IRC is recruiting for a consultant to conduct an assessment in Southern Sudan looking at education and skills building needs and opportunities for youth. The term of the contract will be approximately 3-4 weeks between May-June 2010 to conduct research in Sudan and write 10-15 page report. Interested applicants should submit their CV/resume, a 3 page writing sample and fee requirement to Abigail Gacusana: abigailg@wrcommission.org.
Locations to be visited: Juba, Yei and/or Rumbek (TBC)
Date of TOR: January 27, 2010
Background on assessment:
This field assessment is part of the Women’s Refugee Commission’s global research and advocacy project that aims to increase the scope, scale and effectiveness of educational and job training programs for displaced, conflict-affected young people (15-24 years old). The purpose of this mission is to look at the skills and education Southern Sudanese youth need to earn a safe, dignified living and make a healthy transition to adulthood.
In conjunction with desk research, including reviewing existing market surveys, we will identify what skills, knowledge, goods and services are in demand in specific parts of Southern Sudan with a high concentration of conflict-affected and previously displaced youth. In collaboration with young people and based on available market information, the Women’s Refugee Commission will identify which occupations are most likely appropriate for their situations and what limited number of transferable skills will most likely have the largest “pay-off” for these populations. We will also look at young people’s existing coping strategies and skills as well as the many “sub-group” of young people (i.e., ex-combatants, young mothers, youth living with disabilities, etc). During the field mission, we will identify and document existing programs that appear to meet these needs—programs that lead to the acquisition of basic literacy and numeracy and market-driven skills.
Outputs will include a report detailing findings and recommendations to address gaps and help strengthen education and skills building programs for young women and men. The report will be used in advocacy targeting donors, policy-makers and field practitioners to promote greater attention to and services for appropriate educational and market-driven skills building programs for displaced youth. The field mission will focus on Southern Sudan but will also inform humanitarian action in future complex emergencies and situations of post-conflict reconstruction. It is part of a series of assessments and reports conducted by the Women’s Refugee Commission’s Displaced Youth Initiative. For other reports in the series (Liberia September 20009, Arizona October 2009 and Jordan December 2009), please visit http://www.womensrefugeecommission.org/programs/youth/79-untapped-potent… .
Purpose
To identify the knowledge and skills Southern Sudanese young women and men (age 15-24) need to earn a safe, dignified living.
Objectives
- To identify current and emerging labor market demand for youth in areas with a high concentration of conflict-affected and previously displaced young women and men;
- To identify what occupations are most likely appropriate for young people’s situation, taking into account the unique experiences of young women and men of varying ages, backgrounds and experience; (ex-combatants, young mothers, youth with disabilities, etc);
- To identify what limited number of transferable skills will most likely have the most beneficial impact for young people’s futures, building on young people’s existing coping strategies and skills;
- To gather young people’s opinions and perceptions of what they think is working, what more is needed and what are some recommendations to meet their needs;
- To document existing non-formal education and job training programs that appear to lead to the acquisition of basic literacy and numeracy and market-driven skills.
- To propose strategies and interventions for addressing identified needs and how such services can be strengthened, replicated and/or brought to scale.
Data collection methods
Information gathered from young women and men (approximately 15-24 years old), and government officials, youth networks and groups, business community, donors and service providers (UN, international and local NGOs, government and private sector) working with youth through the following methods:
- Focus groups
- Semi-structured discussions
- In-depth interviews
- Observations
- Site visits
- Secondary data sources – program descriptions and reports, country reports, market surveys, etc.
Activities
- Meet with representatives and field staff of local and international NGOs, youth groups, government, donor and UN agencies and private sector implementing programs and projects targeting young women and men.
- Collect project descriptions from government, UN and international and local NGO staff, including evaluations, when available.
- Visit project implementation sites and document projects visited—size, number/groups of beneficiaries and impact.
- Visit markets and places of employment for previously displaced youth.
- Conduct focus groups and in-depth interviews with previously displaced and conflict-affected young women and men (both those who participate in programs and those who do not) to solicit their views on programs (strengths and weaknesses), reasons why they are or are not participating in programs, coping strategies, service needs and recommended solutions.
- Examine links between education and livelihood programs that promote continued learning and the transition from learner to earner. Identify current strategies in place and build and strengthen such links.
- Consult and review secondary data sources and include relevant findings.
- Collate and analyze all information collected into report on findings—current services, gaps and identified needs with recommendations for initiating solutions.
Deliverables and Outcomes
Deliverables:
- Trip report of current non-formal education and job training programs, gaps and identified needs with recommendations for initiating solutions. Report should include the following: documentation of current and emerging labor market demand for youth and skills required; existing programs that teach market-driven skills; gaps in programming; and good practices and models of youth programs and services that might be scaled up and/or replicated (approximately 10-15 pages)
- Detailed contact list of everyone met, including someone identified in each location to distribute findings back to the community
- 1 detailed individual young person’s story (1 page)
- Photographs
Outcomes:
- The specific educational and employment related needs of previously displaced young women and men in specific sites have been identified and analyzed, taking into account the unique experiences of young women and men of varying ages, backgrounds and experience;
- Innovative market-driven interventions and promising practices working with previously displaced young women and men in specific sites have been identified and documented.
- Market opportunities for previously displaced young women and men in specific sites have been identified;
- Analysis of participatory assessments conducted with young people have been conducted;
- Promising program components—learning, vocational and life skills—that can be replicated in other settings have been identified and documented;
- Learning and targeted recommendations within the humanitarian community has been shared and effective, comprehensive youth programs have been promoted;
- Data collected and lessons learned feed into a larger out-of-school youth resource that the Women’s Refugee Commission is developing as part of 3-year global applied research.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Excellent research, data collection, analysis and writing skills.
- Strong background in relief and international development, with knowledge of and interest in conflict-affected populations, youth, education and livelihood activities.
- Experience working with young people and/or in Southern Sudan a plus.
- Comfortable taking initiative and working with minimal supervision.
Schedule (TBC)
Field visit in Southern Sudan: approximately 2-3 weeks during mid-May or June 2010
Write report: approximately1 week before June 31, 2010.
Manages project:
January — mid-February 2010
Jenny Perlman Robinson
Senior Program Officer, Children and Youth
Women’s Refugee Commission
Email: jennyp@wrcommission.org
Mid-February—June 2010
Dale Buscher
Director, Protection Program
Women’s Refugee Commission
Email: daleb@wrcommission.org
To apply
Please submit a cover letter, CV/resume, 3 page writing sample and salary requirement (including fees for most recent consultancies) via email to:
Abigail Gacusana
Program Coordinator
Women’s Refugee Commission
Email: abigailg@wrcommission.org
Please indicate “Southern Sudan Consultancy” on the email subject.
No phone calls please.
The Women’s Refugee Commission considers all applicants on the basis of merit without regard to race, sex, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability. The Women’s Commission is an equal opportunity employer.
This expert post from executive director Jeroo Billimoria explains why Aflatoun chose a campaign as the growth and expansion strategy for their social and financial education programme, and what the benefits of this approach have been to date.
Can children manage money? How can they best be taught the importance of saving money and other resources? These are questions Aflatoun is answering through its Campaign for Social and Financial Education. From its 2008 launch in Amsterdam by Princess Maxima of the Netherland, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development, the campaign has pursued one key goal: to provide high quality social and financial education to 1 million children in 75 countries by the end of 2010.
Why did we utilize a campaign to expand and disseminate the Aflatoun programme? We did it to build a movement to convince people that primary school children can and should save. Aflatoun piloted its social and financial education programme in 10 countries to show that it worked in diverse contexts and that children participated and benefited from the programme. Now at the campaign’s midpoint, the Aflatoun programme is now reaching over 540,000 children in 26 countries.
As a methodology, the campaign has had the following benefits for Aflatoun:
First, it has created a movement of practitioners around child finance and child savings. It has increased connections among organizations working on the issue and created communities of practice at a regional level. As new partners join the Aflatoun programme, they are linked to others with whom they are able to share learning and resources.
Second, it has increased the effectiveness of Aflatoun’s advocacy. At a very local level, association with an international movement has improved our partners’ ability to raise funds and obtain permission to deliver the Aflatoun programme in schools. At a national level, the strength of Aflatoun’s international network was one of the factors contributing to the Egyptian government’s recent decision to integrate the Aflatoun programme into the national education system.
Finally, the campaign has drawn a broader array of organizations and stakeholders into Aflatoun activities. Banks, foundations, academics, charities and governments are all included in our movement. Having a variety of stakeholders increases the number and diversity of voices and perspectives brought to bear on our work, and demonstrates to us that simply running a programme is not enough to fully achieve Aflatoun’s vision. Rather, achieving social and financial empowerment for children requires structural changes in policy and practice that can only be achieved with the broad coalition of organizations that our campaign is fostering.
Aflatoun is a Dutch non-profit organization focused on social and financial education for children between the ages of 6-14 years. The Aflatoun program is currently operational in 22 countries reaching over 500,000 children (approximately 200,000 of which have started either individual or group savings accounts), and program materials have been translated into 11 languages.
As we’ve grown, we have struggled to find a meaningful, accurate and cost-reasonable way of measuring our work and our impacts. That process is the subject of this post.
Aflatoun's aim is to help children learn to believe in themselves, understand their rights and responsibilities, save money, plan and budget, and even start their own school-based social and micro enterprises. We take a multi-faceted approach: providing our partners an educational programme for children, advocating for policy change in the area of Child Social and Financial Education, and coordinating a network of like-minded organizations and stakeholders.
In our early days, we tried a number of conventional evaluation techniques to track and measure our effectiveness but became increasingly frustrated with them. We didn’t feel these tools were able to properly disaggregate the value of the different streams of work we were doing. In response, we began exploring the emerging field of Social Return on Investment (SROI), because it seemed to offer a common format for analysing and valuing different endeavours. We’ve now been working to complete a SROI calculation for our work since 2005.
What we see as the key innovation here – and how this differs from a cost-benefit analysis approach – is that SROI aims to capture and value the social benefits of a particular intervention and report these in relation to more conventional financial returns. For example, SROI ratio of 2:1 indicates that for every dollar invested by an organisation two dollars of value – economic and social – are generated. Pretty appealing concept, huh?
It’s not easy to execute though. The historic difficult with using SROI analysis has been twofold:
- How to do the actual calculation of a Social Return on Investment
- How to do methodologically sound valuations of social returns
Since 2005, we have committed ourselves to overcoming these, working in partnership with two initiatives based in the Netherlands: socialevaluator.eu, a new social venture developing a web-based SROI calculation tool and Context International Cooperation, which has been doing pilot evaluations with 10 NGOs in developing countries using community members to do SROI calculations (an approach we like because it enables target beneficiaries to value programmes).
When we began working on our SROI calculation, it was an early attempt to put a value on the different types of work that we were doing and to analyse them in a common format. The process now allows all our work to be assessed based on the inputs that we put in. This contribution-based approach has required us to both budget and manage our organizational efforts in line with a well-defined strategic plan. In essence, the activities and cost structure of the organization have had to be aligned with the activities that are actually being performed. This gives us a clear idea of all our inputs, both in terms of both finance and labour, towards all of our organizational goals. It has also required us to keep track of the costs of implementation for our partners on a per child basis.
In the coming months, we will be doing a SROI calculation for both our work as a secretariat with socialevaluator.eu and adapting the participatory approach developed with Context for our partners to do for their programmes, starting with International Child Support this summer.
We expect these experiments to go well and enable us to improve our performance monitoring and better understand the different value we create through our work for both our partners and the children they support. We hope to be able to update CYES as we progress and, in the mean time, would be excited to hear from others working with similar tools and are happy to help anyone moving into this area.
