Consultant - Project Evaluation

1. DESCRIPTION: 

Background

War Child (WCH) is an independent and impartial international non-governmental organization investing in a peaceful future for children and young people affected by armed conflict. WCH strives to empower children and young people, while enabling adults to bring about positive and lasting change in the lives of conflict-affected children and young people. 

WCH is seeking a consultant to support in conducting the final evaluation for a project funded by the European Commission (EC) and implemented through local sub-grantees over a 10-month period from September 2019 till mid-June 2020.

1. OBJECTIVES

The final evaluation of the sub-grantees EC project will be conducted in order to assess the level of achievement of the project’s partners, and how successfully they were able to meet the objectives and results of the project. More specifically, the evaluation aims to evaluate the partners’ capacity development in technical areas and grant management. This will partly be determined through the success with which project beneficiaries were protected through equitable access to quality education and child protection services, if the vulnerability of children and caregivers has been reduced, and their resilience strengthened. The evaluation will be conducted for five sub-grantee partners regarding the EC project’s implementation over the period from September 2019 to mid-June 2020.

1. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

In order to conduct the evaluation, a participatory approach to fieldwork will be used, whereby an assessment of the participants’ outputs will be used to appraise the overall outcome. Specific questions will be asked that aim to examine the partners’ performance and development through the relevance, effectiveness, and efficiency of the activities and processes.

The FIELDWORK will collect information from the participants involved in the project. Given the current restrictions related to COVID-19, these can be done remotely through phone or survey where necessary. More specifically, the fieldwork will cover five partners and nine locations, in three categories:

Category 1 – Children who participated in the activities & their caregivers: 300 surveys for children and caregivers

A questionnaire will be developed by the consultant, for children and caregivers. Data collection will be done by partner enumerators, as COVID-19 restrictions allow. The results of the quantitative survey will be delivered to the consultant in Excel format for analysis.

Category 2 – In-depth interviews via skype with partners’ staff: 15 interviews in total

• Up to 3 in-depth interviews from each partner involved in the project (teachers/facilitators/ project coordinators) conducted and analysed by the consultant.

Category 3 – WCH staff: 3 In-depth interviews

• Up to 3 in-depth interviews with WCH staff involved in the project (project managers and technical staff) conducted and analysed by the consultant.

The consultant will be to make extractions for both quantitative and qualitative results. Analysis will be required to compare results (i) across the nine identified locations and (ii) across gendered perceptions of participants.

Final deliverable is a narrative report on the results, and PowerPoint of the main findings, and delivery of the original dataset.

1. Responsibilities:

The consultant will be responsible to conduct quantitative and qualitative research and analysis on the overall achievement of activities, and the abilities of partners to establish and deliver technical child-focused programming as part of this EC sub-grantees funded project. In addition, the final deliverable should compile lessons learned and best practices for War Child engagement with new partners on a small scale in challenging contexts. The consultant will be responsible to incorporate results from the logical framework and reflect these key areas in the evaluation surveys and direction of analysis. War Child will provide access to the monitoring tools and reports received throughout the project and other related documents.

The consultant will be responsible for:

• Designing the tools for quantitative and qualitative surveys
• Training remotely the field workers on the quantitative tools
• Conducting remote quantitative surveys in Category 2 and 3 – (with WCH and partner staff)
• Cleaning the data of the quantitative survey results
• Extracting  the statistical results for the quantitative survey
• Analyzing results of the quantitative and qualitative surveys
• Drafting the final report
• Preparing a Power Point presentation of the main finding.

1. Qualifications:

• Relevant academic background in research, social science or equivalent field.
• Previous work in evaluation project in social development projects
• Good analytical skills
• Previous experience in designing quantitative and qualitative survey
• Previous experience in carrying out focus group discussions/interviews
• Experience directing research for remote implementation by field teams
• Excellent inter-personal skills; good communicator
• Ability to operate Microsoft Excel and Kobo, and statistical tools software
• Experience working in Syria context
• Fluency in written and spoken Arabic and English
• Excellent English writing skills

1. TIMELINE REQUESTED TASKS

The proposed scope of work for this evaluation is 17 working days.

Start date: 15^th June - End date: 20^th July 2020.  Preliminary findings should be made available to War Child by 13^th of July 2020. All deliverables must be finalized and submitted to WCH by the 20^rh of July 2020.

Please send your CV including 3 references and your daily rate to [email protected] and [email protected] before 9^th of June 2020.