Theatre for a Change has been funded by the DFID Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) programme to run a 2.5 year project entitled Tiphunzire! in 10 districts in Malawi. The focus of the project is on empowering young female teachers to create inclusive learning environments for marginalised girls. This will be realised by training 315 female teachers to become ‘Agents of Change’ in 225 rural primary schools in 10 districts, where they will work with school administrations to create girl-friendly learning environments, encouraging out-of-school girls to return to school and in-school girls at risk of dropping out to stay in education. The Agents of Change will also run weekly workshops with groups of marginalised girls, focusing on sexual reproductive health knowledge, rights awareness, building self-confidence and self-efficacy and developing literacy and numeracy skills. Ultimately, through working with schools, parents and communities, the project aims to improve the sexual and reproductive health of girls, resulting in enhanced attendance at school, as well as improvements in literacy and numeracy.
We are inviting suitable organisations to submit proposals to conduct an evaluation of the programme being implemented in Malawi. As we have already conducted our Year 1 baseline, the Evaluation Team appointed will need to build on an existing monitoring and evaluation strategy, sampling framework and data collection tools.
Scope of work:
Over the lifetime of the project we will be working with 225 schools and 315 trained Agents of Change (AoCs) in 10 rural districts in Southern and Central Malawi. AoCs will either work in pairs or alone in their assigned primary schools, depending on levels of ability and knowledge of the surrounding community.
The project will target 9,000 girls in total. This number comprises 30 in-school girls, as well as 10 out-of-school girls at each school.
Due to a phased roll-out of the project over two years, in December 2013 we conducted a representative baseline of girls joining the programme in Year 1, in both treatment and matched control schools. The treatment girls were based in 36 rural primary schools, consisting of a total of 1,440 girls.
In September 2014, 189 schools will join the programme, along with 7,560 new girls (30 in-school and 10 out-of-school in each of the 189 schools). The external evaluation team will be required to collect baseline literacy, numeracy and attendance data for a representative sample of girls from this Year 2 cohort, as well as some contextual information about the households in new project districts.
Responses are invited from organisations with expertise in the following areas:
· Evaluation design: the team should include skills and expertise required to design, revise, plan and conduct an impact evaluation, including quantitative and qualitative research methods – based on the existing evaluation design provided by Theatre for a Change;
· Relevant subject matter knowledge and experience: knowledge and experience required (e.g. education sector, gender, working with girls) to ensure that the evaluation design and research methods are as relevant and meaningful as possible given the aims and objectives of the project and the context in which it is being delivered;
· Evaluation management: manage a large-scale and complex evaluation and research process from end-to-end, including conducting field data collection for a baseline, midline and endline study in 225 schools in 10 rural districts of Malawi;
· Primary research: design, management and implementation of primary research in potentially challenging rural areas;
· Country experience: it is particularly important that the team has the appropriate country knowledge /experience and language proficiency required to train enumerators and conduct the field research required;
· Information management: design and manage data and information systems capable of handling large datasets for M&E purposes;
· Statistical analysis: a range of statistical modelling and analysis of impact data; highly proficient user of: SPSS or STATA; and qualitative data analysis software e.g. ATLAS.ti, NVivo or equivalent; and
· Value for Money (VfM) assessment of education projects: education economics expertise to conduct cost benefit analysis and cost effectiveness analysis as part of the assessment of the project’s VfM.
How to apply:
Proposals should be submitted to the MEL Manager Zoe Dibb zoe.dibb@tfacafrica.com by 5th May 2014.
Detailed Terms of Reference are also available in writing from zoe.dibb@tfacafrica.com
