Background
UN Women is the United Nations (UN) entity dedicated to promote gender equality and empowerment of women. UN Women was established in 2010 to accelerate the aims of the UN in tackling gender inequalities and meeting the needs of the worlds’ women.
In 2014, UN Women, with the support of the Belgium Government, initiated the implementation of the project “Expanding Women’s Role in Agricultural Production and Natural Resource Management as a Strategy for Improved Food Security and Climate Change Resilience”.
As the end of the project (foreseen by August 2018) approaches, UN Women Mozambique will carry out a final, end-of-project evaluation, as scheduled in the Monitoring, Evaluation & Research Plan (MERP). The evaluation will be conducted by an independent, external team. The assignment will contribute to results-based management through a participatory approach that documents results achieved, challenges to progress, and contributions to women’s economic empowerment in Mozambique.
The evaluation process will adhere to UN Women’s Evaluation policy, the Evaluation Chapter of UN Women’s POM, the GERAAS evaluation report quality checklist, the United Nations System Wide Action Plan Evaluation Performance Indicator (UN-SWAP EPI) and UN Women’s Evaluation Handbook. These documents will serve as the frame of reference for both Evaluation Manager and evaluation consultants for ensuring compliance with the various requirements and assuring the quality of the evaluation report.
Description of the Project
The project rationale stems from the need to mitigate the negative impact of adverse climatic change on the livelihoods of women in terms of food insecurity and of breaking down the persisting gender inequalities.
With a duration of four years, it started in September 2014 and will end in August 2018. It operates in six districts of Gaza Province – Guijá and Mabalane as priority districts, and Massingir, Chigubo, Chicualacuala and Massangena as non-priority districts. The project has an overall budget of EUR 1,637,710. Its direct beneficiaries are women and local government authorities.
The project goal is to empower women and their communities to become change agents and beneficiaries from local decision-making and implementation towards enhanced livelihoods, food security and climate change resilience.
The expected results of the project are the following:
Outcome 1: Women have access to increased opportunities to enhance their economic and food security status with focus on the most vulnerable in the context of climate change and natural disasters adaptation and mitigation
Output 1.1: Targeted strategies developed and implemented for promoting sustainable livelihoods and food security especially for vulnerable women
Output 1.2: Women's participation in local decision-making platforms increased and transformation of gender norms at community level accelerated
Outcome 2: Plans, budgets and related processes incorporate gender equality commitments to facilitate increased economic empowerment and climate change adaptability by women
Output 2.1: Multi-sectorial framework to respond to women's economic empowerment and climate adaptation and mitigation needs in place
Output 2.2: Improved availability and use of data to guide planning, resource al location and monitoring of gender equality commitments in relation to women's economic empowerment in the context of climate change adaptation
The project’s strategy includes:
Capacity development and promotion of sustainable livelihoods and food & nutritional security for vulnerable women;
Increasing women’s participation in local decision-making platforms and accelerate transformation of gender norms;
Support multi-sectorial frameworks to respond to women’s economic empowerment and climate change adaptation; and
Improve availability/use of data to guide planning, resource allocation and monitoring of women’s economic empowerment commitments.
The project aims at facilitating relevant and effective strategies to support women’s economic empowerment and use this as an entry point for promoting transformation of gender relations. The work towards transforming gender relations, on one side, has taken place through awareness raising, advocacy and support to women participation in decision-making at the household and community level. On the other side, it encompasses engagement with gatekeepers of the local socio-cultural norms – community and opinions leaders – to create an enabling environment for women to exercise their rights to access to and control of productive resources.
Key stakeholders of the project are the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Action; the Belgian Government (Belgium Diplomatic Bureau), FAO, UNCDF, the provincial government of Gaza and the governments of the target districts, associations of rural women’s groups. Some of these partners are part of the project Steering Committee.
The project management structure is composed of:
a Programme Officer, based in Maputo, who is responsible for the overall project and financial management, technical support, partnership building and staff management in the project;
an Administrative Assistant, also based in Maputo, who supports the logistics and financial processes for project implementation, in support of the Programme Officer;
a Project Officer, based in the Gaza province, responsible for project implementation, coordination with local partners at provincial and district levels and for project representation in Gaza province and in the targeted districts.
In seeking to implement an evidence-based and gender-sensitive intervention, UN Women conducted a scoping study which among others entailed the identification of women’s groups and their economic activities and possibility for scaling up; identification of relevant actors, stakeholders and beneficiaries of food security and climate resilience and assess their capacities and challenges to contribute for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the context of project intervention; identification of the main constraints to women’s access and control to economic assets (views of women community members, government and other key players) and identification of two focus districts taking into account the potential for synergies with the partners of the Belgium-supported Food Security and Nutrition Programme. The scoping identified animal husbandry as one economic activity with high potential to simultaneously contribute to generate solid income for women in a drought-prone area exacerbated by the climate change and to challenge gender norms in terms of women roles within the family and community.
The mid-term evaluation of the project, conducted in the second half of 2017, observed that the project is relevant both to the needs of beneficiaries and national priorities; that it has overall good implementation status on all four outputs, although with delays; that it had positive impact on the lives of beneficiaries, although with risks for their long-term sustainability. The evaluation analysed the efficiency of the project investment in both the financial and the human resources perspective; recommended solutions for improving the project monitoring functions; and assessed its overall sustainability, recommending solutions to overcome the identified issues before the end of the project.
Duties and Responsibilities
The evaluation aims to understand why — and to what extent — intended and unintended results were achieved and to analyse the implications of the results. The target audience of the evaluation will be the UN Women country office staff and regional management staff; the donor of the project, other donors interested in UN Women’s programs, UN Women’s partners (including the national government and the provincial government of Gaza); other stakeholders engaged stakeholders engaged in rural WEE, in and out of Mozambique.
In this perspective, the evaluation will be used for both accountability and learning purposes, as well as contributing to inform decisions on the future programming of UN Women CO with focus on women economic empowerment and gender-responsive budgeting. The evaluation will also serve to sharpen and/or re-align results to new national development indicators, the challenges of the protracted drought in project implementation areas and the tension between emergency and development interventions[1], the Mozambican UNDAF 2017-2020, the recently launched UN Women Flagship Programme on rural women economic empowerment and climate change.
Relevantly, the evaluation needs to capture why — and to what extent — intended and unintended results were achieved, analyse the implications of the results, and condensate lessons learned.
The evaluation needs to be finalized and presented by the time of the conclusive meeting of the project, foreseen by September 2018.
The evaluation is individual, meaning it will be managed only by UN Women, and summative, meaning it focuses on the outcome of the project.
Objectives (evaluation criteria and key questions)
Considering the mandates to incorporate human rights and gender equality in all UN work and the UN Women Evaluation Policy, which promotes the integration of women’s rights and gender equality principles, these dimensions will have a special attention in this evaluation. A specific evaluation objective on human rights and gender equality is included as well as considered under each evaluation criterion.
The overall objectives of this evaluation are to:
Assess the effectiveness in achieving expected results, including the effectiveness of programming strategies in implementing global commitments within national priorities for women´s economic empowerment, with a special focus on innovative, scalable and replicable interventions. The evaluation should also investigate the contextual factors that enabled or restricted the achievement of results;
Assess the organizational efficiency of the project, in terms of financial management and human resource investments towards the achievement of gender equality and women’s empowerment;
Assess the final impact of the intervention on the lives of beneficiaries, communities, and institutions involved in the project;
Assess the potential sustainability of the interventions;
Analyse how human rights approach and gender equality principles have been integrated in the interventions;
Provide an analysis on how this UN Women intervention has strategically positioned itself to add value to women’s economic empowerment in the national context and how it aligns to regional and global context. The assessment should focus on UN Women´s position regards to the implementation of its full mandate of normative, operational and coordination work;
Identify and validate lessons learned, good practices and examples of innovative work;
Provide actionable recommendations with respect to improving similar programmes in the future.
The following draft evaluation questions serve as first reference point for the inquiry. The specific evaluation questions, performance criteria and relevant evaluation instruments will be determined during the inception stage and in close consultation with the Evaluation Reference Group.
Key Evaluation Questions and Criteria
The following draft evaluation questions serve as first reference point for the inquiry. The specific evaluation questions, performance criteria and relevant evaluation instruments will be determined during the inception stage and in close consultation with the Evaluation Reference Group.
Relevance
To what extent was the intervention relevant to the needs and priorities as defined by beneficiaries?
To what extent was the intervention contributing to provincial (Gaza) and country priorities for gender equality, economic empowerment and climate change?
What are the priorities for Gender Equality, Economic Empowerment and Climate Change at provincial and country level? Did the project respond to them?
Effectiveness
To what extent were the expected outputs and outcomes achieved and how did UN Women contributed towards them?
Did UN Women effectively contribute to the outputs?
What are the enabling and limiting factors that contributed to the achievement of results and what actions needed to be taken to overcome any barriers that limit the progress? (see indicator table below for details)
Organizational efficiency
To what extent project strategies were cost-effective in making an impact on the ground, district and provincial levels?
To what extent did the Budget and Expenditure contribute to desired project results?
What have been the capacities (technical, administrative and advocacy skills) of the project management structure to deliver the project objectives and how could they have been strengthened to improve impact?
Impact
Did the project contributed to long-term social, economic, technical, environmental changes for individuals, communities, and institutions related to the project?
What changed in the lives of the beneficiaries? (Assess scenarios of before and after the project)
What are the social changes the intervention contributed for at community level? (attitudes, behaviour, knowledge, socio-cultural practices & norms related to GE)
What institutional changes did the intervention achieve in the partners organizations, especially regarding GRB?
How did the project change the availability of data on WEE, gender equality and climate to guide policy and programming?
Sustainability
To what extent was capacity developed in order to ensure sustainability of efforts and benefits?
How will the benefits of the intervention be secured for rights holders (i.e. what accountability and oversights systems were established)?
What are the contextual factors in the Province of Gaza for sustaining and replicating the project interventions and its impact;
Do beneficiaries demonstrate skills with potential for long term impact on their wellbeing?
Is the community endowed to continue changing attitudes?
To what extent have Government Partners committed to mainstream gender-responsive planning and budgeting at district level?
What are the contextual factors in Gaza for sustaining and replicating the project interventions and its impact?
Human Rights approach and Gender Equality principles
To what extent has gender and human rights considerations been integrated into the project design and implementation?
How has attention to/integration of gender equality and human rights concerns advanced the area of work?
Strategic positioning
What has been the level of engagement between the Partners and key Stakeholders at all levels and the ability to leverage the partnership process to inform the advocacy strategy?
How has the project aligned UN Women’s position to the regional and global context?
What was the value addition of UN Women in terms of the resources oversight and technical support?
Identification of lessons learned and good practices
Which were the good practices, challenges and lessons from the interventions and recommend forms to improve project strategies in the remaining implementation period.
What could have been done differently?
What has worked well and could be replicated?
Scope of the evaluation
The scope of the evaluation is the whole project, in its whole duration and geographical coverage. The scope of the evaluation is therefore national (mostly concentrated in the 6 target districts in the province of Gaza) and will include all dimensions of the project, namely how it contributes to the overall UN Women mandate to support normative and intergovernmental, operational and coordination work at provincial and national levels. It will cover all four years of the project duration. In an effort to identify and assess Women´s Economic Empowerment linkages with other thematic areas, the evaluation scope includes also other UN Women impact areas such as the elimination of violence against women and girls and gender responsive budgeting.
Evaluation design (process and methods)
The evaluation type will be non-experimental, and follow these phases:
Preparation: This includes the stakeholder analysis and establishment of the reference group, development of the ToR, and recruitment of the evaluation team
Conduct: Inception report, stakeholder workshop, data collection and analysis
Reporting: Presentation of preliminary findings, draft and final reports
Use and follow up: Management response, dissemination of the report, and follow up on how to positively shape future programme design.
The evaluation methodology will be developed by the Evaluation Team and presented for approval to the Evaluation Reference Group. The methodology should use a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods that are appropriate to address the main evaluation questions and account for complexity of gender relations and to ensure participatory and inclusive processes that are culturally appropriate. These methods should be responsive to human rights and gender equality principles and facilitate the engagement of key stakeholders. Measures will be taken to ensure the quality, reliability and validity of data and data collection tools. Limitations with respect to the sample (representativeness) should be stated clearly.
Primary data collection could be undertaken through observations, site visit, individual key informant interviews and focal group discussions with representatives of relevant government institutions (duty bearers), development partners, beneficiaries (right holders) and key community players seeking to address gender equality and human rights issues. Data collection methods such as appreciative inquiry, most significant change, case study, survey could also be implemented. The evaluation team will develop a sampling frame (area and population represented, rationale for selection, mechanics of selection, and limitations of the sample) and specify how it will address the diversity of stakeholders in the intervention.
The evaluation team should take measures to ensure data quality, reliability and validity of data collection tools and methods and their responsiveness to gender equality and human rights; for example, the limitations of the sample (representativeness) should be stated clearly and the data should be triangulated (cross-checked against other sources) to help ensure robust results.
The evaluation will be carried following UN Evaluation Group (UNEG) Norms and Standards (see http://www.unwomen.org/about-us/accountability/evaluation/), UN Women Evaluation Policy as well as the Ethical Guidelines for evaluations in the UN system, see Annex to this TOR. Once finalized the evaluation report will be quality-assessed based on the UN Women Global Evaluation Reports Assessment and Analysis System (GERAAS). GERAAS standards and GERAAS rating matrix are available at http://www.unwomen.org/en/about-us/evaluation/decentralized-evaluations.
Stakeholder participation
The evaluation team will collaborate with the Project Management to convene and coordinate meetings with the Evaluation Reference Group. Ideally, the ERG will include the members of the Project Steering Committee: the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Action; the Belgium Diplomatic Bureau; sister UN agencies, local governments and women groups. They will be playing liaison, technical advisory and quality assurance roles, including the validation and dissemination of results. In this sense, rural women and their associations are key rights holders — their views, challenges and progress need to be highly reflected in the process and results of this evaluation.
[1] This consideration emerged from the Midterm Evaluation conducted in 2015 to five implementing agencies of the Belgium Fund for Food Security. UN Women collaborated in the process as a synergy project. The tension between emergency and development approaches to food security is now a broader strategic issue facing projects in Gaza.
Competencies
Corporate Competences and Ethics
Demonstrate integrity, values and ethics in accordance to UN Women norms;
Promote the vision, mission and strategic objectives of UN Women;
Show respect regardless the race/colour, sex, religion, nationality and age as well as be sensible to cultural adaptation capacity; and
Evaluators are expected to have personal and professional integrity and abided by the UNEG Ethical Guidelines for Evaluation and the UNEG Code of Conduct for Evaluation in the UN System ensuring that the rights of individuals involved in the evaluation are respected.
Functional Competences
Knowledge of legislation, programme and public policies on gender, women’s economic empowerment, and women’s rights in general in Mozambique;
Demonstrated experience in gender and economics related research;
Leadership and skills to work with autonomy and initiative; and
Strong Advocacy skills.
Managing knowledge and learning
Promote knowledge sharing and a learning culture;
Team working; and
Strong communication skills, oral and written in Portuguese and English
Ethical code of conduct
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 commit to the Code of Conduct for Evaluation (see http://www.unevaluation.org/papersandpubs/), specifically to the following obligations:
Independence: Evaluators shall ensure that independence of judgment is maintained and that evaluation findings and recommendations are independently presented.
Cultural Sensitivity/Valuing diversity: Demonstrating an appreciation of the multicultural nature of the organization and the diversity of its staff. Demonstrating an international outlook, appreciating differences in values and learning from cultural diversity.
Impartiality: Evaluators shall operate in an impartial and unbiased manner and give a balanced presentation of strengths and weaknesses of the policy, program, project or organizational unit being evaluated.
Conflict of Interest: Evaluators are required to disclose in writing any past experience, which may give rise to a potential conflict of interest, and to deal honestly in resolving any conflict of interest which may arise.
Honesty and Integrity: Evaluators shall show honesty and integrity in their own behaviour, negotiating honestly the evaluation costs, tasks, limitations, scope of results likely to be obtained, while accurately presenting their procedures, data and findings and highlighting any limitations or uncertainties of interpretation within the evaluation.
Competence: Evaluators shall accurately represent their level of skills and knowledge and work only within the limits of their professional training and abilities in evaluation, declining assignments for which they do not have the skills and experience to complete successfully.
Accountability: Evaluators are accountable for the completion of the agreed evaluation deliverables within the 45-day timeframe (respecting specific timeframe for the International and National Consultants) and budget agreed, while operating in a cost-effective manner.
Obligations to Participants: Evaluators shall respect and protect the rights and welfare of human subjects and communities, in accordance with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights conventions. Evaluators shall respect differences in culture, local customs, religious beliefs and practices, personal interaction, gender roles, disability, age and ethnicity, while using evaluation instruments appropriate to the cultural setting. Evaluators shall ensure prospective participants are treated as autonomous agents, free to choose whether to participate in the evaluation, while ensuring that the relatively powerless are represented.
Confidentiality: Evaluators shall respect people’s right to provide information in confidence and make participants aware of the scope and limits of confidentiality, while ensuring that sensitive information cannot be traced to its source.
Avoidance of Harm: Evaluators shall act to minimize risks and harms to, and burdens on, those participating in the evaluation, without compromising the integrity of the evaluation findings.
Accuracy, Completeness and Reliability: Evaluators have an obligation to ensure that evaluation reports and presentations are accurate, complete and reliable. Evaluators shall explicitly justify judgments, findings and conclusions and show their underlying rationale, so that stakeholders are in a position to assess them.
Transparency: Evaluators shall clearly communicate to stakeholders the purpose of the evaluation, the criteria applied and the intended use of findings. Evaluators shall ensure that stakeholders have a say in shaping the evaluation and shall ensure that all documentation is readily available to and understood by stakeholders.
Omissions and wrongdoing: Where evaluators find evidence of wrong-doing or unethical conduct, they are obliged to report it to the proper oversight authority.
The evaluator will have the final judgment on the findings, conclusions and recommendations of the evaluation report, and the evaluator must be protected from pressures to change information in the report. If the evaluator identifies issues of wrongdoing, fraud or other unethical conduct, UN Women procedures must be followed and confidentiality be maintained. The UN Women Legal Framework for Addressing Non-Compliance with UN Standards of Conduct defines misconduct and the mechanisms within UN Women for reporting and investigating it.
For more information, please refer to: UN Women Evaluation Consultants Agreement Form, UNEG Ethical Guidelines and Code of Conduct for Evaluation in the UN system should be provided.
Annexes
UN Women Evaluation Handbook and UN Women GERAAS evaluation quality checklist http://www.unwomen.org/en/about-us/evaluation/decentralized-evaluations
UN Women Evaluation Consultants Agreement Form
UNEG Norms and Standards for Evaluation in the UN System
http://www.unevaluation.org/document/detail/1914
UN Women Evaluation Handbook
Required Skills and Experience
Post-Graduate degree (Masters) in development studies, economics, social science, rural development or other related fields
A strong record (minimum 7 years) in designing and leading evaluations including gender-responsive evaluations;
A minimum of 7 years of progressive experience in the field of gender equality and women’s empowerment;
Work experience in economic empowerment, rural development, food security, and climate change mitigation;
Knowledge of gender-responsive planning and budgeting approaches is an asset
Sound understanding of social and cultural reality of Mozambique, in particular traditional norms affecting gender equality;
Sound understanding of the functioning of government structures in Mozambique;
Knowledge of the national gender machinery, women’s organizations, policies and legislation on WEE/rural women;
Excellent analytical skills and prior experience of both quantitative and qualitative data analysis;
Fluent in Portuguese and English