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EOI for Hiring for Consultancy Service for Final Evaluation
Organization: Catholic Relief Services (CRS)
Apply By: 25 Apr 2021
EoI - Hiring for Consultancy Service for Final Evaluation
About the Organization:
Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. CRS works to save, protect, and transform lives in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality. CRS’ relief and development work is accomplished through programs of emergency response, HIV, health, agriculture, education, microfinance and peacebuilding.
Evaluation Overview:
Catholic Relief Services (CRS) India country program’s project: Watershed Approach for Resilient Livelihoods of Tribal Communities in Odisha” is implemented over a period of five years partnership with Society for Welfare Animation and Development (SWAD) in Mohana Block of Gajapati district of Odisha with the funding support from NABARD & CRS private funds. According to the project proposal narrative, a final evaluation is to be conducted. The proposed objectives of this final evaluation are to evaluate the project’s achievement against selected indicators, to evaluate the project’s interventions/strategies in terms of relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability and to review the project’s and nutrition learning questions and to identify and document key lessons learned, if any.
CRS proposes to hire an external national-level consultant/agency to conduct survey as well as the qualitative study and reporting. It recommends employing a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodology using participatory methods wherever feasible. The quantitative study will include survey of Head of Households and pregnant/lactating women (PLW), to measure the achievement against selected indicators and the project’s spillover effect. The qualitative study will include focus group discussions (FGDs) with Head of Households, PLWs, Watershed Development Committee (WDC) members and Project Animators and key informant interviews (KIIs) with key project staff and key external stakeholders (ANM, AWW, Veterinary Surgeon, Panchayat members, Husband of PLW and MIL of PLW) around proposed key evaluation questions. This evaluation will use primary source of data collection.
About the Project:
The Goal of the project is: “Tribal communities in Mohana block of Gajapati district are food secure”. The project plans to achieve its goal through supporting communities to adopt low cost, sustainable and collective natural resource management practices using a watershed approach; and environmentally sustainable yield and income enhancing agriculture and livestock practices. Emphasis was placed on increasing the availability of, and access to, a diverse range of nutritious foods, along with enhancing resilience to climatic shocks like droughts and erratic rainfalls. The project focuses on vulnerable groups like landless households to diversify their livelihoods, reduce their acute dependence on forests and in the process reduce further exploitation of natural resources. Additionally, relevant communication strategies were developed and implemented to increase target community awareness on nutritional issues and improve dietary diversity, particularly for PLW and children aged under 2 year. The project also worked closely with WDC and external stakeholders to develop sustainable solutions to address NRM and livelihood challenges faced by the communities.
SWAD implemented the project in 17 villages of Gajapati District, which includes four micro watersheds (WS). As per NABARD guideline, each of the four WS constitutes a WDC. The project works with the existing village committees and federates them into WDCs for each of the four watershed areas to construct soil and water conservation structures (SWCs) like farm bunds, trenches, gully plugging, contour bundings, percolation tanks, plantation etc.
The project promotes crops like pulses and millets in the valley and upland areas and decreases the area of maize and cashew cultivation in these areas. Moreover, the project focus was to facilitate switching back to the traditional crops with improved practices and crop varieties. Improved food security was another key area, wherein household sources of income were diversified, to enable purchase of more nutritious food and increase resilience to shocks. Based on assessments, opportunities like backyard/homestead poultry were further explored for their feasibility and vulnerable groups were supported to take up these opportunities.
In addition to creating awareness on importance of diversified diet, other interventions undertaken such as pulse production and improvements in poultry were expected to address ‘supply-side’ issues and increase availability of nutrient-rich food at the household level. Project had planned to encourage families to think through and analyze use of production and purchasing choices, to maximize nutrition outcomes.
As a learning objective for CRS and partners to understand the agriculture and nutrition pathways, the project has developed and tested strategies for integrating agriculture interventions with messaging on nutrition to improve dietary diversity among PLW along with children between 6-23 months of age. The project works with target households (mothers, mothers in law, grandmothers and others who influence decisions on diet) to increase awareness on the importance of diversified diet, especially for pregnant and lactating women and children ages 6-23 months.
For the agriculture component, the project works with both men and women to build their vegetable growing skills while for the livestock component, the focus is on women. Elderly men and women who remain at home also being targeted for home gardening. At the same time, the project ensures that both men and women have access to all livelihood related technologies being promoted in the project.
Interested candidate/agency please email at rekha.bahanwal@crs.org by 25th April 2021, 5:00 PM for detailed ToR of this final evaluation that covers topics including evaluation questions, methodology (including sampling), reporting and dissemination plan.
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