Consultant: Evaluation of ACCRA programme

Introduction

The Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance aims to increase governments’ and development actors’ use of evidence in designing and implementing both humanitarian and development interventions that increase poor and vulnerable communities’ capacity to adapt to climate hazards, variability and change. The programme aims to bring together good practice from Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), Sustainable Livelihoods and Social Protection programming to better understand how programmes and policies can support communities’ and individuals’ capacity to adapt to climate change. The first phase of ACCRA runs from Nov 2009 to Oct 2011, and is operational in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda. ACCRA has four key objectives:

1. To understand how existing social protection, livelihoods and disaster risk reduction projects by ACCRA members reduce disaster risk and build adaptive capacity to climate change in beneficiaries, and how these approaches can be strengthened.
2. To use the findings to influence donors, development partners and civil society to improve future planning/action.
3. To work together with local and national governments to build capacity to implement interventions, which can reduce disaster risk and build communities’ adaptive capacity.
4. To encourage learning across countries and disciplines.

Oxfam GB, as the ACCRA lead, is looking for an evaluation team capable of providing a rigorous, credible, independent evaluation of the ACCRA’s work. The evaluation should also inform ACCRA’s phase 2, which is currently under design and will run from November 2011 to October 2014. The evaluation will be carried out in September 2011, and be finalised by the end of October 2010. ACCRA will be looking for evaluation partners in the longer term over the second phase, so this is an opportunity for the right team to work with ACCRA to develop and improve the programme.

(i) Scope and Scale

ACCRA is a consortium made up of Oxfam GB, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Save the Children Alliance, CARE International and World Vision International and funded by DFID. Oxfam GB is the lead consortium member, with an international coordinator based in Uganda and a national coordinator in each of the 3 ACCRA countries: based with World Vision in Uganda; based with Oxfam GB in Ethiopia; based with Save the Children in Mozambique.

ACCRA’s work has several dimensions:

(ii) The ACCRA Local Adaptive Capacity Framework. A key overarching conceptual tool for our programme is our Local Adaptive Capacity framework (LAC), which we are currently using to frame for our research. The LAC has the potential to be used in a number of different contexts, and for a range of purposes, for example for mainstreaming climate change adaptation, design or evaluation purposes. We’re already looking at how it can be used in ACCRA members’ policy and programming work, but our ambition longer term is for it to be used much more widely.
(iii) ACCRA’s in-depth research. We’re carrying out detailed research on 11 projects across Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda before April 2011 – that’s 11 months of research, one in each site. The ACCRA research seeks to test whether existing programmes are already be contributing to adaptive capacity or not, as well as to identify where existing programmatic approaches fall short, in order to inform actions to build adaptive capacity as an integral part of CCA programming. Through our research we’ll bring together good practice from Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), Sustainable Livelihoods and Social Protection programming to better understand how programmes and policies can support communities’ and individuals’ capacity to adapt to climate change.
(iv) ACCRA’s capacity building work. ACCRA will implement national level capacity-building activities to support improved policy and practice of government actors. Whilst all countries have committed to national level engagement around key opportunities, each ACCRA country will also select one focus zone in each ACCRA country in which to undertake more direct capacity building support to support governments to successfully implement policy commitments. There is a strong commitment to cross-programme learning across countries and a variety of meetings and exchange visits involving programme and government personnel will enable the sharing of good practices.
(v) Working and learning with others. ACCRA has a strong commitment to working with governments, and for this reason the consortium is fully operational in all 3 countries. We have an ACCRA national coordinator working alongside ACCRA members to build a strong relationship with and support the national government and work with local and national government at each step of the process. We’re also working closely with existing civil society networks to ensure ACCRA contributes to their work, and with the wider development community through key platforms and meetings.

It is hoped that the evaluation will be able to evaluate ACCRA’s achievements in relation to the logframe, and any achievements above and beyond logframe aims. The evaluation should also identify where ACCRA has fallen short of its aims, and make recommendations on how to improve ways of working in order to increase the likelihood of achieving phase 2 objectives. Although the evaluation will be both summative and formative, emphasis will be placed on understanding not only where progress has been made, but probing more deeply into the why and how questions - what the critical success factors were. It will also draw out learnings and case studies from ACCRA’s advocacy work.

Evaluation Questions

The evaluation will cover the purpose and outcome level indicators as outlined in the ACCRA logframe. The evaluation questions will be refined in conjunction with the successful consultants.

1. The programme’s outcomes or impact
What have been results of the ACCRA been to date in the 3 ACCRA countries? How far did we achieve what we set out to? Are there any unexpected or additional outcomes?

2. ACCRA’s contribution or ‘added value’
What value-added did the ACCRA bring, both in-country and internationally?

3. Ways of working. What improvements could be made to the way ACCRA works in phase 2 (bearing in mind that structures and activities for phase 2 will have been defined, so recommendations should focus on improvements/amendments to those).

4. Learnings from advocacy work. Consortium members specifically are interested to understand which advocacy approaches work, and which are less successful, to inform future work across the consortium

Methodology

Interested parties will be asked to tender a short outline methodology of how they would tackle this evaluation, both on a theoretical and practical basis. This should include:

• desk research (plans, research outputs, conference reports, monitoring data);
• interviews with key internal stakeholders within the ACCRA organisations in the UK and ACCRA focus countries;
• interviews with key external stakeholders including allies and targets.
• visits to Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda;
• collation of evidence on what works on advocacy.
• stories useful for both evaluation and communication work.

UK-based evaluators are strongly advised to identify a team-mate in each ACCRA country to support the evaluation, and a translator in Mozabique. ACCRA can offer advice in this area if helpful. The selected evaluation team would then work collaboratively with Oxfam GB to refine the methodology and develop a detailed evaluation plan.