CONSULTANT: DRM PROGRAMME EVALUATION 315 views0 applications

1. Background and Context

Diakonia is a Swedish faith-based development organisation that works to change unfair structures that generate poverty, inequality, oppression, and violence. Diakonia supports civil society organisations in about 25 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America and has its Head Office in Stockholm, Sweden. Diakonia works through capacity building of civil society actors in partnership with local and regional organisations and seeks to employ a rights-based approach to development in all programmes, including a special focus on gender equality.

Africa Economic Justice Programme (AEJ) is a regional programme that has been supporting regional civil society organizations working in Sub-Saharan Africa since 2007. Over this period, AEJ has strategically created a platform where new practices and innovative ideas on social and economic justice and economic empowerment of women are tested and developed. AEJ works with regional civil society organizations because they complement the work of the national and local actors by providing linkage to the regional and global authorities including intergovernmental and non-state international actors.

The programme is managed from the Diakonia Africa Regional Office since 2007. Under the previous strategy which ended in 2020, the work of AEJ was divided into three thematic clusters on unfair financial flows; financial and investment regimes and economic empowerment of women. Instead of a fixed end-date, the new strategy will be based on a horizon of approximately five years that is constantly being pushed forward. In order to stay relevant, the strategy will be revised and updated annually based on changes in context and organisational learnings. The theory of change will be contextualized and adapted to each change process AEJ engages in and will be adjusted when conditions or analysis changes.

Domestic Resource Mobilisation Programme

This programme sits under the AEJ programme and recognizes that Sub-Saharan African countries need to increase their domestic resource mobilisation to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. If successful, they will be able to put aid and loan dependency behind them, and allow every woman, man, boy and girl to live a life in dignity.

Inadequate domestic resource mobilisation maintains African governments’ dependency on external resources, such as foreign aid and loans. The lack of domestic resources also leads to underbalanced national budgets where public services in health, education and social welfare receive fewer resources than needed to cater for the needs of the right holders, where women and children are extra vulnerable.

Despite the fact that most African countries stepped up their policy initiatives aimed at strengthening the mobilization and effective use of domestic resources, many loopholes still exist.

It is against this background that Diakonia engaged the Embassy of Sweden in Addis Ababa (EoS) to develop a programme on Promoting Domestic Resource Mobilisation in Sub-Saharan Africa which runs from July 2018- June 2022. The programme aims to address some of the causes for the inability to expand and realise domestic resource mobilisation and is designed on the premise that Africa is facing challenges that can well be solved by cooperation between countries through regional integration.

The programme recognises policy formulation, review, and implementation as a crucial strategy for development and aims to take advantage of existing regional policy frameworks to push for maximization of domestic resource mobilization. To achieve this, priority is to support and build the capacity of regional civil society organizations. The partners will lobby and engage key change agents at regional and national level to advocate for policies that support increased domestic resources.

Diakonia’s Theory of Change will be at the core of the programme’s work and will be contextualized and adapted accordingly to the focus areas of the programme when conditions or initial analyses change. Programme results are envisaged in relation to both the civil society capacity and in policy change at the national and regional level.

The programme prioritizes five intervention areas linked to existing EAC, ECOWAS and SADC frameworks and policies. The intervention areas are:

1. Harmful tax competition between member states
2. Tax evasion and tax avoidance
3. Public debt management
4. Corporate transparency and accountability in the extractive sector
5. Institutional and programmatic capacity of regional CSO partners

The programme result areas are further illustrated below:

Outcome 1: Member States of EAC, ECOWAS and SADC implement key recommendations in the AU HLP report on IFFs to curb harmful tax practices by 2022

Lead partner- TJNA

Bridging Outcome 1.1: RECs agree on harmonized standards for taxation to prevent harmful competition resulting from the race of attracting foreign direct investment

Activity 1.1.1: Advocate for the Development of laws/policies/commitments to align tax incentives within regional economic communities.**

TJNA, AFRODAD, YTJN, SEATINI

Bridging outcome 1.2: Reduced Tax Evasion among member states in targeted RECs

Activity 1.2.1: Advocate and influence member states to develop and implement laws and policies to promote beneficial ownership and make provisions for public registry on beneficial ownership laws.

TJNA, TI Kenya

Bridging outcome 1.3: Reduced Tax Avoidance among member states in targeted RECs

Activity 1.3.1: Advocate and influence member states to make provisions for tax avoidance

TJNA, TI Kenya, SEATINI

Outcome 2: Member states in targeted RECs held accountable for prudent public debt management in line with regional finance and investment protocols

Lead partner- AFRODAD

Activity 2.1.1: Implement regional protocols on finance and investments (reduction of fiscal deficit, advocating efficiency in capital spending and fighting corruption and wastage in public finance management.**

AFRODAD, TI Kenya, SEATINI

Outcome 3: Targeted Regional Economic Communities’ legislative and policy structures support implementation of the AMV and EITI

Lead partner- TI Kenya

Activity 3.1.1: Promote models for profit sharing and transparency and accountability measures (national mining visions and laws, capacity building anti-corruption measures)

TI Kenya, ACEP, AFRODAD, SEATINI

Outcome 4: Implementing partners in the DRM programme adequately deliver programme results to contribute to increased DRM in SSA

Lead partner- Diakonia

Activity 4.1: Improve technical capacity of Implementing partners in the DRM programme to implement planned interventions

Diakonia, TI Kenya, AFRODAD, TJNA, ACEP, YTJN, SEATINI

1. Purpose of the Evaluation

With implementation being underway since 2018, the overall purpose of the evaluation is to assess the performance of the DRM programme against the agreed outcomes. This evaluation is deemed imperative to provide Diakonia, DRM partners, and the EoS with an external and independent assessment which will help draw recommendations and lessons that will provide future direction for the remaining period to implement in this first phase, and which can be used as input to discussions for a second phase.

3. Scope of the Evaluation

The evaluation will cover the 2018-2020 period of the programme. Different project components and activities stated in the revised 2018-2022 DRM programme results framework will be assessed. Certain elements of the standard OECD/DAC criteria on evaluation namely relevance, coherence, effectiveness, and efficiency will be prioritized in structuring the evaluation. Specifically, the evaluation hopes to answer the following questions:

Relevance

o To what extent is the design (including the Theory of Change, indicators, implementation strategies) of the DRM programme relevant in relation to the context and partners’ intervention areas and priorities?

o Analyse the extent to which there is a balance and strong linkages between programme interventions influencing norms at national level and regional level.

Effectiveness

o To what extent have the interventions achieved, or are they expected to achieve, planned results?

o Determine any unexpected outcomes derived from the programme implementation.

o Does the programme M&E system deliver robust and useful information that is/ could be used to assess progress towards outcomes and contribute to learning?

Coherence

o To what extent have partners applied a collaborative strategy in the implementation of the programme?

o Analyze the present partnership model and ways of working and propose other collaboration models that would be relevant for the programme.

o To what extent has the programme engaged/ is the programme engaging strategic stakeholders identified as key in order to reach the envisaged results?

Efficiency

o To what extent have the programme interventions delivered results in an economic and timely way?

o Where programme interventions have delivered results, analyze why. Give a similar analysis where there have been no results.

o Assess and evaluate Diakonia’s role and how this has translated/ is translating to added value in the programme as per Diakonia’s roles within the Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PME) handbook

4. Methodology

Diakonia will hire a team of consultants to undertake this exercise. The team will develop a mix of qualitative and quantitative research approaches that should include the following:

• A literature review of Diakonia and the partner organisations documentation e.g., Diakonia and partner strategies, programme proposals, Baseline study for the program, progress reports, AEJ 2016-2020 CIVSAM programme end-term evaluation report, Diakonia’s mainstreaming toolkits, etc.
• Preparatory meetings and consultations with the Diakonia team and the Embassy of Sweden in Addis Ababa (back donor)
• Undertake interviews/Focus Group Discussions with:
• The Diakonia AEJ team.
• The Embassy of Sweden in Addis Ababa (back donor).
• Key staff of the respective partner organisations.
• Rights holders as per the respective partner projects.
• Duty bearers being engaged by partners; government officials, policy makers etc. as per respective partner projects.
• Other likeminded organisations, including funding institutions supporting partners.
• Collect stories of change from identified target groups of the respective partner projects. The stories will focus on what the project beneficiaries consider to be the most significant change brought by the project in their lives, capacities, or way of operating.

Given the Covid19 risks and restrictions, these consultations may mostly be virtual. Physical meetings will be arranged where possible.

5. Roles and Responsibilities

The consultant will be responsible for:

• Conducting the assignment and producing an evaluation report with clear conclusions and recommendations.
• Developing tools required for data collection and for the coordination of data collection, compilation and analysis exercises.
• Ensuring the evaluation approach and methods foster reflection, discussion, and learning.

Diakonia will be responsible for:

• Supporting the consultant where necessary to mobilize and coordinate the logistics for all aspects of the assignment. Where applicable, Diakonia will provide logistical requirements for any workshops/meetings required.
• Supervising the assignment. The Consultant will report to the Africa Economic Justice Programme Manager based in Nairobi.
• A reference team from Diakonia Regional Office and representatives of partner organisations e.g., the Steering Committee will provide overall quality assurance of the evaluation report.

6. Outputs and deliverables

The following outputs and deliverables are expected:

• An inception report outlining how the consultants will go about the study in more detail, how the guiding questions will be translated into sub-questions etc.
• An evaluation report (20,000 words maximum)
• Other documents related to the assignment –raw and refined statistical data, interview notes, meeting minutes, etc.

7. Envisaged timeframes

The evaluation is envisaged to take place within the 2^nd and 3^rd quarters of 2021.

8. Evaluation quality

The evaluation shall conform to OECD/DAC’s Quality Standards for Development Evaluation. Therefore, the evaluators should specify in their application how quality assurance, in accordance with DAC’s quality standards, shall be handled during the evaluation process.

9. Evaluation team

The team of consultants should have the following qualifications:

• Post graduate degree in Economics, Development Studies, Social Sciences or equivalent (with emphasis on research and analysis and monitoring and evaluation.
• Proven experience of at least 7 years in the development field working with Civil Society in Africa. Specific experience in Sub-Saharan Africa will be an added advantage.
• Monitoring and evaluation experience of at least 7 years of similar regional programmes would be key.
• Possess excellent coordination abilities.
• Be an excellent team player.
• Proven understanding and experience of human rights-based programming, progressive theories of change, participatory approaches, feminist principles, gender mainstreaming, as well as environment and conflict sensitive approaches to development.
• A good understanding of thematic areas related to social and economic justice. This includes but is not limited to:

o Tax justice and illicit financial flows

o Public debt management

o Natural resource governance

o Inequality trends

o Business and human rights