Background

Organizational Context

Grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the UN, UN Women works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing women's rights at the center of all its efforts, UN women lead and coordinate United Nations System efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world.  It  provides  strong  and  coherent  leadership  in  support  of  Member  States'  priorities  and  efforts,  building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors.

UN Women in South Sudan has developed a Strategic Note for 2014/2016 that targets four (4) key results areas: (1); Women's leadership and participation in gender responsive governance enhanced; (2) Women in South Sudan, especially the poorest and most excluded are economically empowered and benefit from development; (3) Women and girls live a life free from violence; (4) Peace and security and humanitarian actions in South Sudan are shaped by women leadership and participation Increased women’s access to education opportunities is cross cutting and supports all 4 result areas. The programme is aligned to the UN Women Global Strategy, 2014-2017;  The United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF), 2014-2016 which as well is aligned to the South Sudan Development Plan (SSDP), 2014-2016.

Pillar 1. Governance and Leadership: This Pillar is promoting gender responsiveness in government policies and institutions; gender budgeting and gender mainstreaming; increasing women’s participation and leadership in governance.  It reinforces the leadership skills and capacities of women legislators, women led groups, CSOs, women in the media and gender equality advocates to influence government to adopt gender responsive planning and budgeting.  Through the governance and leadership pillar, UN Women supports the Ministry of Gender by strengthening institutional capacity for the promotion of gender equality. The pillar trains gender advocates to engage in advocacy for gender responsive governance including the Constitutional Review process and the ratification of CEDAW. The pillar also supports the strategy of the Ministry of Gender at national level to fill the 25% quota for women’s leadership and participation with transformational leadership training of  female leaders. UN Women also leads, coordinates and promotes accountability for the implementation of gender commitments across the UN system. The scope of coverage is largely within Juba, the political capital that lodges national government ministries, and to a little extent to some States.

Pillar 2. Economic Empowerment:  This Pillar seeks to increase women’s economic assets and productivity through capacity strengthening of key government ministries to develop gender responsive policies, strategies and services that will enhance women's economic and sustainable livelihoods; increased access to functional literacy and numeracy for rural women; increased capacity of women entrepreneurs to access diverse sources of income. Specifically, UN Women has estimated to increase the productivity and incomes of about 10,000 women over a period of three years. A project has been initiated with the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry Cooperatives and Rural Development (MoAFCRD) that aims at increasing rural women farmers’ access to services and opportunities that will facilitate their engagement in agribusiness. This project targets 600 farmers in six states, namely Eastern Equatoria, Western Equatoria, Western Bahr el Ghazal, Lakes and Warrap. UN Women has constructed two multi-purpose centers for the empowerment of women and there is an ongoing quick impact functional literacy and numeracy skills development for rural women in 5 Payams in 4 states that is reaching out to over 1000 women.  UN Women in collaboration with the Ministry of Gender, Child, Social Welfare, Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management (MGCSWHA&DM) has initiated an intervention aimed at increasing women’s participation in the governance and reaping benefits from the Extractive Industry. The main partners are Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Mining and Petroleum, Ministry of Forestry, Cooperatives and Rural Development, UNESCO, UNICEF and the Ministry of Gender.

Pillar 3. Preventing Violence Against Women and girls:  Within this pillar, UN Women is working with partners including rural women, men, girls and boys to implement strategies to reduce violence at community level. At Payam level, UN Women supports mobilization of women and men against violence. The partnership identifies and supports male champions against violence. Specific programmes for young people in the community are also being supported.

Pillar 4. Peace and security and Humanitarian Response

This pillar aims at improving protection and security for women and girls through peace building and conflict management, and gender responsiveness of security sector processes.  The strategy is to enhance the capacity of gender advocates to influence peace recovery, peace building, peace planning and transitional justice processes; to ensure that community women effectively influence peace building processes at the community level. It provides economic empowerment support to women involved in Peace Building at the Community Level utilizing strategies such as the Village Savings and Loans Associations. Its projects are currently in four geographical locations namely, Warrap, Western Equatoria, Eastern Equatoria and Lakes States; with planned expansion to Jonglei and Western Bahr el Ghazal States.

This pillar also involves UN Women’s intervention in the humanitarian response. Following a comprehensive gender assessment of the humanitarian response in South Sudan, UN Women provides services to fill the gaps in the response for women and girls. Two safe spaces have been established within the UN Mission in South Sudan’s Protection of Civilian sites for effective mobilization of the women within the PoCs. Through support for advocacy, women have been part of the leadership structure of the PoCs. UN Women provides services such as adult functional literacy, computer skills training, and sustainabile livelihood support to build resilienceof women, girls, men and boys and to prepare them for return to their natural habitat.

Mid Term Evaluation

UN Women is interested in conducting a Mid Term Evaluation of its programme as outlined in the  2014/2016 strattegic plan and Annual Workplans.  The purpose of the evaluation is to determine the overall effectiveness, efficiency, impact, continued relevance and sustainability of UN Women programmes in South Sudan.

Specific Objectives of the Mid Term Evaluation:

• Take stock of current programme achievements, challenges and opportunities;
• Verify the continued relevance of the programme;
• Assess  the programme design, objectives, strategies and implementation arrangements incl. proposed plans for sustainability;
• To present the key findings, draw the lessons learned, and provide a set of clear and forward-looking options to inform management decisions and stakeholders and to strengthen Country Programme

The main clients of the evaluation are:

• Relevant staff in partner National Ministries at the National and Subnational level;
• National NGO’s and CSOs;
• Relevant staff in participating UN-agencies;
• UN Women at country, regional and HQ level;
• Development partners and particularly the main donors (SIDA and DANIDA).

Duties and Responsibilities

Scope of Work

The Consultant will:

• Assess progress made towards the achievement of results at the outcome and output levels for the 2014/2016 Strategic Plan and Annual Work Plans;
• Determine if the results contribute to UNWOMEN’s overall goals of advancing gender equality and empowerment of Women;
• Assess the reasonability of the relationship between project costs and results;
• Assess performance of the Country Programme in terms of the relevance of results, sustainability, shared responsibility and accountability, appropriateness of design, resource allocation, and informed and timely action;
• Identify lessons learned and provide recommendations for guiding UNWOMEN future programming.

Evaluation Use

Aligned with United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG) Norms and Standards, this evaluation has an explicit focus on utility. UN Women together partners in South Sudan will be the primary users of this evaluation. The evaluation findings will be used as basis for changes in Programme design and implementation strategies, up-scaling or replicating of interventions. The evaluation is also expected to generate lessons learned about efficiency and effectiveness of UN Women support, processes and management. The evaluation will provide forward looking recommendations for effective planning, management, monitoring and evaluation of the country office strategies, support and activities. The lessons identified will also feed into the UN Women future planning in South Sudan and the global strategy for women’s empowerment and gender equality promotion in countries of transition. In line with UN Women Evaluation Policy the final evaluation report together with the UN Women management response will be disclosed publicly on the UN Women Global Accountability and Tracking of Evaluation Use System http://gate.unwomen.org/.

Duties and Responsibilities

Under the overall supervision of the UN WOMEN Country Representative and in close supervision by the International Consultant; the National Consultant will support in assessing  the design of the 2014/2016 Strategic Note and the Annual Work Plans including the corresponding Development Results Framework, Organizational Effectiveness Framework, Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Plan, and Risk Analysis Matrix. The evaluation will analyze the coherence of processes and strategies in place and provide early indications of achievements at the output levels of results. The National Consultants together with the International  will be responsible for developing the evaluation methodology and work plan in close consultation with the Evaluation Reference Group (see below) and the Regional Evaluation Specialist.

Key questions to be addressed include

The questions below outline some indicative key information needs identified during the formulation of this Terms of Reference. The questions will be further refined based on input from the Evaluation Reference Group and the Evaluators during the inception phase of this evaluation.

Design and implementation of the 2014/2016 Strategic Note and Annual Work Plan: Does the UN Women programme have a clear theory of change/logic model? Overall, is the results framework SMART, clear and logical? Are the formulated outputs and outcomes clear and realistic? Are they measurable and do they respond to the needs identified? Do all results have sufficient, clearly defined and measureable indicators? Does baseline information exist, or what are the provisions to generate baseline information? Does the programme have a complete Monitoring, Evaluation and Research (MER) Plan to gather and systematize the information with defined responsibilities, sources and periodicity?

Relevance: To what extent the programme results are consistent with beneficiary requirements that is, empowering women and promoting gender equality; how is UN Women positioning it’s within national needs (SSDP) and UNDAF priorities? Has the programme addressed the relevant needs in the country? Have new, more relevant needs emerged that the programme should address? Have the stakeholders taken ownership of the programme concept?

Efficiency: Have resources been used efficiently? Have the programme activities been cost-effective? Have programme funds and activities been delivered in a timely manner? If not, what were the bottlenecks encountered? Are there sufficient resources (financial, time, people) allocated to integrate human rights and gender equality in programme design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation?

Effectiveness: Is the programme making sufficient progress towards its planned outputs and outcomes spelled out in the AWP? Will the programme be likely to achieve its planned outputs upon completion? How have stakeholders been involved in programme implementation? Have the quantity and quality of the outputs produced so far been satisfactory? If not, what were the bottlenecks encountered? Do the benefits accrue equally to men and women? How has the programme enhanced ownership and contributed to the development of national capacity?

Sustainability: Does the programme design include an appropriate sustainability and exit strategy (including promoting national/local ownership, use of national capacity, etc.) to support positive changes in human rights and gender equality after the end of the programme? To what extent were stakeholders involved in the preparation of the sustainability strategy? How do stakeholders show ownership of the programmes? To what degree did partners change their policies or practices to improve human rights and gender equality fulfillment (e.g. new services, greater responsiveness, resource re-allocation, improved quality etc.) If not, why not and what are the major obstacles?

Evaluation Process and Methodology

The evaluation would be undertaken according to UN Women Evaluation Policy and UNEG Norms and Standards, accessible at http://www.unwomen.org/about-us/accountability/evaluation/.  It will follow a gender and human rights responsive evaluation approach. The management arrangements for the evaluation will ensure the effective participation and engagement of programme stakeholders. The evaluators will collect secondary data from desk review and verify them with primary data from field visits, interviews and workshop. During the process of data gathering the evaluators will compare, validate and triangulate data of different sources (programme staff, programme implementing partners and beneficiaries) and different methodologies (desk review, site visits and interviews). All data collected should be sex-disaggregated and different needs of women and men should be considered. A mixed-methods approach will include qualitative and quantitative methods, and will seek to offer diverse perspectives to the evaluation and promote the inclusion of different groups of stakeholders. Stakeholder inclusion will help to address the issue of biases such as gender bias, distance bias (favoring the more accessible), class bias, power bias etc. it will also help to identify groups that may have been negatively affected by the programme.

The Evaluation Team will be composed of 2 Consultants, 1 International Expert who will serve as Evaluation Team Leader and 1 National Expert. The Consultants will be engaged under the Special Service Agreement (SSA), for a total number of 40 Consultancy days for the International Consultant and 40 Consultancy days for the National Consultant in the period 27th April 2015 to 22nd June 2015.  The consultants will work in close consultation with the Evaluation Reference Group which will help to identify the key stakeholders to be interviewed. Stakeholders will include representatives from Government Ministries, implementing partners, donors, community based organizations, so that their engagement and involvement in the evaluation process can be arranged in a timely manner. The participation of stakeholders will enhance the credibility and ultimately ownership of the evaluation findings.

Evaluation Quality and Ethics

The final evaluation report will be quality-assessed against the UN Women Global Evaluation Reports Assessment and Analysis System (GERAAS) as well as Evaluation Performance Indicators in the UN System-Wide Action Plan on Gender Equality (UN-SWAP). The GERAAS and SWAP methodologies are explained in detail at http://www.unwomen.org/en/about-us/evaluation/decentralized-evaluations and http://www.unwomen.org/en/about-us/evaluation/un-coherence respectively.

To ensure the credibility and integrity of the evaluation process and following United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG) Ethical Guidelines, the consultants will be required to sign the Code of Conduct for Evaluation in the UN system. The agreement form is available at http://gate.unwomen.org/resources/docs/SiteDocuments/UNWomen%20-%20CodeofConductforEvaluationForm-Consultants.pdf.

Evaluation Reference Group

To ensure coordination and coherent management, an Evaluation Reference Group has been created whose roles and responsibilities are to establish a system to involve the key stakeholders in the evaluation process; serve as consultation body, facilitate feedback and make decisions on the evaluation processes. This reference group will ensure that the evaluation process and outputs are of the required quality, that the principles of participation and consultation, transparency and accountability are upheld at the maximum. The M & E Focal Person and the Country Representative are coordinating these roles and will throughout the process closely liaise with the UN Women Regional Evaluation Specialist based in Nairobi.

Stakeholder Involvement

Stakeholder participation is fundamental to UNWOMEN programme evaluations. The Consultant is expected to support the process to conduct a participatory evaluation providing for meaningful involvement by project partners, beneficiaries and other interested parties. Stakeholder participation is to be an integral component of evaluation design and planning; information collection; the development of findings; evaluation reporting; and results dissemination.

Key Tasks

Desk Review: Before conducting field visits, the evaluators will review all relevant documentation, quarterly progress reports, work plans, mission and workshop reports, baseline surveys, monitoring data, country data and previous evaluation reports etc.

Individual Interviews and Focus groups: Individual interviews and Focus groups will be organized according to themes, topics or characteristics of groups of stakeholders to discuss specific evaluation issues or questions. The discussions and interviews will be complemented with field visits to the actual sites of implementation. Discussion will be held with relevant governmental institutions and organizations involved and/or benefiting from the programmes interventions in those sites in accordance with the evaluator's requests and consistent with the terms of reference. The choice of sites to be visited should have an explicit rationale (differing conditions, random selection, etc.).

Debriefing: The evaluators will present preliminary findings, conclusions and recommendation to the Evaluation Reference Group in order to discuss and validate them. The draft report will subsequently be shared for further comments before finalization.

Key Deliverables

This evaluation is expected to produce:

• Inception report: Inception report that includes a detailed evaluation work plan, design outlining key questions, data collection and analysis methods. This inception report will be shared for feedback with the Evaluation Reference Group and the Regional Evaluation Specialist;
• Draft Evaluation Report: The Consultant will submit a draft evaluation report for review by UNWOMEN and the Evaluation Reference Group;
•  Evaluation Report: Within two (2) weeks of receiving UNWOMEN / Evaluation Reference Group comments on draft report, the Consultant will submit a final evaluation report including an evaluation abstract/executive summary;
• Dissemination strategy To further promote learning and the exchange of experiences, a dissemination strategy will be developed for sharing lessons learnt and good practices from this evaluation with UN partners, government, civil society and other relevant stakeholders.

  Accordingly, the final evaluation report should contain but not limited to the following analytical framework:

• Title page (1 page);
• Table of Contents (1 page);
• Acronyms (1 page);
• Executive Summary (2 pages);
• Background and Programme Description (2-3 pages);
• Purpose of Evaluation (1 page);
• Evaluation Objectives and Scope;
• Evaluation Methodology (1 page);
• Findings, Analysis, Conclusions, and Recommendations (no more than 20 pages)

This section’s content should be organized around the TOR questions, and include the findings, conclusions and recommendations for each of the subject areas to be evaluated:

• Lessons learned (1-2 pages);
• Annexes: including the terms of reference, evaluation work-plan and any other relevant documents.

Evaluation of Applicants

Individual consultants will be evaluated based on a cumulative analysis taking into consideration the combination of the applicants’ qualifications and financial proposal. The award of the contract should be made to the individual consultant whose offer has been evaluated and determined as:

• Responsive/compliant/acceptable;
• Having received the highest score out of a pre-determined set of weighted technical and financial criteria specific to the solicitation.
• Technical Criteria weight; 70%
• Financial Criteria weight; 30%

Only candidates obtaining a minimum of 49 points in technical evaluation would be considered for the Financial Evaluation.

Duration and remuneration

The duration of the contract is expected to be from 30th April 2015 to 25th June 2015 with estimated number of approximately 40 working days. The payment will be made upon satisfactory completion of key milestones of the assignment and submission and approval of final report by UN Women.

Application procedure

Interested candidates are requested to apply online through this site no later than COB  30th April 2015, and to submit:

• Letter of interest for the position;
• Personal CV including past experience and contact details of 3 referees (please follow the UN Women Personal History Form (P11) format available at http://www.unwomen.org/about-us/employment);
• Operation work plan indicating the time frame and key tasks to be accomplished;
• Financial proposal, specifying a total lump sum amount for the tasks specified in this announcement. The financial proposal shall include a breakdown of this lump sum amount (daily fee, number of anticipated working days, and/or any other possible costs).
• Please note that the financial proposal is all-inclusive and shall take into account various expenses incurred by the consultant/contractor during the contract period.

Competencies

Core Competencies and values:

• Demonstrates integrity and fairness by modeling UN values and ethical standards;
• Demonstrates professional competence and is conscientious and efficient in meeting commitments, observing deadlines and achieving results;
• Display cultural, gender, nationality, religion and age sensitivity and adaptability;
• High sense of relational skills, including cultural, gender, religion, race, nationality and age sensitivity and adaptability, with a demonstrated ability to work in a multidisciplinary team.

Functional Competencies:

• Ability to manage and supervise evaluation teams and ensure timely submission of quality evaluation reports;
• Good knowledge and understanding of the UN system, familiarity with UN Women mandate an asset;
• Knowledge of issues concerning governance, women's rights and gender equality;
• Specific knowledge in the subject area [e.g. democratic governance, economic empowerment, GBV and/or gender mainstreaming;
• Thorough knowledge of results-based management and strategic planning processes;
• Excellent facilitation and communication skills;
• Wide experience in quantitative and qualitative data collection methods and –analysis including surveys, focus group discussions, key informant interviews etc.;
• Ability to deal with multi-stakeholder groups;
• Ability to write focused evaluation reports;
• Willingness and ability to travel to the different project's sites in the country.

Required Skills and Experience

Education:

• Master degree or equivalent in Social Science, Development Studies, Gender Studies, or equivalent.

Experience:

• At least 5 years of professional experiences in conducting evaluations with minimum of 5 years as Evaluation Team Leader
• A reliable and effective evaluation manager with extensive experience in conducting evaluations and a proven record delivering professional results;
• Fully acquainted with UN results-based management orientation and practices;
• A proficient practitioner in gender equity and equality policies;
• Good working experience in the ten (10) States of South Sudan.

Language:

• Fluency in English;
• Knowledge of local Arabic an added advantage.