Historique

1. Background

The UNPDP Myanmar Country Office developed a Transformation Plan (the Plan) in 2018 to respond to the programmatic direction outlined in the new Country Programme 2018-2022. It outlined a new path for working in a more integrated and collaborative way to help Myanmar achieve sustainable development and sustained peace. The UNDP Country Office consists of 190+ staff including 30 international and 165 national staff and Service Contract holders working in 8 different locations.

In response to the Plan measures were taken to align the o?ce structure with the new CPD, facilitates more collaborative and iterative ways of working, puts down foundations for more sub-national level work and higher delivery, emphasizes learning and supports national sta? capacity development. To support the o?ce, the leadership of RBAP has committed expertise in organizational positioning, resource management, design and partnerships, as well as financial resources to support national capacity development.

The ambitious objectives set in the Plan required a significant change to business as usual; adoption of a leapfrog strategy. As such the CO needs to be built around the capacity for a high degree of innovation & invention.  This means fostering a new way of working that is better aligned with delivering impact within the complex, interdependent and ambiguous nature of the SDG class of challenges UNDP is tasked with helping to address in Myanmar. Developing a more e?ective way of working will not only deliver more impact but also create greater opportunities for growth. This strategy requires all staff within UNDP Myanmar, both international and national, to work different and contribute to this transformative change.

The Plan articulated several principles to build a new way of working. These principles outline how the country office can support a new way of working and a new culture of sharing and contributing. The fundamental steps to realigning the way of work include:

• Innovation: Give a clear mandate to innovate. Innovation is not an aside, or an exception to the rule, but rather needs to be the new way of working. This means that there must be a clear and unwavering declaration from management that it everyone’s responsibility to foster and participate in innovative ways of working.
• Team Work: Build creative teams of 8. These bring the right balance of perspectives within a manageable enough group dynamic. As such it is critical that the CO think systematically of all the things it needs to do to enable the formation of the best possible creative teams. This means considering not only the individual team member's professional experience, but also their social attributes and the dynamic of the group, as well as their current workload.
• Free Space: Institutionalize 10% unscheduled time (like Google’s policy of 20% unscheduled time) to allow for reflection and schedule fluidity. You cannot be strategic & thoughtful in your work if you don’t have some degree of freedom to step back and reflect, explore, if what you do is only driven by the need to respond to the immediate.
• Communications: Recognize that communications is strategic. Work is communications. The role of a Communications Team is not communicating on behalf of the office but rather helping support and equip teams to communicate. The way work is delivered is communications.
• Partnerships: Position partnerships at the core. The CO is not effective without a network of change partnerships. If one is to impact change at scale then the Country Office needs to also help redirect the logic of market investments (as these are critical drivers in both SDG challenges as well as the politics of government). Partnerships should include the private and non-traditional 3rd sector.

1. Approach

To support this transformative plan, the Country Office seeks to recruit a consultant or company to support the design of a multi-year capacity development plan for the Country Office in line with UNDP’s capacity development approach.

UNDP defines capacity development as:

It is not a ‘one size fits all’ blueprint, but should be adapted to suit the context of the Myanmar country office. The investment into human development requires an integrated system approach where capacity is grown and nurtured. The assignment should ensure the review and development of activities that support an integrated system taking into consideration the following factors:

• The enabling environment: is the broad social system within which people and organizations function. It includes all the rules, laws, policies, power relations and social norms that govern civic engagement. It is the enabling environment that sets the overall scope for capacity development.
• The organizational level: refers to the internal structure, policies and procedures that determine an organization’s effectiveness. It is here that the benefits of the enabling environment are put into action and a collection of individuals come together. The better resourced and aligned these elements are, the greater the potential for growing capacity.
• At the individual level: are the skills, experience and knowledge that allow each person to perform. Some of these are acquired formally, through education and training, while others come informally, through doing and observing. Access to resources and experiences that can develop individual capacity are largely shaped by the organizational and environmental factors described above, which in turn are influenced by the degree of capacity development in each individual.

The UNDP Senior Management Team will serve as the working group to support the development of the Capacity Development Plan and serve as a sounding board for the consultant.

The consultant will develop a series of tools, to be consulted and agreed with senior management, that will be utilized in assessing current capacities and arrangements within the office to determine the alignment, and gaps, between capacities and arrangements to support the new ways of working outline above.

The capacity assessment process should include mobilization and design, conducting the process and summarizing and assessing the results. The process is summarized below:

• Mobilize and design: A capacity assessment should start from the assumption that there are existing capacities that can and should be built upon.
• Conduct the assessment: The capacity assessment compares desired capacity against existing capacity. People may be tempted to set the level of desired capacity at the highest level attainable. Therefore, it is important to define a realistic goals with a realistic timeframe for developing capacities.
• Summarize and interpret results: Comparing desired and existing capacities provides insights for the formation of capacity development responses. When interpreting the results of the assessment, the assessment team will be able to discern patterns in capacity gaps to identify whether a gap is consistently large across a core issue or across a specific capacity. It is important to gather a variety of perspectives and take into account different points of view.

1. Activities

The UNDP capacity development process uses a five-step cycle, which may be applied for this consultancy. The assignment will focus on the technical and functional capacities of the national staff to:

• Work differently and contribute to new ways of working by demonstrating ownership in the overall performance and impact of the country office.
• Increase ‘levels’ of responsibility by strengthening capacity to gradually assume more responsibility with the aim to gradually shift activities currently performed by international staff to national staff.
• Provide leadership by taking accountability for actions and providing direction.
• Team engagement is needed to ensure the office is greater than the sum of its parts. National staff need to build confidence and be empowered to step up their active engagement in teams.

Step 1: Stakeholder Engagement

Capacity development begins with people talking and listening to each other. The first step is to get a dialogue going among all those who stand to benefit from the enhanced capacity. The aim should be to get everyone committed to the process, and personally invested in its success. This is what we mean when we speak of ownership.

Ownership is best achieved when it comes about organically, rather than when it is imposed from an outside source. Using local methods of consultation and decision-making from the start and allowing everyone to contribute to the design and content of the process, help to situate an initiative within national development priorities.

It is also important early on to establish accountability: who will do what, who will ensure that it gets done, and what will the consequences be if it doesn’t? Accountability should flow both upward and downward through clearly stated goals and responsibilities. External partners should avoid creating parallel systems that undermine or compete with the local systems.

Step 2: Assess Capacity

The UNDP methodology for capacity assessments is the result of years of experience from around the world. It is not a ‘one size fits all’ blueprint – it is meant to be adapted to suit various situations. However, in every case, its ultimate goal is to move from analysis to action, with clear indicators for measuring progress. This step should help establish the baseline from which that progress should be measured, through identifying existing capacity assets as well as the desired level of capacity anticipated to achieve development or organizational objectives.

Step 3: Formulate a Capacity Development Plan

A good capacity development response builds on existing capacity assets to address the gaps identified in a capacity assessment. Most stakeholders prefer to play to their strengths – their capacity assets – and use what they are doing right to do other things better.

Because the four core issues reinforce each other and are highly contextual, the effectiveness of the response will increase if it combines actions across core issues and levels of capacity based on the local situation. For instance, an assessment of the procurement office of a ministry of health (organizational level) may need to be complemented by a revision of the government’s procurement guidelines (enabling environment). Similarly, procurement officers may need to be trained in applying these guidelines and an incentive system put in place to encourage procurement officers to use the new system and guidelines.

Sometimes it may be important to define quick win/short-term activities to help shore up support while the foundation is being laid for longer-term capacity development initiatives. The design of a capacity development response should therefore contain a combination of quick-impact initiatives (less than one year) and short- to medium-term (one year or longer) initiatives. This is particularly critical in post-crisis and transition situations.

Indicators should be set to monitor progress in implementation. The process itself of defining progress indicators is useful as a way of generating policy discussion, enhancing monitoring and evaluation and as a learning exercise.

Ideally, a capacity development response should be integrated into existing national budget structures, to help ensure continued funding beyond the involvement of UNDP or other external partners.

The cost of a capacity development response should be clearly calculated, since it encourages a realistic estimate of the funding required. If the budget proves too small to cover all proposed actions, it’s time to prioritize activities or find alternatives, based on the findings of the capacity assessment.

Since the process of setting priorities is inherently political, it should be managed carefully and transparently, with the involvement of all relevant stakeholders; otherwise those that stand to lose out may withhold support during implementation.

THE FOLLOWING STEPS ARE NOT PART OF THIS PHASE I ASSIGNMENT, BUT ARE INCLUDED SO THAT THE CONSULTANT IS AWARE OF THE NEXT STEPS TO BE IMPLEMENTED UNDER PHASE II UNDER A SEPARATE CONSULTATNCY.

Step 4: Implement A capacity development plan

The implementation phase is where the real action occurs. This is the point where all the thinking, planning, assessing, analyzing and designing is tested in the real world. For the most sustainable long-term results, implementation should be managed through national systems and processes rather than through the parallel systems of external partners. The very fact of using national systems can help strengthen essential capacities such as project management and procurement. Partner countries feel a strong sense of ownership of initiatives when their own systems and procedures are used for implementing programmes and projects. It is therefore important to help strengthen these systems.

The importance of investing in and using national systems cannot be exaggerated. National systems, for UNDP, ranges from systems of planning and strategy development, all the way to delivery and evaluation. Every initiative should include an ‘exit strategy’ that allows external partners to effectively hand over management of the programme or project to national counterparts.

There are instances where this is easier said than done. For instance, when countries are in transition, donors often respond to political pressure on new governments to deliver quickly by bringing in external organizations and consultants to carry out urgent tasks that could and should be done by national organizations. External expertise may be absolutely necessary and appropriate in some cases. However, if there is no clear exit strategy, the external presence may become counter-productive: not only might it compromise the accountability of government to the public it serves, since the externals may be seen – for better or worse – as the real change agents; but it might also cause valuable opportunities to be missed for enhancing local capacities in such areas as governance and basic service delivery.

Step 5: Evaluate Capacity Development

Measurement of capacity development success cannot be reduced to an increase in input resources such as human, financial, or physical resources. Availability of input resources does not guarantee their contribution to development objectives. Progress and results are reflected by changes in performance, which can be measured in terms of improved efficiency and effectiveness. But all these outcomes are less easy to capture than outputs, which is why it can be tempting to focus on such elements as funds disbursed, number of workshops conducted, or number of people trained. The link between capacity development and impact is also challenging to evaluate because it depends on the dynamics at work among several factors over time – of which a change in capacity may be only one.10 In the end, an evaluation framework is only useful to the extent that its findings are absorbed and applied. The challenge is in designing a framework that is comprehensive enough to capture the key issues, but that continues to be manageable (see annex for checklists).

Devoirs et responsabilités

1. Expected Activities and Deliverables:

The first phase of the assignment is six months and the overall assignment is to be implemented in two phases over  over 24 monthsP.  The assignment can be carried out by an individual consultant or by a firm/company.

Compétences

Evaluation Methods for Selection of the Best Offer

• Offers received will be evaluated using a Combined Scoring method, where the qualifications of the Offeror will be weighted 80% (i.e. technical evaluation), and combined with the price offer, which will be weighted 20% (i.e. financial evaluation).
• Technical Evaluation will be conducted based on the below criteria. Only candidates/firms/companies obtaining a minimum of 50 points in the Technical Evaluation will be considered for the Financial Evaluation.
• A Technical proposal shall be submitted responding to this Terms of Reference and the below criteria demonstrating the capacity to carry out the assignment. Capacity assessment tools and plan prepared by the consultant/firm should also be submitted that demonstrates completion of similar assignments.

• Financial Evaluation: All technically qualified proposals will be scored out of 20. The maximum points (20) will be assigned to the lowest financial proposal. 

 [DDR1]there are too many different critieria and will be very difficult to assess.

I suggest not more than five criteria.

Qualifications et expériences requises

1. Qualifications

The consultant or firm/company is expected to have the following skills and expertise: 

• Advanced degrees in human resources, adult education, development studies, business studies, social sciences or related discipline; 
• A minimum of five (5) years’ experience in conducting individual and organizational capacity needs assessments.
• At least five (5) years of experience working in organizational development and capacity building in international organizations; experience working in this capacity in Asia Pacific is an advantage.
• Technical background in capacity development as well as general human development issues, and knowledge of the latest developments and trends in the field.
• Demonstrated experience in developing training and workshops materials, and a seasoned facilitator capable of imparting knowledge, skills and attitudes. 
• He/She should be able to work in a multicultural and multidisciplinary team environment with strong interpersonal skills, and the ability to communicate and work well with diverse people including national and international personnel.  
• Demonstration of design and application of innovate methods to building capacity and work spaces conductive to team work and innovation is an asset.
• Possession of a Training of Trainers certificate and skills in Participatory Planning and Management for Behaviour Change would be an added advantage.
• Fluency in English.  Excellent writing and communication skills in English