Thailand: Evaluation Consultant – Short Term Girls Empowerment Project
The Girls Empowerment Project is a pilot project implemented by the International Rescue Committee in Ban Mai Nai Soi refugee camp (site 1), Mae Hong Son. The objective of this pilot project is to promote and facilitate the safety, well-being and empowerment of marginalized, at-risk adolescent girls in the camp. Specifically, the project seeks to reduce or eliminate risk factors for sexual violence and increase protective factors from it, targeting a segment of the adolescent girl population who are particularly vulnerable. The project targets 30 girls ranging in age from 10 to 18 who are no longer attending school, either because of social exclusion due to their gender or marriage status or forced exclusion due to pregnancy.
This project works at multiple levels to increase the physical, social and human assets of the target girls by: providing them with a “safe space”, strengthening their knowledge and skills, and engaging the family members, peers, community leaders and structures that act as gatekeepers to such assets. Through a participatory action research (PAR) process, the target girls identified the knowledge and skills they would like to learn to feel safe, healthy, and confident. This learning content is being taught through weekly workshops over a period of 12 months. Older girls from the community (ages 18-25) have also been recruited and trained to be individual mentors for participants as well as facilitators of the identified learning content. Lastly, PAR was used to engage family and community members in a dialogue about the target girls' risk and protective factors for sexual violence and to further define what resources they, as gatekeepers, need to address risk factors.
As the pilot stage of the project comes to a close, IRC seeks an external consultant able to conduct an evaluation of the pilot. A baseline assessment was conducted at the start of the project.
Scope of Work: The Evaluation Consultant will design and conduct an evaluation to determine whether target girls do experience increased presence of, or access to, various social, physical and human assets on completion of the program. The evaluation will focus on 4 main anticipated results of the project:1) 75% of target girls regularly attend program activities2) 75% of target girls identify that they have increased the presence of resources that can protect them from sexual violence3) 75% of target adults (carers, spouses) have increased knowledge of what they can do to actively promote the safety and well-being of target girls4) Target community leaders identify and take specific actions to change social policies that hinder girls’ access to education
Activities will include the following:• Review data from existing monitoring tools (e.g. activity attendance records, home visit tracking sheets, meeting minutes and action plans, etc)• Train local consultants as enumerators• Conduct end-line survey and qualitative research with 30 girls and their family members• Develop tool to measure levels of knowledge of family members• Analyze findings and produce report
Experience Desired:• Practical experience in designing and conducting research and evaluation projects as well as data collection skills.
• Experience working in refugee camp settings• Analytical skills and frameworks, such as gender analysis • Process management skills, such as facilitation skills • Demonstrated experience conducting evaluations in low resource settings, including both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis.• Experience using relevant analysis software• Experience evaluating programs with a protection focus
