BRAC Maendeleo Tanzania is a leading nonprofit organisation with a mission to empower people and communities in situations of poverty, illiteracy, disease, and social injustice. Our approach is grounded in the conviction that people living in vulnerable situations can be agents of change if they are empowered with the tools, skills, and hope they need to change their lives. We design proven, scalable solutions that equip people with the support and confidence they need to achieve their potential. BRAC’s institutional expertise on successfully implemented programmes is applied across 10 countries, touching the lives of over 130 million people, where our models are adapted according to the country’s context.
In 2022, the MasterCard Foundation in partnership with BRAC International (81) will be announcing an initiative that will create positive and measurable impact for 1.2 million adolescent girls and young women and 9.5 million people across seven countries in East and West Africa, including Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Community assessments are one of the inception phase activities which will set the groundwork to understand the contexts, needs, and implementation dynamics in the implementing communities. This ToR describes the roles, eligibility, and recruitment process of the leads who will oversee the assessments and write the final reports in four countries.
The purpose of the assessments is to facilitate programme to select the relevant communities, potential beneficiaries, service providers, and other supports. The specific purposes are as below:-
- To facilitate the selection of relevant community in terms of the project’s purpose;
- To determine the selection criteria of potential beneficiaries in terms of project relevance;
- To map out the active and new service providers (govt. private, NGOs);
- To suggest appropriate programme supports and associate resources and intervention tweaking to implement the project; and
- Short guideline for similar assessments in the follow-up years.
With a participatory rural appraisal approach (PRA), the assessments will be qualitative cross-sectional study. Literature review will be used to triangulate the community level findings with the similar studies and national level relevant analytics. The potential study population for the assessments are household heads, Adolescent Girls Young Women (AGYW), Adolescent Boys Young Men (ABYM), local service providers, and other stakeholders. The tools to be used are FGD, KII, Household survey (qual), market observation, and transect walk. Many of the tools will be built on BRAC’s validated (qualitative) tools being used in UPG (ultra-poor graduation) inceptions.
The Community Assessment Lead will lead the assessments with the help of M&E, BRAC’ s Independent Evaluation and Research Cell (IERC), and community assessment leads/consultant. BRAC staff, M&E, IERC and hired enumerators will collect data. BRAC Country Team will clean and compile the dataset for analysis. The same enumerators will do data entry/transcription.
The main scope of the works by the Assessment Lead is to contextualize assessment tools if needed, train enumerators on data collection methods, facilitate the implementation of the data collection, analyse the report, and write reports. The specific roles are as below:-
- Through BRAC country team, the assessment lead will facilitate a quality implementation of the data collection in each country. One consultant for each country will be responsible for writing the reports of many (15-20) of the community assessments if the country selects 10-15 Branch areas for the first-year term (4-5 communities in each Branch);
- Contextualize and synchronize the validation and finalization of the tools based on the field learning across countries. The consultants will receive the final draft version of the tools from BRAC central teams;
- Analyse the (qualitative) primary data and use relevant secondary data (literature reviews) about the respective communities, Branch, and country context to write the reports;
- Write around 10-15 reports for each country (based on the estimation that 10-15 Branches will include 40-60 communities – 4 communities under each Branch). The reports should be short, precise, and inclusive of the scope of the assessments. Report template will be shared;
- Based on the implementation and report writing experience, the assessment lead will draft a “Community Assessment Guideline” for this project which the programme managers can use themselves to conduct similar assessment for the remaining communities and in the following years.
Individual experts are preferred over consultancy firms. National and international candidates are qualified for this position given that the international applicants are qualified (with respective country context) and available to travel and work in the designated countries for the most part.
Qualitative researchers experienced in PRA, M&E, and project implementation with high quality writing skills are encouraged to apply.
Interested candidates should send their proposals (technical and financial), CV and some writing samples to
[email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] by 1700hrs of Monday, 25 Apr 2022. Only short-listed candidates will be interviewed for selection and negotiation.
For further information, if so needed, please contact Ms.Lilian Msoffe (+225 754 413 457)
