Democratic Republic of the Congo: Consultant for the Final Evaluation of the DRC: Prevention and Mitigation of Sexual and Gender Based Violence in North and South Kivu Project

CONTEXT

Sexual and Gender-based violence (SGBV) is recognized as an endemic problem in the DRC, with Demographic and Health survey (DHS) data revealing that over 50 percent of women have experienced physical violence in DRC, and 32 percent have experienced sexual violence committed by their partner over the last 12 months^[1]. Recent research emphasizes the fact that both men and women are affected by SGBV, although women and girls represent the majority of those experiencing such violence. Estimates range from 40 percent of women and 24 percent of men reporting having been subjected to sexual violence in eastern DRC^[2] to 9 percent of men and 22 percent of women in North Kivu.^[3]

SGBV has devastating effects on physical and mental health. Survivors often lack access to basic health services that address the physical and mental consequences of violence and displacement, and beyond the physical and psychological damage to individuals, SGBV also carries important social and economic costs, with survivors often facing stigma and rejection by spouses, families and communities.

Although international interest has often focused on conflict-related sexual violence, especially in the country’s conflict-affected eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, data from the IRC’s GBV Information Management System (IMS) has revealed both the range of different types of violence that women and girls experience, including Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), underpinned by unequal power relations and discriminatory gender norms.

It is in this context the IRC Women’s Protection and Empowerment (WPE) Program has received funding from the World Bank to implement the project ‘*Prevention and Mitigation of Sexual and Gender Based Violence in North and South Kivu Project’* between December 2014 and January 2017. The project’s objective is to pilot innovative tools[4] to improve provision of SGBV prevention and treatment services in North and South Kivu. In particular, the innovative aspects of this project include tailored tools to address the specific needs of children and male survivors, a focus on accountable male engagement in the prevention of SGBV, strengthening of economic empowerment activities for women, and monitoring of quality of services to survivors.

The project is structured according to three components, which aim to prevent SGBV, ensure access to basic services, and support local ownership in addressing SGBV, as described in more detail below.

Component 1. Prevention and Service Provision

Sub-component 1. A. Prevention

This component includes prevention activities through economic empowerment of women in the community (savings and loans associations, business skills training, group discussions including female members and their spouses on household decisions through the Economic And Social Empowerment – EA$E – program in South Kivu), community education (including sessions conducted by male leaders in the community to encourage attitudinal and behavioral change among their peers), a media campaign, the Engaging Men through Accountable Practice (EMAP) approach, and support to CBOs (economic empowerment, training for SGBV referral).

Sub-component 1. B. Access to basic services

This component focuses on access to basic services for survivors, including medical, psychological, and legal services, with a specific emphasis on piloting new initiatives to respond to the specific needs of children and men. Legal support is provided through local NGOs that receive capacity building support, including training on management, legal aspects, and modalities of sensitive interactions with SGBV survivors. To ensure the provision of services in conflict-related emergency situations, with reported cases or risks of SGBV, the project also funds an emergency team, designed to quickly deploy and provide assessments and responses.

Most activities under sub-components 1.A. and 1.B. are implemented in both North and South Kivu, except for the EA$E program, media campaign activities, and activities related to targeted mental health support to survivors through Cognitive Processing Therapy that is only funded in communities in South Kivu. The inclusion of communities in North Kivu for the EMAP pilot allows for a large enough sample size for an Impact Evaluation to be conducted.

Component 2. Local ownership on addressing SGBV

There is currently a high demand, from the Provincial Ministries of Health, Gender, Family and Humanitarian Affairs Health Ministry, the National Program of Mental Health, and UN agencies for monitoring and improving the quality of services provided to survivors of SGBV. Providers of psychosocial and legal services to SGBV survivors are numerous in South Kivu with varying quality and limited control from national or provincial authorities. Component 2 aims at elaborating, testing, and implementing tools, in close collaboration with the Provincial Ministries of Health, Gender, Family and Humanitarian Affairs and the National Program of Mental Health, to evaluate and monitor the quality of local organizations and institutions that provide services to survivors, including psychosocial and legal services. This will prepare the grounds for identifying capacity building needs of such local organizations and institutions, and for providing tools to provincial authorities to monitor the quality of services, and potentially set the grounds for a future accreditation mechanism. This initiative brings together the provincial authorities, along with UN agencies and donors, to design evaluation tools and implement an evaluation system to monitor the quality of services provided. The tools designed, the partnerships established, and the results of the evaluations will inform the Great Lakes Women’s Health and Empowerment Project, in particular regarding the design of tools for monitoring the quality of services. Component 2 is piloted in South Kivu.

Component 3. Project management

This component includes all activities related to the coordination and oversight of the project, including logistical aspects of project implementation, coordination of the North Kivu and South Kivu operational teams, monitoring and evaluation, and research-related activities for the EMAP Impact Evaluation, in collaboration with the academic research partner.

The IRC seeks to hire an individual consultant or consultants to conduct the final evaluation of this project. The evaluation will serve to document the achievements of the project and gather lessons learnt that can inform future programming on SGBV in DRC and other fragile and post conflict contexts.

OBJECTIVES OF THE EVALUATION

The objective of the evaluation is to assess the relevance, effectiveness, impact, sustainability and scalability of the three components of the project, as described above. Specific evaluation questions and sub-questions are outlined below.

a) Relevance: What was the significance or relevance of the project in relation to local or national priorities and beneficiary needs in DRC?

Sub-questions:

• To what extent did the project address the needs and interests of SGBV (male, children, and women) survivors and vulnerable women and girls in the intervention areas?

• To what extent did the project adhere to development priorities for the DRC government?

• To what extent did the project respond to the World Bank’s development priorities for the DRC?

b) Effectiveness: Has the project attained its objectives?

The project’s Development Objective is to test innovative pilots to improve provision of SGBV prevention and treatment services in North and South Kivu.

Sub-questions:

• Have all activities been implemented effectively and has the project been managed effectively?

• What were the challenges in implementing the project and how were they overcome? Were there common challenges faced across programmatic areas? Were there specific challenges related to the most innovative aspects of the project?

• Did the risk mitigation matrix adequately identify risks, and were proposed mitigation measures successful in overcoming obstacles?

• What were the external and internal factors that affected program delivery?

• What were the main lessons learned from the activities that were implemented?

• What best practices have been identified on the design and implementation of holistic SGBV programming, and in relation with the key innovative pilots implemented by the project?

c) Impact: What were the main positive and negative changes produced by the project implementation?

More detailed information on the Project Development Objective, Intermediate Results, and Indicators, as outlined in the project’s Results Framework, can be found in Annex A.

Sub-questions:

• What outcomes can be identified as a result of the project implementation?

• What unintended positive and negative changes took place?

• What were the catalysts for change that led to major positive or negative changes?

• What has been the impact of the project on survivors’ daily functioning and psychosocial well-being (through either analysis of functionality tool used and/or of anonymous questionnaires given to survivors who have completed case management)? What has been the impact of the project on women and girls’ social and economic functioning/empowerment (self-reported in discussion with women and girls) and reintegration into community life?

• How did the project activities address gender norms during project implementation, such as how were economic empowerment/reintegration activities for women and survivors and how successful were male engagement activities (using the Engaging Men through Accountable Practice curriculum) perceived in the communities, including by male members?

• What part of the project was most important in catalyzing the change?

d) Sustainability: Did the project implementation promote lasting solutions by strengthening, through systematic capacity building, mentoring and follow-up, local institutions to promote the well-being of women and girls and mitigating the consequences of GBV?

As outlined in the project’s sustainability and exit strategy, the project committed to capacity building of NGOs and CBOs, building community networks, and collaborating with government institutions, notably for Health and Gender, in order to promote the sustainability of the programming and partnerships implemented under the project. Specific focus on sustainability has been placed on;

· Working with local organizations to offer case management to survivors;

· Providing medical care through referrals to health care structures;

· Partnering with local NGOs to implement specific activities around legal assistance and business skills training, using the EA$E program model for women’s continued access to financial resources;

· Collaborating with government institutions, including the Provincial Ministries of Health, Gender, Family and Humanitarian Affairs, and the National Program of Mental Health, to help design tools and systems for local authorities to monitor and improve the quality of services provided to survivors of SGBV.

Sub-questions:

• Did the IRC’s technical support to Provincial authorities (through component 2), local service providers, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community based organizations (CBOs) (trainings, ongoing technical visits, mentoring), provide demonstrated increase in the partners’ organizational and technical capacity to provide essential services to GBV survivors and also to prevent GBV? If so, to what extent would this capacity permit the partners to continue providing quality prevention and response activities if there was no further funding from the IRC?

• What is the level of local ownership by community stakeholders (e.g. CBOs, Relais Communautaire (RECO), health centers), in ensuring that the activity or service (medical, psychosocial, legal and income generating activities) continues after project funding ends?

• To what extent did project activities contribute to local capacity development of governmental and civil society actors to implement GBV prevention and response in target geographic areas?

• To what extent did the project contribute to the development of an accreditation process for local GBV service providers that is likely to be used by government actors going forward?

e) Scalability: To what extent are the pilot tools scalable?

The project has piloted a series of tools, which, if successful, will be implemented in DRC in year three and four of implementation of the Great Lakes Emergency Sexual and Gender Based Violence and Women Health Project. The piloted tools are as follows:

· Tailored tools to address the specific needs of children and male survivors;

· Male Engagement and Prevention of SGBV;

· Strengthening of economic empowerment activities (the EA$E program);

· Monitoring of quality of services to survivors (tools developed under Component 2 of the project).

Sub-questions:

— What evidence is there of the scalability potential of each of the piloted tools?

— What would be the key anticipated challenges in scaling up each of the tools, based upon experience of piloting and implementing them as part of the project?

Recommendations:

In addition to responding to each of the evaluation questions and sub-questions described above, the chosen consultant(s) should describe specific actions to be taken in the future regarding current and possible future SGBV programming based on findings and conclusions of this evaluation.

This should include considerations of program design, management and operational decision making, as well as considerations for work in conflict-affected and non-conflict-affected areas. What are the lessons learned for design and implementation of future holistic SGBV prevention and response programming? What additional steps should be taken to promote sustainability of the interventions to date and to bring these interventions up to scale?

EVALUATION IMPLEMENTATION

The selected consultant(s) will lead and manage the evaluation and is responsible for the timely submission of all deliverables including developing the methodology and submitting the final report.

Evaluation plan

An evaluation plan will be elaborated and submitted to the WPE Program Director for comments in the five working days following the signature of the contract.

The plan should include:

• A detailed evaluation methodology, including draft questionnaires for selected key informants and other evaluation participants (limited methodology guidance provided below);

• A proposed list of key informants and evaluation participants to be interviewed;

• A list of proposed monitoring data to be reviewed;

• A proposed list of field sites to be visited as part of the evaluation based on intervention sites provided;

• An evaluation timeline for the (anticipated) forty five (45) working days assigned to this activity, including time for report writing and revisions of report for final submission; and

• A protocol on ethics and safety with regards to interviewing beneficiaries, who may include potential survivors, including a plan for keeping data confidential.

Proposed methodology

The selected consultant(s) will be required to develop a detailed evaluation methodology as part of the evaluation plan (see above). The methodology should at least include the following:

a) Desk review of key project documents, including the project proposal, grant agreement, project reports, training modules, and relevant monitoring data;

b) Interviews (individual or focus groups) with key stakeholders in North and South Kivu including:

a. Local leaders – minimum 5 in each province

b. NGO partners – minimum 1 in each province

c. CBO members – minimum 10 in each province

d. VSLA members – minimum 5 in South Kivu only

e. Other community members (including RECO, EMAP participants, etc.) – minimum 5 in each province

f. Media partners – minimum 2 in South Kivu and Kinshasa only

g. Health center staff – minimum 5 in each province

h. Health Focus staff – minimum 1 in South Kivu only

i. WPE key staff – minimum 5 in each province

j. IRC staff at national and provincial level (senior program and support staff) – minimum 5 total in North Kivu, South Kivu, and Kinshasa

k. Government of DRC representatives – i.e. Ministry of Gender, Ministry of Health in each province

c) Demonstrate the collection/use of qualitative data and review of quantitative data already collected;

d) Describe how persons to be interviewed will be selected;

e) Plan field visits to at least three (3) program sites in each province, including how field sites will be selected.

Please note that any research, data collection and information gathering efforts on SGBV should respect WHO guidelines^[5] and SGBV guiding principles^[6]. An ethics and safety protocol detailing steps to be taken to ensure safety and confidentiality of key informants and other study participants will be agreed upon by the selected consultant(s) and the WPE team. The consultant(s) should consult with the WPE team as necessary before and during data collection to address any ethical and safety issues that might emerge.

Geographical coverage and logistics

The study will be conducted in the intervention areas of the project and in identified communities in the targeted territories of North and South Kivu. The IRC will provide consultants with logistical support, security advice and documents during the length of the assignment.

Deliverables

a)Draft report of the evaluation to be submitted within 10 working days of the completion of the field visit to the DRC. Format of the draft report should follow the report format described below.

b)Final report of the evaluation of a maximum of 30 pages in English, including the executive summary but excluding annexes. The detailed report template should be proposed by the selected consultant as part of the evaluation plan, but should at least include:

• Executive summary of no more than two pages

• Overview of the context

• Organization and program background

• Evaluation questions

• Evaluation methodology

o Explain evaluation methodology in detail.

o Disclose evaluation limitations, especially those associated with the evaluation methodology (e.g. selection bias, recall bias, unobservable differences between comparison groups, etc.).

• Findings

• Evidence-based conclusions on each of the three evaluation objectives, as outlined above

• Lessons learned

• Recommendations

• Annexes, including among others, the Terms of Reference for the evaluation as well as a list of questions used during interviews, all evaluation tools (questionnaires, checklists, discussion guides, surveys, etc.), and a list of sources of information (key informants, documents reviewed, other data sources).

Both the draft and final evaluation reports may be submitted electronically via e-mail to the WPE Program Director in MS Word and PDF format.

LENGTH AND DURATION OF THE EVALUATION

It is anticipated that the evaluation will be for a length of 45 working days from the signature of the contract, including at least 21 working days in DRC. The consultant will draft the report and submit the draft report to the IRC within 10 working days of completing the field visit to the DRC. The consultant will finalize the report no later than January 15, 2017.

CONSULTANT PROFILE

Individual consultants should have the following qualifications and competencies:

Qualifications and competencies

• Master’s degree, PhD or equivalent in social sciences, economic or other related degree

• Good aptitude in written and oral communication skills

• Good knowledge of written and spoken English and French is a precondition

• Good knowledge of the social and political context of the DRC an asset

• Previous experience working in Africa, and specifically in fragile context would be an advantage

Professional Background

• Five (5) of experience in the field of GBV and women’s empowerment, including provision and evaluation of holistic services for GBV survivors, GBV prevention and response programming, and related ethical and confidentiality concerns

• Experience in assessing project management

• Experience in running program evaluations

• Good understanding of the social and implementation context

• Excellent computer skills

• Capacity to work under pressure

• Excellent organization skills and sense of teamwork is essential

ANNEX A: PROJECT OBJECTIVES

Project Development Objective: The PDO is to test innovative pilots to improve provision of SGBV prevention and treatment services in North and South Kivu.

Indicators:

1. Service providers trained in addressing specific needs of children and men (Number)

2. Men survivors seeking support (Percentage)

3. EASE women participants who report that their status in the household has improved since the start of the EASE program (Percentage)

4. EMAP group members who complete the planned EMAP sessions (Percentage)

5. Provincial officials trained to use the developed tools and conduct evaluations (Number)

Intermediate Result: Component 1.A. Prevention

Indicators:

1. Community members who attended community education sessions (Number)

2. EASE discussion group participants (VSLA members and partners) who successfully complete the cycle (Percentage)

Intermediate Result: Component 1.B. Access to basic services

Indicators:

1. SGBV survivors reporting incident who receive at least one relevant service (Percentage)

2. Rape survivors reporting incident to CBOs within 72 hour window (Percentage)

3. Trained medical service providers meeting 90% of the quality criteria (Percentage)

4. Trained legal service providers meeting 80% of the quality criteria (Percentage)

5. Trained case management service providers meeting 80% of the quality criteria (Percentage)

6. CBO partners with IRC who provide case management services to survivors and promote the rights of women and girls (Number)

Intermediate Result: Component 2. Local ownership on addressing SGBV

Indicators:

1. Coordination meetings on the design of evaluation criteria and evaluation tools attended by at least one representative of each key organization/Provincial Ministry (Number)

2. NGOs and organizations evaluated according to the agreed on criteria and evaluation tools (Number)

^[1] Measure DHS, Demographic Health Survey, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2010.

^[2] Johnson et al., Association of Sexual Violence and Human Rights Violations With Physical and Mental Health in Territories of the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Journal of American Medical Association, 2010, 304(5):553-562.

^[3] Promundo, Sonke, Gender Justice Network, Gender Relations, Sexual Violence and the Effects of Conflict on Women and Men in North Kivu: Preliminary Results from the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), 2013.

[4] If successful, the piloted tools will be implemented in DRC in year three and four of implementation of the Great Lakes Emergency Sexual and Gender Based Violence and Women Health Project.

^[5] World Health Organisation, Ethical and Safety Recommendations for Researching, Documenting and Monitoring Sexual Violence in Emergencies, 2007.

^[6] Safety, confidentiality, respect, non-discrimination and empathy.

http://chm.tbe.taleo.net/chm03/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=IRC&cws=1&rid=14395