IWPR regional office in Central Asia is looking for country M&E specialists (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) to monitor and evaluate the project “Development of New Media and Digital Journalism”.
1. Background: Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) is an international media organization that supports local reporters, citizen journalists and civil society activists in three dozen countries in conflict, crisis and transition around the world. IWPR has been operating in Central Asia since 1999 with the regional head office in Bishkek. Since April 2019 IWPR CA has started implementing the project “Strengthening Central Asian media capacity to produce high quality impartial and objective cross-platform content” with financial assistance from the UK Government. Project is aimed at strengthening the capacity of, and cooperation, between journalists and media outlets in four Central Asian countries to produce new alternative media content, which is conflict and gender-sensitive. The project has 3 main objectives:
- Capacity built of students and tutors of journalism departments in 3 Central Asian countries on new media, including on skills to counter disinformation and conflict-and gender-sensitive reporting.
- Capacity built of 10 CARs media outlets in selected Central Asian countries on using new media digital platforms and producing new content to counter mis/disinformation, conflict and gender-sensitive reporting and delivering COVID-19 messaging
- Established informal network of media students and professionals in 4 Central Asian countries to create conflict- and gender-sensitive collaborative content for alternative voices to be heard
2. Objective of the consultancy: The Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) consultant is responsible to conduct the final evaluation of the “Strengthening Central Asian media capacity to produce high quality impartial and objective cross-platform content” project (2019-2021). The outcomes focused evaluation should assess degree of achievement of project goal, objectives and level of sustainability, impact, effectiveness and relevance of results achieved providing quantitative and qualitative evidence of the results.
Utilization focused evaluation: findings, learnings and recommendations should be reliable, understandable and “actionable” in full by intended users of the evaluation. Intended users are: project manager, project staff, donor, IWPR staff, partners, mentors, direct beneficiaries. Methodologies, deliverables and debriefing sessions should prioritize inclusive, users-friendly formats.
Complex changes, expected and unexpected: Special attention should be paid to uncovering the peculiarities of the changes in actions, relationships, policy or practice of both beneficiaries and external actors linked to the project activities. The nature of the changes in question may be positive or negative, intended or unintended.
Significance and context: The consultant is to provide a detailed account of the interconnection between the project and the larger observed social trends happening within the region. Results, challenges and recommendations for future programming should be outlined in the light of local and regional context mindful of factors that may limit or enhance impact and sustainability.
3. Tasks and responsibilities: The consultant(s) is expected to:
- Study the relevant project documents (including, but not limited to the work plan, events’ evaluation sheets, content produced throughout the project life), review and revise the log frame and result matrix, and revise the indicators (both target and achieved) study project progress reports and annual and mid-year evaluations;
- Suggest and conduct monitoring activities to track the qualitative impact of the project (interviews with beneficiaries, focus-groups, evaluation of the content produced, etc.). Collection of stories that exemplify/explain achievement or challenges is encouraged.
- Conduct evaluation of the project’s short-term and long-term impact towards the target groups (media, religious leaders, leaders of local communities, youth). Utilization of rigorous methodologies like “outcomes harvesting” is encouraged.
- Compare the existing project progress against the established baseline. Outline trends of success baseline-target vs year achievements and overall achievement.
- Identify new sources of verification that the project can use. As much as possible, use existing data sources embedded in existing systems. Consider utlisation of IWPR Stakeholders or/and Network Engagement indexes.
- Submit draft and final agreed deliverables
- Debriefing and feedback session to support utilization of the findings
4. Reporting: the final full evaluation report should provide with following information and analysis:
- Overall assessment of the level of success of the project as per 4 DAC criteria: Impact, Effectiveness, Relevance, Sustainability.
- Outline key actionable recommendations for future programming in the light of current needs (national/regional context), project goal and project successes, good practices and lessons learned.
- List outcomes achieved, intended as observable changes in actions, relationships, policy or practice of both beneficiaries and external actors linked to the project activities, categorize them using existing and unplanned performance indicators, by DAC criteria and other relevant categories (e.g. gender, type of beneficiary, date etc).
- Outline significance and relevance of each outcome in light of implementation context at national, regional and international level.
- Outline contribution of the project for each outcome.
- Beneficiaries reach: overview of beneficiaries reached directly and indirectly: number, type, gender, country.
- Outline challenges and/or negative changes that have limited or affected achievement of success, analyze effectiveness of mitigation strategies applied (if any) and level of impact of those challenges. Outline lessons learned for future implementation.
- Track progress as per project performance matrix/M&E framework (baseline, targets and year by year progress)
- Include visualizations (graphs/tables) and quotes as appropriate to support deeper understanding of evidence and analysis.
5. Deliverables:
- Deliverable 1 Plan Proposed plan and methodologies for the evaluation and case studies development, to be approved by the project manager.
- Deliverable 2 Final evaluation report: A full evaluation report, 15-20 pages max (excluding annexes). Content outlined in the section “reporting”.
- Deliverable 3 Summary Summary of the evaluation findings: 3 pages max with overview of overall achievements/performance and key actionable recommendations.
- Deliverable 4 Case studies Up to 3 case studies to support “scaling up of success”. Each case study should focus on a significant observable change/impact (outcome) identified by the project manager and should outline which conditions (activities/behaviour/processes/stakeholders) enabled success to support replicability. Each case study should be 5 pages max.
- Deliverable 5 Visualizations: Set of visualizations(tables, graphs) with short explanations to be used separately from the report
- Deliverable 6 Dataset A database (excel) with list of outcomes, significance and categorization
- Deliverable 7 Debriefing Conduct a debriefing session to support evaluation finding utilization. Debriefing sessions should be with project staff and any key stakeholders identified by project manager (e.g. donor, partner, mentors etc) previously agreed with evaluator and the objective will be to share evaluation findings, recommendations, clarify doubts.
The official start date is February 22.
Qualifications
- At least 5 years of experience in leading external evaluation
- Proven expertise in quantitative data analysis
- Proven expertise in qualitative data collection and analysis
- Prove excellent writing skills
- Excellent expertise in data visualizations and graphics
- Excellent knowledge of Russian and English
Application:
https://iwpr.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=250
Deadline: February 16, 2022