| Overview : The mid-term evaluation of the MicroLead Expansion programme is being conducted as agreed in the project document (partnership protocol with The MasterCard Foundation) and in accordance with UNCDF’s Evaluation Plan 2014 – 2015 and its broader Evaluation Policy which sets out a number of guiding principles, norms and criterias for evaluation in the organisation.
Amongst the norms that the Policy seeks to uphold, the most important are that evaluation exercises should be independent, impartial and of appropriate quality but also that they should be intentional and designed with utility in mind; in other words that evaluations should generate relevant and useful information to support evidence-based decision making.
With this in mind, this evaluation has been designed with dual objectives: i) to allow UNCDF and The MasterCard Foundation meet their accountability objectives, but also ii) to ensure that the evaluation can support the ongoing attempts by the programme and its funders to capture good practice and lessons to date in a sector which is still relatively new and innovative.
The evaluation will assess both the results to date (direct and indirect, whether intended or not) from the first years of implementation as well as the likelihood of the programme meeting its end goals on the basis of current design, human resource structure, broad implementation strategy, etc. It will build -where appropriate- on the lessons learnt and recommendations generated from the mid-term evaluation of the original MicroLead programme conducted in 2012. It is expected that the evaluation will follow a forward looking approach and provide useful and actionable recommendations to increase the likelihood of success by the end of the programme in 2017.
In line with standard evaluation practice, the scope of the exercise goes beyond assessing whether UNCDF is currently ‘doing things right’ in programme execution and management, to a broader assessment of whether on the basis of evidence available, the MicroLead Expansion approach as implemented by UNCDF and in comparison with similar approaches implemented by others looks to be the ‘right approach’ to achieving the higher-level objectives agreed at the start of programme.
DETAILED RFP DOCUMENT IS ATTACHED.
IMPORTANT NEW NOTICE: Due to UN travel restrictions to Ebola-affected countries, the evaluation team will not visit Liberia during the country mission phase of MicroLead Expansion mid-term evaluation. However, in their technical proposal, bidders need to ensure sufficient coverage of the programme’s performance in this country making use of remote data collection tools (phone interviews with key stakeholders, questionnaires, etc.) |
