Research & Learning Partner to join UK-s Protection Programme Tender, Switzerland - 30640418

Procurement Summary

Country : Switzerland

Summary : Research & Learning Partner to join UK-s Protection Programme

Deadline : 20 Feb 2019

Other Information

Notice Type : Tender

TOT Ref.No.: 30640418

Document Ref. No. :

Competition : ICB

Financier : Department For International Development

Purchaser Ownership : -

Tender Value : Refer Document

Purchaser's Detail

Purchaser : CARE INTERNATIONAL
Chemin de Balexert 7-9 1219 Chatelaine (Geneva) Tel.: +41 22 795 10 20 Fax: +41 22 795 10 29
Switzerland
Email :jorprocurementssu@care.org

Tender Details

Request for proposals are invited for Research & Learning Partner to join CARE International UK-s Protection Programme in Syria.

Duration: 6 Months from the signing date.

Place of work: Remotely (globally) based with potential travel to Beirut, Lebanon; Amman, Jordan; Gaziantep, Turkey and Syria, Hasakah.

1. Organisational Context

CARE International is a multi-sector humanitarian and development agency working in 80 countries to fight social injustice. Focusing on women and girls, we do this by supporting their right to food and nutrition security; sexual, reproductive and maternal health; a life free from violence and access to and control of economic resources. CARE-s Global 2020 Strategy priorities three approaches that will help us meet and sustain our ambitious goals: i) Promoting gender equality and women-s voice, ii) Increasing resilience and iii) Inclusive governance.

2. Project Context

CARE Syria, structured in line with the Whole of Syria initiative, is delivering a three-year DFID-funded programme to reach communities, refugees and internally displaced people in Syria: Developing resilience of households and communities affected by conflict in Northern and Central Syria. Three geographical hubs - in Northeast, Northwest, and Central Syria - work largely through remote management with local partners operating inside Syria. CARE International UK is the project grant holder with the donor and also has an 18-month resilience programme grant with the EU, working with the same partners to build resilience among communities in Syria. As of June 2018, the project will be 17 months into a 39-month time-frame.

The on-going conflict in Syria results in rapidly changing circumstances that create significantly more variability and severity in the shocks and stresses that households and communities face, which can also affect programming and the ability to strengthen resilience. Understanding how households and communities deal with this variability and severe risks in order to improve their conditions is key to helping support their ability to become more resilient. Household level interventions can help build capacity and assets, but being resilient in the long-term also requires addressing the broader systems that are necessary for supporting resilience (e.g. market systems, local decision-making and governance processes, community service provision, gender equality, etc.).

CARE is seeking a research partner with experience in protection research to work with the consortium delivering the DFID Syria Resilience Programme. The research partner will be engaged throughout the 12 months of the programme to help develop deeper understanding around community-based protection within the context with Syria, with the aim of making programming and policy recommendations on how to address community-based protection within the context of ongoing conflict.

3. Purpose

The purpose of this research partnership is to deliver learning and lessons for CARE and the wider humanitarian sector in Syria on what community-based protection means and how we can support strengthening community-based protection and, accordingly, resilience within such challenging circumstances. Through this partnership, CARE hopes to learn and share lessons on what is needed for effective community-based protection and resilience-building in this context to inform current and future interventions in Syria.

The research partnership should provide a strong analysis of household, community, sub-national and national systems and the changing variables within Syria, with a view to better understanding how these impact on the ability of households and communities to enhance community-based protection mechanisms and, in turn, their resilience, and how they impact on the delivery of programmes. This will lead to learning on how CARE and the wider humanitarian community can best respond to systemic weaknesses, in order to enhance the ability of communities to absorb and adapt to shocks and stresses, with a particular focus on systems that will support the empowerment and resilience of women and girls.

The research will have two components: (1) Research on what community-based protection means and how it contributes to resilience in the context of Syria and (2) Lessons for CARE and the wider humanitarian community-s programming and policy.

Component 1: Research on what community-based protection means and how it contributes to resilience within the context of Syria

Component 1 aims to understand what community-based protection looks like from the perspective of men, women, girls and boys, including those from marginalized groups, in the three regional areas in which CARE operates. As humanitarian actors, we have common frameworks and assumptions about what factors and enabling environment are necessary to support community-based protection for individuals, households and communities.. In turn, we design our programmes based on the sectors and activities we believe are necessary to strengthen community-based protection and build resilience. However, in the context of conflict, where the situation and dynamics are constantly shifting and the crisis is protracted the focus must shift from a sectorial to a broader systems approach to our multi-sectorial response support. .

The Research Partner will lead the conceptualization of the research design during the inception phase, which will center on how to unpack the following proposed overarching research topics/questions:

1. Mapping community protection assets, capacities, structures and mechanisms: Map community structures and organisations; identify formal and informal (male and female) leaders and representatives of various community populations such as people with disabilities, older people, minority groups, etc.; examine how community decisions are made; list other protection-related agencies working in the area and in the community; identify governorate or district-level institutions or programmes that can help to address community needs and concerns.

2. Identify protection threats for different population groups: Together with the different sub-groups within the community, use participatory results to identify distinct protection threats that each sub-group encounters; probe for underlying issues and causes; work with the community to set priorities, based on the community-s own assessments and the availability of or ability to deliver responding services.

3. Identify and strengthen communities- existing protection measures and strategies: Identify and understand the measures and strategies for individual or collective self-protection that communities- employed before the crisis and developed during the crisis, including harmful strategies; discuss what strategies could replace harmful community protection measures or mitigate their effects.

4. Examine how communities- own positive protection measures and strategies inform the integration of protection measures and strategies into CARE-s sectorial and multi-sectorial programming to produce more effective, protective and empowering outcomes for all our programme participants equally

The consultancy will design data gathering methods to investigate agreed upon research questions and will manage and deliver the research in collaboration with CARE programme and MEAL staff and data collectors in Syria. The research must take into account the variability within the three regional hubs and within the communities themselves to consider factors that will affect how individuals and households experience community-based protection differently. Such factors include: gender (especially women and girls), displaced vs. non-displaced, urban vs. rural, and level of conflict in area (active conflict area, besieged area, hard-to-reach area, historic conflict area, etc.).

The research partner will be able to draw on M&E data that is currently being gathered throughout the project, based on CARE-s Syria programme M&E Framework. As CARE-s M&E data is largely quantitative based, CARE envisions this research to support robust qualitative findings that have the potential to complement the existing M&E data from the programme.

The analysis of the data collected will be led and manage by the Research Partner and draw findings, conclusions, and recommendations for each of the three regional areas and differentiate where possible between findings at various levels (e.g. household, community, region).

Component 2: Lessons for CARE programming and policy shaping

The purpose of Component 2 is to facilitate learning and reflection from the findings, conclusions and recommendations that the research explores under Component 1. This will consist of internal learning that can be applied to the current programme as well as external learning that CARE can use to advocate for appropriate and impactful approaches to mainstreamed, integrated and standalone protection programming in Syria. This component will consist of a mix of deliverables including Executive/Learning Briefs and learning workshops.

Internal learning:

It is expected that the Research Partner will facilitate two learning events in the course of the research period; one at the mid-term point of the research where preliminary findings can be extrapolated and discussed; and post-research, when final findings, conclusions and recommendations are completed. In each learning period, the events will take place for each of the three regional hubs.

Additionally, for the post-research learning events, it is expected that the Research Team will produce:

a) A Learning Brief: This will that provide an analysis of the research findings against CARE-s current programme-s Theory of Change. What we expect from this is a review of the degree to which the programme-s sector priorities and corresponding activities continue to be appropriate to address the p

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