Summary
Date Posted: Wednesday, March 16, 2022 , Base Salary: Not Disclosed

JOB DETAILS:
Request for Proposal for an Impact Evaluation Design Consultant for the 2022-24 Dialogue and Knowledge Sharing Communication Platforms in Uganda Project

Background and introduction
FRI aims to establish and develop sustainable dialogue and knowledge sharing communication platforms, housed and hosted by community-oriented radio stations in East Africa. The focus of the platforms will be on facilitating and enabling inclusive, circular and regenerative agriculture.
Over a 24-month period, with a grant from the IKEA Foundation, the Dialogue and Knowledge Sharing Communication Platforms in Uganda Project,will establish the building blocks for an enduring network of dialogue and knowledge sharing communication platforms, hosted by community-oriented radio stations, serving many rural communities of Uganda. At least half of those served will be women, and one third will be youth - defined as under thirty years of age. At the end of this two year phase, a comprehensive impact evaluation plan, with baseline measures, will be in place to allow for a future rigorous evaluation of the contribution of these platforms to the resiliency and quality of life for communities through planet- and people-positive regenerative agriculture.
In this first phase, a network of 12 platforms will be developed, each serving a unique geography and in language(s) spoken in the area. The building blocks established through this grant will take us toward the ultimate aim of providing a majority of rural people in both countries with reliable, continuous and powerful communication service through interactive platforms that share knowledge, facilitate dialogue, give voice, and stimulate positive change toward inclusive, circular, regenerative agriculture.

Those who access and use the service will gain:
• much greater knowledge of planet positive circular and regenerative agriculture
• sustainable shifts in practice toward more circular and regenerative agriculture
• stronger more profitable links with short value chains
• a greater sense of agency among farmers and opportunities to participate in debate, dialogue and feedback

Project proponents – including the other partners of IKEA Foundation - will be able to scale up the reach and impact of their evidence-based planet positive agricultural solutions. Government extension services and public research systems will provide more cost-effective and consistent extension and advisory services to all farmers. Farmer-serving organizations will form stronger connections with their members, share information with them, and gather their feedback. The private sector will better connect with rural producers – generating more local sales and sourcing more and better products from local farmers. A range of voices and perspectives, including those of people and groups that are critical of mainstream approaches, will be brought to the table and engaged in constructive debate and dialogue.
One of the main steps in this project will be to develop a rigorous evaluation methodology to assess the impact of these communication platforms on resilience and livelihoods.
With the expectation that this 2-year start-up phase will be followed by an implementation and scale-up phase, FRI will take steps from the very beginning to design the intervention in a way that allows its effectiveness and impact to be evaluated.

Through this Request for Proposals, FRI is seeking to engage an impact evaluation design consultant to work with FRI’s Knowledge Management Team (which is headed by Bernard Pelletier, who holds a PhD in Natural Resource Sciences from McGill University) to ensure that the project is designed in a way that enables an assessment of changes in developmental outcomes that can be partially attributed to the Dialogue and Knowledge Sharing Communication Platforms. This may mean working with radio stations that have confined reach and identifying, as counterfactuals, comparable communities that the stations do not reach. The use of different quasi-experimental methods such as, for example, propensity score matching, will also be explored to address the inherent challenges of randomized controlled trials. The potential for longitudinal cohort tracking will also be considered. The consultant will work with the team to identify, modify or develop an index of, for example, resiliency, agency, prevalence of regenerative agriculture practices etc. At the end of the two-year period, a carefully-designed, rigorous impact evaluation plan will be set, with key baseline measures in place.
The consultant engaged for the initial start-up phase may continue to be involved in future phases, potentially as a Principal Investigator, supporting the implementation of the evaluation plan and providing arm’s length validation of findings, claims and recommendations derived from evaluation activities. Thus, over time, the consultant will both be a co-creator of the evaluation design and an independent reporter of the evaluation results and conclusions.

Project goals and scope of services
The goals for this engagement will be to develop a comprehensive and rigorous evaluation design, plan and baseline measures that will allow for the long-term impact of dialogue and knowledge sharing platforms to be measured and documented. This will involve:
• developing a means of measuring changes in; access to and use of sustainable communication services by rural women, men and youth; resiliency of and quality of life in rural communities; agency of rural people; and the prevalence of regenerative, people- and planet-positive agriculture practices. This may involve developing one or more indices or sets of measurable indicators that can be tracked periodically over a period of time.
• developing a project design that can be used to assess the extent to which the above changes can be attributed to the dialogue and knowledge sharing platforms;
• creating the measurement processes and tools needed for implementing the evaluation plan
• contributing to the completion of a baseline study of the indices group of indicators that can be used for future assessment.

The consultant will be engaged for up to 80 days between April 2022 and November 2024. (FRI will employ a full-time Monitoring and Evaluation Officer in Uganda to support these efforts. Additionally, approximately 100 days of the time of the Knowledge Management Team manager will be assigned to this project over two years). Through this level of effort, the consultant will be expected to deliver:
• A report on one or more indices or groups of indicators that can be used to assess the impact of the Platforms (Due by June 2022)
• An impact evaluation design for future phases of the project (Complete by August 2022)
• A comprehensive monitoring and impact evaluation plan with tools (such as surveys, logs, tracking sheets, maps etc) and processes (complete by January 2023)
• A baseline study plan (complete by June 2023)
• A results analysis report from the baseline study (complete by November 2023)
• Anticipated selection schedule
• Receive submissions: March 22, 2022
• Preliminary assessment of submissions: March 23, 2022
• Interviews with shortlisted candidates: March 23 - March 25, 2022
• Select and contract PI: By April 4, 2022
• Time and place of submission of proposals

Education Requirement: No Requirements

Job Experience: No Requirements

Work Hours: 8

Job application procedure
Submit proposals by March 22, 2022 to bpelletier@farmradio.org 
• Elements of proposal
• Qualifications and relevant experience of the firm and of the specific consultant(s) that will be assigned to this project
• The general approach that the consultants will take to completing the assignment
• The tasks/action steps that the consultants will undertake to complete the deliverables
• The timeline and workplan
• The budget
• Budget
Only the time of the consultants need be budgeted - other costs, including the costs of meetings, travel, surveys, and printing/distributing reports are covered by other budget lines.

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