Terms of Reference
Third Party Monitoring Services for CARE Somalia’s ADOLESCENT GIRLS’ EDUCATION IN SOMALIA (AGES) PROJECT
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
Deliverables and Schedule
Expected Tasks
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:
2) Data collection protocols;
3) Enumerators training plans;
4) Complete clean datasets in Excel;
5) 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:
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:
Submission Information