Sightsavers is an international organisation that changes lives for the long term. We work in more than 30 countries to eliminate avoidable blindness and support people with visual impairments to live independently.
We are recruiting to fill the position of:
Job Title: Evaluation Consultant
Project Number: 94302
Location: Kogi
Anticipated Timeframes: 97 days between December 2020 and April 2022
Project Summary
- Programme Name: Disability Inclusive Development (DID)
- Project Name: Piloting an Inclusive Health Approach to Improve Quality and Equity in Access to Eye Care Services for Women and Men with Disabilities in Kogi State, Nigeria.
- Project Duration: 24 months with an additional six-month inception period:
- Inception: January to December2020
- Project implementation: January 2021to June 2022
- There is no close out period to the project; the evaluation must be completed by the end of April 2022. There is a possibility for this project tobe extended to December 2022 as the project has been delayed due to the impact of Covid-19
- Project budget: Total project budget is £487,857
Project Stakeholders:
- Kogi State Ministry of Health
- Kogi State Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Development
- Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPD)
- Health facility staff
- Persons with disabilities utilising eye health services
- Members of the community in the project area
- Sightsavers’ local and international staff
Background
The Disability Inclusive Development Programme is a £29,247,582 programme funded by UK Aid. The programme commenced on 19 July 2018 and will run for six years until 16 July 2024. The programme’s goal is to improve the long-term well-being and inclusion of persons with disabilities in low and middle-income countries (including conflict and humanitarian settings), through equitable access to quality health services and health outcomes, equitable access to quality education and educational attainment, and equitable access to jobs/self-employment and improved livelihoods. Interventions also aim to address stigma and discrimination and generate evidence on what works to deliver results for persons with disabilities.
Programme delivery takes place through a consortium of elevenorganisations led by Sightsavers. The consortium consists of the International Disability Alliance, ADD International, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, BBC Media Action, Humanity and Inclusion, Leonard Cheshire, Light for the World, SenseInternational, Institute of Development Studiesand Social Development Direct.
The DID programme has four components and is implemented in six countries: Bangladesh, Jordan, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria and Tanzania. The four components are:
- Innovation: Design and implementation of interventions in contexts that test newapproaches in supporting personswith disabilities, focusing on thematic areas where evidence is particularly weak.
- Scale: Identification of promising small-scale interventions and taking them to scale.
- Research Uptake: Ensuring programme learning, new evidence and technical support are embedded in donor, the global development community and national governments.
- Programme Management: Administration and coordination of programme activities relating to the three components above (Innovation, Scale and Research Uptake). This includes all aspects of risk management, results, monitoring, evaluating and learning.
A Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Strategy has been developed to guide the programme MEL activities to enable the DID programme to:
- Place persons with disabilities in the lead of the DID programme.
- Produce and use quality monitoring and reporting data.
- Generate rigorous evidence of what works or does not work to realise long-term improvements in well-being and inclusion of persons with disabilities.
- Adhere to adaptive management practice
- Foster sharing within the consortium and strengthen organisational learning
The MEL strategy places importance on the evidence generated by the projects as these must demonstrate “improved understanding of what works and what does not work in disability-inclusive programming. The programme also plans to use this evidence to influence governmental, private and donor organisations”. Learning and adaptation play a central role in the DID programme, the MEL strategy advises that “learning and evidence generated during implementation must be used to adapt, improve and quality assure delivery. Projects must ensure the DID programme is “doing the right thing” to reach its intended outcomes and not “doing things to plan”, and that learning and adaptation integrates and responds to participant and OPD feedback. Projects are expected to maintain ongoing learning and adaptation log and hold six-monthly learning reviews
Project Overview
- Sightsavers is seeking an experienced in-country Evaluation Consultant with a working knowledge of the theory and application of developmental evaluation and adaptive management together with a good understanding of eye health or the health system in Nigeria and matters related to disability inclusion at global and local levels.
- Sightsavers is supporting the Kogi State Government to implement a comprehensive eye care programme that aims to strengthen the local eye health system and improve access to eye care in the project areas.
- The project will reduce avoidable visual impairment and improve population eye health through developing sustainable locally-owned systems for prevention and treatment of common eye conditions.
- This is an ‘innovation’ project as defined under the Disability Inclusive Development (DID) programme and Sightsavers intend to undertake a ‘scale’ project upon completion, based on the evidence generated.
This Consultant will:
- Assess the contribution of the interventions in providing equitable access to, and quality of eye health services for women and men with disabilities; and
- Determine which and to what extent these interventions could be scaled up.
- The methodology must be participatory, inclusive of OPDs and project stakeholders in the capturing of learnings and analysis of results. The learning and evaluation process will ensure adequate reflection on progress against outcomes to enable adaptive management.
Requirements
Required skills and Expertise of the bidder:
- An in-country evaluation consultant will be procured to undertake the evaluation through an expression of interest process. For consistency purposes, one principal evaluator with support staff, if required, is preferred as the evaluator will be embedded within the project team and will work on the project throughout its duration. Assurances will be required from the selected consultant that the principal evaluator will be available to work on the project for its entire duration.
- It is not essential that the evaluator has experience conducting developmental evaluations as Sightsavers, through its appointed developmental evaluation technical expert, will provide guidance in conducting this type of evaluation. However, it is critical that the appointed evaluator is an experienced evaluator and has a theoretical understanding of developmental evaluation, adaptive management and knowledge management.
- The appointed evaluator will also be expected to improve their knowledge of developmental evaluation and adaptive management throughout the course of the project. Sightsavers has not previously undertaken a developmental evaluation and therefore the evaluator must look for opportunities to build understanding in the project team about this evaluation methodology and the role of the evaluator.
- The evaluator must also provide learning to Sightsavers’ MEL team on the developmental evaluation process.
Given the nature of developmental evaluations, it is crucial that the evaluator is accepted and seen as credible by the project team and stakeholders and as such the evaluator must possess the following essential skills:
- Strategic thinking: the evaluator must remain objective and steer the project team to keep the outcome and impact of the project at the forefront of project discussions and decisions. This is particularly applicable in a project that adopts an adaptive management approach, the focus should be on achieving the outcomes of the project and consideration of a scale phase, the project should not become purely output driven.
- Pattern recognition: the evaluator should understand the complex systems involved in the project and identify and try to make meaning of patterns reflected in the data. The evaluator should assist the project team in analysing results, identifying emerging themes and making connections in order to better lead the team towards making evidence-based decisions.
- Relationship building: the evaluator will need to work alongside the project team and most likely have to ask challenging questions and manage possible tensions. To enable this interaction with the project team and steering committee, the evaluator will need to gain the trust and respect of the project stakeholders.
- Supportive: through ongoing interactions and facilitation, the evaluator will play a role in shaping the project and thus needs to be able to support the team to reach decisions but guard against dominating decision making.
The evaluator should possess the necessary competencies to conduct the evaluation including:
- Project and programme analysis, facilitation skills, knowledge management and dissemination, report writing and oral presentation skills.
- In order to lend credibility to their input on the team, it is desirable if the evaluator has a good understanding of eye health or the health system in Nigeria and matters related to disability inclusion at global and local levels.
- The evaluator should have considerable experience in conducting evaluations with working knowledge on the theory and application of developmental evaluation and adaptive management, experience in conducting developmental evaluations will be an added benefit but is not essential.As the project is located in Kogi State, it would be beneficial if the evaluator can communicate in Yoruba, Igala and Ebira.
Full details of the project, Scope of Work, Outputs/ Deliverables and budgets can be found within the attached Terms of Reference (ToR)
Method of Application
Interested and qualified candidates should please read the complete ToR, complete our Expression of Interest (EoI) and Budget Template which can be found via the application link below and return to: jobs@sightsavers.org
