Consultant: Development and Conduct of a Governing Board Self-Evaluation

The African Risk Capacity (ARC) was established as a Specialized Agency of the African Union (AU) to help Member States improve their capacities to better plan, prepare and respond to extreme weather events and natural disasters, therefore protecting the food security of their vulnerable populations.

ARC’s mission is to use modern finance mechanisms such as risk pooling and risk transfer to create pan-African climate response systems that enable African countries to meet the needs of people harmed by natural disasters.

The objective of the ARC Agency is to assist AU Member States to reduce the risk of loss and damage caused by extreme weather events and natural disasters affecting Africa’s populations by providing targeted responses to disasters in a more timely, cost-effective, objective and transparent manner.

Background

The ARC Agency Governing Board (the Board) has 7 voting members plus the ARC Director General, who serves as an ex-officio, non-voting member. Two of the Board members are appointed by the African Union.  The other 5 are elected, based on a system of regional representation. Each elected Board member has an alternate who is invited to attend Board meetings when he or she is not available.  The Board meets at least two times each year, in different locations.

The Rules of Procedure of the Board include a provision for the Board to conduct periodic self-evaluations.  The Board intends to conduct its first self-evaluation in 2019.  The objective of the Board evaluation would be to review and analyse the current governance structure, systems and processes in terms of evaluating its effectiveness and the quality of decision-making against the backdrop of challenges currently confronting the governance of ARC Agency and to reflect on its appropriateness in light of the 2016-2020 Strategic Framework.

Purpose of the Consultancy

The consultant will develop and implement a self-evaluation tool for the Board, prepare a report with recommended actions for consideration and present the findings to the Board based on the data collected in the course of the self-evaluation, comprising both qualitative and quantitative criteria and analysis, with the findings from the evaluation and recommended actions.  The self-evaluation tool should seek to ascertain the level of convergence or divergence of views from members of the Board, Committees, Secretariat, Partners and stakeholders on roles, accountabilities and processes and how that impacts on the effectiveness of these relationships and relative efficiencies of the governance of ARC Agency. The self-evaluation tool must be suitable for future use by the Board without additional support from the consultant.

Duties and Responsibilities

In carrying out this consultancy, the consultant will have the following specific responsibilities.

1. conduct a diagnostic exercise through an electronic survey;
2. conduct one-on-one interviews (which could be a mixture of telephone calls and preferably in-person interviews);
3. lead collective discussion with the Board where circumstances permit;
4. observe Board and Committee meetings scheduled for December 2018 to February 2019;
5. desk top review of the Statutes, By-Laws and Committee Charters to evaluate alignment and compliance with existing governance procedures and practices with a focus on the core functions of the Board and its Committees; and
6. a review of other relevant documentation including minutes of meetings and meeting papers.