendations ix. Conclusions x. Reference Annexes (including the list of FGDs and KII participants)

 

Timeline

The Final Evaluation is scheduled to take place between January 2021 to March 2021. A tentative schedule with main deadlines I detailed below

 

Issue	Deadline
Submission of detailed technical and financial proposals from interested consultants/agencies.	7th January 2021
Signature of the contract by ActionAid and the selected consultant/agency.	12th January 2021
Preparatory meetings between the selected consultant/agency and the WeGo2 team.	12th-15th January 2021
Submission of the Evaluation Plan and related data collection tools	21st January 2021
Approval of the Evaluation Plan and the tools by the WeGo2 project team.	28th January 2021
Desk review of project records including partner reports, facilitator activity reports, progress reports mid term and final evaluation reports and tools.	4th-24th February 2021
FGS and KIIs implementation period	4th-24th February 2021
Interim meeting for updates from evaluator to project team	15th February 2021
The selected consultant/agency submits a first evaluation report to the WeGo2 team.	5th March 2021
Internal presentation on the main evaluation findings is organised by the selected consultant/agency	Tbd
Feedback on draft evaluation report.	10th March 2021
The selected consultant/agency submit the final evaluation report	15th March 2021

Coordination arrangements

The selected evaluator will work under the close supervision of ActionAid and coordinate with the Project Managers and teams

 

Budget and payment arrangements

The total budget for the consultancy is 8.000 Euro (VAT inlcuded). 40% payment will be made after signing of the agreement and upon submission of work plan. Remaining 60% will be paid after submission of final report

 

Assessment of proposals

Both technical and financial proposals must be submitted in English. Proposals will be evaluated by an evaluation committee on the basis of the following criteria:

1. The technical proposal must score 70 out of 100 as total score:

• Clarity, comprehensiveness and coherence of the technical proposal: 20

• Previous experiences of the supplier/provider: 25

• Capacity to develop the present evaluation, based on provided material and specific methodology: 25

2. The financial proposal will be opened only for proposals which have been evaluated 70 plus from a technical point of view The score for the financial proposal is 30 and this will be awarded to the proposals that offer the best combination of quality and price.

 

Required qualifications and skills

• More than 5 years of experience in conducting project evaluation with specific experience in gender-based violence.

• Knowledge of and previous experiences with project funded by the Rights Equality and Citizenship Programme of the European Commission DG Justice and Consumers.

• Knowledge of social network analysis methods.

• Fluency in English (both written and spoken). Knowledge of an additional language of project participating countries is an asset.

• Good qualitative and quantitative analytical skills. 

• Good reporting and presenting skills.

• Punctuality and availability to complete the work on time.

 

Submission of technical and financial proposals

The technical proposal shall include at least

• Letter of motivation (max 2 pages) indicating the consultants’ suitability for the assignment and match with previous work experience, qualifications etc; the composition, roles and responsibilities of the evaluation team; and the provisional availability to fulfil the consultancy as per the timeframes indicated;  

• CVs of all individuals included in the proposed team;

• Description of the evaluation methodology that will be used and draft work plan (max 3 pages); 

The financial proposal shall include the economic offer and budget break down.

The technical and financial proposals should be enclosed separately and send to womensrights.ita@actionaid.org by 7^th January 2021

 

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