Background

Over the past years, UN Women has provided support to national and local stakeholders in strengthening democratic governance and advancing women’s rights through initiatives aimed at mainstreaming gender in policy planning and budgeting.
In 2011, the UN Women Sub-regional Office for Central & South Eastern Europe (CSEE) has launched the 3-year regional project on Promoting Gender Responsive Policies in South East Europe financed by Austrian Development Agency and UN Women. The project aims at improving individual and collective capacities of governmental institutions, CSOs and parliamentarians in South East Europe (with particular focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and FYR Macedonia) on utilizing gender responsive budgeting as a tool to promote, implement and monitor policies and programmes in the employment and labor, social protection and social assistance and rural development sectors. By doing so the project strives to facilitate strengthening of women’s economic rights and improve social protection and social assistance policies and programmes.
The purpose of this final evaluation is to evaluate the project results and selected processes in order to identify lessons learnt that can improve UNWOMEN’s future initiatives on GRB in the region.
The evaluation is a final project evaluation. It will cover activities conducted in the project three countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and FYR Macedonia) that have taken place since the beginning of the project (December 2010) until the time of the evaluation (June 2013). The evaluation will also take into account the future planned activities (July – December 2013) and support the planning of follow-up activities by identifying successful approaches and spaces to further enhance performance. The final evaluation will serve as a tool and learning product to secure future progress.
The key objective of this evaluation is to review whether the key project’s outcomes foreseen in the project log frame have been achieved. Further, the evaluation will assess UN WOMEN’s contribution to results, including the effectiveness of programming strategies in implementing global commitments within national priorities for fostering gender responsive policies. The evaluation will also investigate the contextual factors that enabled or restricted the achievement of results. The evaluation will help to evaluate UN WOMEN’s organizational performance with respect to this project and will evaluate the project design, project strategies, project management, , including project monitoring, and their effectiveness in facilitating the implementation of UN WOMEN’s mandate to promote gender responsive policies. It will set forward-looking recommendations on how to strengthen UN WOMEN’s programming, monitoring and evaluation system at the country and (sub)regional level.
The evaluation’s primary audience are the project stakeholders, donors, partner organisations, as well as UN WOMEN regional offices and headquarters.

Duties and Responsibilities

A team of 4 consultants will be recruited for this evaluation. The team will consist of Team Leader (Senior Evaluation Consultant) and three national consultants, who will be supervised by the Team Leader and who will be based in Bosnia and Herzegovina, FYR Macedonia and Albania respectively. The key responsibility of the team members will be to collect in their respective countries data for the evaluation.
The Team Leader will be responsible for the overall delivery under the TOR.
She/he is expected to travel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to Macedonia in order to collect data for the evaluation. The data collection in these countries will be supported by the respective national consultants. The team leader will not be required to travel to Albania.
For detailed information, please refer to TOR available at http://www.unifem.sk/uploads/doc/TOR_GRP_Final_Evaluation.doc

Competencies

  • Excellent interpersonal, communication and interview skills
  • Excellent writing skills in English
  • Experience as a team leader of multinational teams, demonstrated cultural sensitivity
  • Prior experience working for international organizations
  • Integrity
  • Knowledge of the local language is an advantage
Core values:
  • Demonstrates integrity and fairness by observing UN values and ethical standards
  • Demonstrates professional competence and is conscientious and efficient in meeting commitments and observing deadlines
  • Displays cultural, gender, nationality, religion and age sensitivity and adaptability.
Ethical code of conduct:
 
All members of the evaluation team are required to follow the UNEG ethical code of conduct. (http://www.unevaluation.org/unegcodeofconduct)

Required Skills and Experience

Education:
  • Master’s degree in a relevant field (social sciences, e.g. sociology, political science, international relations, legal studies, public policy, international development) field, PhD an advantage.
Experience:
  • At least 7 years of demonstrated experience in evaluation of international development projects and programs
  • Demonstrated work experience on gender issues incl. gender responsive policies, public administration, familiarity with GRB is an asset
  • Demonstrated work experience in/on South Eastern Europe
  • Demonstrated experience with applied research with data collection, analytical and presentation skills and demonstrated ability to structure information.

Language Requirements:

  • English is required.

Documents to be included when submitting the proposals.

Interested individual consultants must submit the following documents/information to demonstrate their qualifications:
  • Cover letter (1 page) stating your interest in and qualifications; explaining why they are the most suitable for the work
  • A max 2-page methodology outline (describing briefly how they will approach and conduct the evaluation)
  • Recent (no older than 2010) evaluation report/s on a related topic and/or region
  • Financial proposal (for details see further below)
  • UN P11 form (preferred) or a personal CV including past experience in similar projects and at least 3 references

Financial proposal

Financial proposal should consist of a lumpsum (total) and also a breakdown of costs: (1) daily fee; (2) travel/accommodation costs for field missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina (5 days of field work) and Macedonia (5 days of field work). Within BiH, the Team Leader and the National Consultant will have to travel to Sarajevo (4 days) and to Banja Luka (1 day).
The cost proposal of the consultant is a lump sum proposal, including all visa, travel and accommodation costs and other costs required to deliver under the terms of this contract. (For more details refer to Application process and evaluation of applicants). The evaluator will be responsible for office space, administrative support, telecommunications, printing of documentation and implementation of tools such as the survey and focus group discussions. The Evaluation Task Manager and Project Manager will facilitate the process to the extent possible, by providing contact information, documentation for desk review, reviewing draft report and providing feedback to the evaluators.

All costs should be listed in USD.

Evaluation

UN Women applies a fair and transparent selection process that takes into account both the technical qualification of potential consultants as well as the financial proposals submitted in support of consultant applications. Candidate applications will be evaluated using a cumulative analysis method taking into consideration the combination of applicant qualifications and a financial proposal. The contract will be awarded to the individual consultant whose offer has been evaluated and determined as:
  • responsive/compliant/acceptable, and
  • having received the highest score out of below defined technical, interview and financial criteria.
Only candidates obtaining a minimum of 30 points in the technical evaluation will be considered for an interview. Top 5 candidates (with highest number of points in the technical evaluation) will be interviewed. The maximum number of points assigned to the financial proposal will be allocated to the lowest price proposal among those candidates who have reached at least 30 points in the interview. All other price proposals receive points in inverse proportion.

Criteria

Technical Evaluation – documents based (40%)
Out of which:
Evaluation related work experience/expertise – 20 points
Gender Responsive Policies related work experience/expertise – 10 points
Regional experience/expertise – 5 points
Applied research, writing, international organizations experience/expertise – 5 points
Technical evaluation – interview based (40%)
Out of which:
Evaluation related work experience/expertise – 20 points
Gender Responsive Policies related work experience/expertise – 10 points
Regional experience/expertise – 5 points
Applied research, writing, international organizations experience/expertise – 5 points
Financial Evaluation (20%)
 
Qualified women and members of minorities are encouraged to apply. UN Women applies fair and transparent selection process that would take into account the competencies/skills of the applicants as well as their financial proposals.
Due to large number of applications we receive, we are able to inform only the successful candidates about the outcome or status of the selection process