Background

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, 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 leads and coordinates 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’s work on achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is guided by its Strategic Plan, which articulates how UN Women will leverage its triple mandate, encompassing normative support, UN System coordination and operational activities. In its integrated approach to address the root causes of inequality and affect broader systems change, supporting positive social norms is a critical area.  UN Women’s new Strategic Plan 2022-2025, both, identifies discriminatory social norms as a structural barrier to gender equality and women’s empowerment, and positions positive social norms as a high-leverage mechanism to advance UN Women’s vision.[1] Supporting positive social norms has been identified as one of the seven systemic outcomes in the UN Women global Strategic Plan (2022-2025).[2]

While the inclusion of social norms as a specific outcome has been a recent development, UN Women programming has addressed social norms change directly or indirectly in its broader advocacy on gender equality and specifically in its work within thematic areas that require behavioural and attitudinal change, such as ending violence against women and girls and promoting women in leadership. UN Women adopts an integrated approach to transform the unequal power relations and discriminatory social norms, behaviours and practices and promote those that advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. This includes engaging men and boys as allies to promote respectful, equitable and non-violent relationships, contribute to transforming negative stereotypes constraining women’s participation in public and private life, addressing social norms that prevent women and girls’ access to humanitarian assistance, and increase the acceptance of women as leaders and agents of change. Social norms work is also relevant in cross cutting areas such as education, health, sports and peace, humanitarian action and disaster risk reduction.

UN Women regularly evaluates its own work to enhance accountability, inform decision making and contribute to learning on gender equality. The Independent Evaluation Service (IES) provides evidence for a more relevant, effective and efficient UN Women with greater impact on the lives of women and girls it serves. UN Women carries out strategic corporate, country portfolio and regional evaluations, as well as decentralized evaluations. IES leads strategic evaluations with the support of external evaluators. They assess effectiveness, organizational performance and normative and operational coherence.

Although programmatic efforts on changing social norms have been prevalent in UN Women’s efforts at the global, regional and country level; an explicit recognition of this area of work marks a shift in the organizations philosophy of embedding and advancing social norms work across the four thematic impact areas.[3]  Thus, UN Women HQ has taken initiative to begin work defining the social norms outcome area of work to streamline and better inform future programming directions. In this regard, the Independent Evaluation Service is undertaking a formative evaluation: Feminist Collaborative Evaluation (FCE). The FCE will facilitate an in-depth regional approach to provide comprehensive analysis and evidence based on experiences with social norms change programming at the field level across Eastern and Southern Africa, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia and the Pacific regions.

UN Women Nepal Country Office (NCO) has been selected as one of the case study countries from Asia and the Pacific region based on the desk review (meta-analysis of evaluations, review of annual reports, and the regional portfolio reviews), and consultations with UN Women personnel at regional and country levels. Country case study is a critical component of the FCE, as they will explore the pathways of change and inform implicit/explicit theories of change that can provide inspiration and lessons learned for social norms programming efforts at UN Women. In Nepal’s case, Developmental Evaluation (DE) approach will be adapted as continuation of the previous DE phase – II[4] with the main purpose of supporting implementation of innovative and adaptive development programme strategies focused on social norm change and documenting key lessons learned. The case study will be participatory and led by Regional Evaluation Specialists in collaboration with the country office M&R/E Officer and support from the National Evaluation Consultant. The case studies will engage rights holders, experts in social norms from the country, and civil society in surfacing their understandings of social norms efforts through storytelling or other feminist methodologies rooted in the country and local context.

[1] UN Women.  Strategic Plan (2022-2025). Accessed from: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N21/186/22/PDF/N2118622.pdf?OpenElement

[2] UN Women.  Strategic Plan (2022-2025). Accessed from: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N21/186/22/PDF/N2118622.pdf?OpenElement

[3] (i) governance and participation in public life; (ii) women ’s economic empowerment; (iii) ending violence against women and girls; and (iv) women, peace and security, humanitarian action and disaster risk reduction.

[4] Available at: https://gate.unwomen.org/Evaluation/Details?EvaluationId=11529

Duties and Responsibilities

The work of the National Evaluation Consultant will be home-based and require in-country travel.  Approximately 20 days of work are estimated over the period from 1 August to 31 October 2023. The consultant will be requested to travel to support data collection, the costs of which will be covered by UN Women. Under the overall oversight of the Regional Evaluation Specialist, the consultant may be requested to contribute to the following:

• Develop a stakeholder map of UN Women’s key stakeholders in the case-study country.
• Undertake feminist/participatory, and inclusive data collection including through interviews and focus group discussions.
• Lead analyses (in-depth analysis of social norms related project/sub-theme/efforts implemented in the case study country), including systematic document review and triangulation.
• Facilitate participatory workshops with: (a) UN Women NCO personnel and (b) key civil society stakeholders focusing on social norms efforts.
• Draft a synthesis report based on data collection and analysis with substantive findings, conclusions and recommendations.
• Address feedback and comments received from UN Women NCO, IES and DE Expert[1].
• Other tasks as assigned by the supervisor.

1.Deliverables and Payment Schedule

Conditions:

• Payment will be made upon submission of deliverables with the approval of the IES Team leader.
• All deliverables should be written and generated in English.
• All data collected is property of UN Women and should be provided upon request.

2.Management and Quality Assurance

Under the direct supervision of the Regional Evaluation Specialist for Asia and the Pacific, the consultant will work in close consultation with MEAL Coordinator and relevant personnel at NCO.  The consultant will also interact and receive guidance from UN Women personnel working on the social norms outcome area and other Evaluation Specialists, national consultants, evaluation analysts and/or interns that may be engaged to support different tasks. 

3.Ethical Code of Conduct

The consultant should abide by the principle of UN Evaluation Group’s Ethical Guideline and Code of Conduct for Evaluation in UN System and follow the UN Women Evaluation Handbook. UN Women has developed a UN Women Evaluation Consultants Agreement Form for evaluators that must be signed as part of the contracting process, which is based on the UNEG Ethical Guidelines.

All data collected through evaluations are subject to the UN Women Information Security Policy that sets out the basis for UN Women in protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of its data to protect these assets against unauthorized usage, access, modification, destruction, disclosure, loss or transfer of data, whether accidental or intentional. All UN Women staff and other authorized individuals or entities are responsible for maintaining appropriate control over information in their care and for bringing any potential threats to the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of that information to the attention of the appropriate management. Compliance with this Policy is a condition of employment for all UN Women staff and a condition of contract for all other authorized individuals or entities, unless a prior (temporary) waiver is obtained. Failure to comply with this policy without obtaining a prior waiver shall be dealt with in accordance with Staff Regulations and Rules, or as appropriate, the contractual terms of UN Women’s engagement of the authorized individual or entity. Data Management Plan outlining key aspects of data protection during this evaluation, namely collection of data and study materials; treatment of consulted populations and observed topics; storage, security and backups; archiving, preservation and curation. The data may be requested and would be property of UN Women.

[1] A DE Expert under the SSA contract with UN Women NCO will review and provide inputs to the synthesis report before finalization.

Competencies

Core Values:

• Respect for Diversity
• Integrity
• Professionalism

Core Competencies:

• Awareness and Sensitivity Regarding Gender Issues
• Accountability
• Effective Communication
• Inclusive Collaboration

Please visit this link for more information on UN Women’s Core Values and Competencies

Required Skills and Experience

Academic Qualifications

• Master’s degree in relevant subjects: social sciences, monitoring and evaluation, international relations and/or development, or other relevant areas or bachelor’s degree with two years of additional work experience.

Experience and Skills

• At least five years of proven experience and technical expertise on qualitative research, feminist/participatory data collection methods in the field of gender equality and women’s empowerment is required.
• Three years of experience in social norms programmatic efforts is desirable.
• Experience facilitating workshops with diverse stakeholders.
• Excellent drafting and analytical skills to produce and present concise reports.
• Experience working with UN Women or the UN system and a solid understanding of its programming, coordination, and normative roles at the regional and/or country level is an asset.

Languages

• English (with demonstrated abilities of writing high quality reports).

Nepali (fluent in speaking and understanding

Applications will be evaluated based on the cumulative analysis.

• Technical Qualification (100 points) weight; [70%]
• Financial Proposal (100 points) weight; [30%]

A two-stage procedure is utilized in evaluating the applications, with evaluation of the technical application being completed prior to any price proposal being compared. The total number of points allocated for the technical qualification component is 100.  Only the price proposal of the candidates who passed the minimum technical score of 70% of the obtainable score of 100 points in the technical qualification evaluation will be evaluated.

Technical evaluation criteria

Financial/Price Proposal evaluation

• Only the financial proposal of candidates who have attained a minimum of 70% score in the technical evaluation will be considered and evaluated.
• The total number of points allocated for the price component is 100.
• The maximum number of points will be allotted to the lowest price proposal that is opened/ evaluated and compared among those technical qualified candidates who have attained a minimum of 70% score in the technical evaluation. All other price proposals will receive points in inverse proportion to the lowest price.

Submission of Proposal

Interested candidates are encouraged to submit an electronic application (consolidated as ONE attachment) online, no later than 16 June 2023. Kindly note the system allows only one attachment, please combine below listed submission package into one document.

Submission package includes:

• Updated Personal History Form including three references (this form can be downloaded from UN Women Employment Section)
• At least two relevant report(s) where the candidate is lead author.
• Financial proposal: the financial proposal shall specify a lump sum amount breaking down the professional fee for each deliverable and all related costs (if any). Please see the financial proposal template as below:

Performance evaluation:

The consultants’ performance will be evaluated based on timeliness, responsibility, initiative, communication, accuracy, and quality of the products delivered.

Payments

Payments for this consultancy will be based on the achievement of each deliverable and certification that each has been satisfactorily completed. Payments will not be based on the number of days worked but on the completion of each stated deliverable within the indicated timeframe on satisfactory completion of task.

1.Annexes (links)

Annex 1: UN Women GERAAS evaluation quality assessment checklist

• https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2022-06/Evaluation-GERAAS-guidance-2021-en.pdf

Annex 2: UN Women Evaluation Consultants Agreement Form

• https://gate.unwomen.org/resources/docs/SiteDocuments/UNWomen%20-%20CodeofConductforEvaluationForm-Consultants.pdf

Annex 3: UNEG Ethical Guidelines for Evaluation

• http://www.unevaluation.org/document/download/2787

Annex 4: UNEG Code of Conduct for Evaluation in the UN system

• http://www.unevaluation.org/document/detail/100

Annex 5: UN Women Evaluation Handbook

• https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2022/05/un-women-evaluation-handbook-2022