Country: Jordan
Closing date: 11 Nov 2018
Baseline Study Terms of Reference – Strengthen protection of the vulnerable women and communities impacted by the protracted crisis
Overview
ActionAid has been working in the Arab Region since 2005 and focuses interventions on advancing women rights, increasing young people’s civic and political engagement and building resilience and ending protection risks faced by women and girls affected by conflict in the region.
This project funded by DANIDA, is planning to shift power to women, young people and their organizations in protracted crises in order for them to lead and influence humanitarian action that builds increased protection and resilience, the AA Arab Region humanitarian program in Jordan and Lebanon is built around three thematic areas:
• Women led community-based protection
• Accountability and localization
• Social and economic resilience.
This consultancy aims at collecting relevant data, to act as a baseline for the project “Strengthen protection of the vulnerable women and communities impacted by the protracted crisis” reflecting into the project design, and feeding into the organizations general understanding of the context, and the wider development sector in the region. The target locations for the baseline study will be Mafraq and Zarqa in Jordan and Jeb Jenin and Baalbek in Lebanon.
Project background
As of beginning 2018, the Syrian conflict had led to the displacement of approximately 11.7 million Syrians, and has caused 5.6million Syrian’s to flee to other countries. In both Jordan and Lebanon, already overstretched public infrastructure, services and resources are having to cope with the additional refugee influx and are increasingly failing to keep pace with demand. This has put pressure on relations between refugees and hosting communities (social cohesion) in the affected communities and created tensions, most acutely around equal access to basic services and job opportunities. In both Jordan and Lebanon, the economies have faced increased strain as a result of the pressures associated with hosting a growing refugee community. According to the Jordan Response Plan 2018-2020, the direct cost of the Syrian Crisis on Jordan has been calculated at around USD 10.291 Billion, and despite international support the needs of refugees and host communities has outpaced the financial support available. While in Lebanon there is growing calls to alleviate the strain on the Lebanese government by the international community to share the burden of indirect costs in the form of infrastructure spending and provision of public services.
While both hosting communities and refugees in Lebanon and Jordan face similar challenges in terms of limited access to livelihoods opportunities, the household livelihood situation and security among Syrian refugees in general is much more fragile because they face a number of challenges specific to displacement as well as their refugee status. The loss of social capital, lack of acknowledged professional certificates, trauma, impermanent accommodation and residence, legal restrictions, limited freedom of movement, etc., places Syrian refugees in particular need of protection, material assistance, capacity building efforts and information provision in order to address their specific vulnerabilities as refugees. The displacement of Syrians has had a profound effect on all Syrian women and men, girls and boys, but evidence from Jordan and Lebanon show that refugee women form a particularly vulnerable group and large parts of the MENA region, including Jordan and Lebanon, are characterized by a lack of effective protection strategies/mechanisms at community level and constraints in accessing specialist services.
As the Syrian crisis approaches its eighth year, an entire generation of children and young people are being shaped by violence, displacement, and a persistent lack of opportunities, with profound long-term consequences for Syria and the region. The high level of frustrations within at-risk populations, who feel they have limited future economic and democratic prospects are also causing increased social tensions and conflicts at community level. In their response to date, international agencies, have not engaged with local actors in a systematic way and coordination forums in both Jordan and Lebanon include disproportionate representation of international versus local and national actors, and extremely limited inputs from communities themselves. According to a recent livelihood study conducted by ActionAid’s Arab Region programme (AR), refugees and host community members have few pathways to obtain accurate, up-to-date information about the assistance available to them, which limits their resilience capacity.
Project Overview:**
ActionAid’s project aimed to “Strengthen protection of the vulnerable women and communities impacted by the protracted crisis” is a four-year project running from 2018 to 2021 operating across Jordan, and Lebanon. The project is working towards supporting women and young people through humanitarian action with the support of partners and the broader ActionAid federation. ActionAid’s humanitarian strategy deliberately targets the support of women’s leadership and protection in humanitarian response, localisation of humanitarian efforts, and accountability to affected communities. This project aims to support these objectives through engaging local communities and partners involved in protracted crises to ensure a long term and sustainable delivery of these aims.
Under an overall objective of contributing to shift power to women, young people and their organizations in protracted crises in order for them to lead and influence humanitarian action that builds increased protection and resilience, the AA Arab Region humanitarian program in Jordan and Lebanon is built around three thematic areas:
• Women led community-based protection
• Accountability and localization
• Social and economic resilience
All project activities will fall within these themes, often overlapping across more than one. The project emphasizes the protection of women and ensures that all activities will be applied with a protection lens.
The project is deliberately targeting women and young people impacted by the Syrian crisis in local communities. Due to Syrian refugee women and young people existing within host communities, ActionAid will target a 50% split of host community members, and Syrian refugees. This is to ensure that the needs of local communities are equally addressed and to build solidarity and cohesion between the groups. The bulk of programmatic activities will take place within ActionAid’s established Women Safe Spaces. These spaces will provide a central location for women to meet, engage with program activities and engage in social activities.
“Shifting power” to communities themselves and in particular women and young people, is an approach that runs across all three thematic areas and is where linkages between humanitarian and development work/ways of working are forged.
All three thematic areas were chosen carefully based on AA-AR previous experience responding to the Syrian protracted crisis in Lebanon and Jordan, as well as the needs of the affected communities including hosting and hosted women and young people. A great synergy and linkages are present among the three areas of intervention where we believe that will add holistic vision to our intervention and help us better respond to the needs in a more sustainable and community-based approach. AA-AR assumes that through empowering the women and young people they will be able to transform and lead the needed, relevant, and sustainable change we want to see in the Arab region, where everyone enjoys the equal rights and have the means to lead the change in their communities.
Across the three thematic areas, ActionAid will work with partners to support these aims ensuring local engagement and ownership of the activities.
Baseline study objectives
The overall objective of this consultancy is to provide sufficient information on the current humanitarian and protection status of local communities in Mafraq and Zarqa, focusing particularly on women leadership.
Project related objectives
• % of women and young people who report safety, resilience and active involvement in decision making in their local communities to reduce risk.
• % of women who have access to protection service and feel protected.
• % of women capacitated to lead protection activities in their communities.
• % of women, young people and their organizations reports ability to lead humanitarian response at local level.
• % of women and young people reports duty bearers are recognizing and addressing human rights issues.
• Number of accountability mechanisms established and functioning at local level.
• % of women and young people reporting access to accountability mechanisms at local level.
• % of women and young people who reports economic resilience.
• % of women and young people reports social cohesion among refugees and hosting communities.
• % of women and young people reports decreased vulnerability as result of the project activities.
Overarching objectives
• How does the project focus on the three focus areas (accountability, protection and women’s economic empowerment) contribute to organizations goal of protecting women and girls and creating social cohesion?
• To what extent is using the women led community-based approach effective in addressing and responding to the protection needs of women affected by conflict?
• What is the enabling factors that helps women and young people to take leadership actions addressing protection issues?
• How can AA contribute to holding humanitarian actors accountable through supporting of local led humanitarian structures
• To what extent are women and girls able to lead on change processes to challenge discrimination, inequality and patriarchy?
• How the project contributing to reducing VAWG – how can we understand the protection risks and factors - capturing the unintended consequences of our projects?
• To what extent this project effectively contribute to the mainstreaming and promoting accountability and transparency practices?
• To what extent does this projects contribute to increasing social cohesion in the target communities? What were the factors and tools to be used that lead to achieving or hindering this?
• To what level women are leading activities at partner organizations of this project.
• % of direct funding allocated for women groups in local communities.
• % of women participating in decision making processes, staff, and in leadership positions
• Level of humanitarian capacity of local and national responders, including preparedness, response and coordination capacities – increasing multi-year investment.
Methodology
It is advised to adapt a mixed method approach achieve the baseline research objectives and that will enable the future assessments of the project, desk review of internal and external relevant documents is as well required in order to cross check findings with other researches and insure the projects sensitivity to the context of implementation.
The mixed-methods approach will then combine statistically representative survey data relevant for project indicators with in-depth, qualitative research. Qualitative research is expected to provide an understanding of the knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of distinct separate stakeholders i.e. women, men, girls, boys, community leaders at community level, district, national level.
All data, qualitative and quantitative, collected through the research must be disaggregated by nationality, sex and age as a minimum. Other factors as highlighted in project indicators also need to be considered.
Deliverables
Inception report highlighting main findings from potential desk review and outlining planning of the study along with surveying methods and tools to be used.
Baseline report with detailed findings along with executive summary, conclusions and recommendations, of 15-20 pages.
M&E Recommendations report.
Final presentation on the study findings, to AA, partner staff and other CSO stakeholders(in person or remotely, or through the provision of summary presentation material)
A ‘user-friendly’ summary of the baseline report to aid sharing of key findings with communities
All raw data files including quantitative output and syntax files, qualitative transcripts etc.
The baseline report will be produced in English and Arabic. The expected format for the final baseline reports and summaries will be agreed during inception phase.
Timeline:
Topic, Date
Reviewing of application, 13 November 2018
Signing of Contracts, and sending relevant documents, Inception meeting with Meal Manager, and Humanitarian Program Manager, 15 November 2018
Inception report submitted and approved, 29 November 2018
Receiving first draft baseline study report from the consultant, 10 January 2019
Receiving feedback and comments from AA-AR on the draft baseline study, 17 January 2019
Presentation of Findings for AA-AR key Staff, 7 February 2019
submission of Final Report, 21 February 2019
Selection Criteria
• Proven record of working on similar studies within Jordan and Lebanon.
• Strong knowledge of local Jordanian and Lebanese contexts, with grounded insights around refugee’s status in the region.
• Strong Knowledge of regional and national protection and political structure, as well as knowledge of laws and regulation regarding refugees.
• Strong experience in humanitarian interventions, specifically in the MENA region and Syria crisis.
ActionAid Principles and Values
ActionAid is a global justice Federation working to achieve social justice, gender equality and poverty eradication. Throughout the world, ActionAid works to strengthen the capacity and active agency of people living in poverty and exclusion, especially women and young people, to assert their rights.
Mutual Respect, requiring us to recognize the innate worth of all people and the value of diversity.
Equity and Justice, requiring us to ensure the realization of our vision for everyone, irrespective of gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, race, ethnicity, caste, class, age, HIV status, disability, location and religion
Integrity, requiring us to be honest, transparent and accountable at all levels for the effectiveness of our actions and our use of resources and open in our judgements and communications with others
Solidarity with People Living in Poverty and Exclusion, will be the only bias in our commitment to the fight against poverty, injustice, and gender inequality
Courage of Conviction, requiring us to be creative and radical, bold and innovative – without fear of failure - in pursuit of making the greatest possible impact on the causes of poverty, injustice, and gender inequality
Independence, from any religious or party-political affiliation
Humility, recognizing that we are part of a wider alliance against poverty and injustice. We are committed to applying a feminist lens and values in our work, which will guide us in interpreting and advancing our mission and these values.
How to apply:
Application Process
We invite interested researchers to submit the following application documents:
a) Expression of interest addressing track record and selection criteria
b) Technical proposal for the baseline study including proposed activities schedule/work plan with time frame
c) CV(s) of applicant(s)
d) Budget (separating daily rates and expenses)
e) An example of previous similar work
Selected consultant(s) will be expected to sign and abide by ActionAid values and key policies (including Anti-Sexual Harassment Policy, Child Protection Policy etc..
All of the above should be sent to Mr. Murad Kharabsheh, murad.kharabsheh@actionaid.org by COB 11 November 2018.