The Municipal Businesses project. Final Evaluation (Consultant) At Finn Church Aid

1. Background of the evaluation

Finn Church Aid (FCA) is the largest Finnish organization for development cooperation and the second largest provider of humanitarian assistance. FCA operates in twelve countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and has over 70 years of experience from international aid. FCA specializes in supporting local communities in three priority areas: Right to Livelihood, Right to Quality Education and Right to Peace. Our operations include long-term development cooperation, humanitarian assistance and advocacy. FCA has been working in Jordan since 2012 with focus on mitigating the impact of the regional refugee crisis especially among youth and young adults. Over the years, the priorities of the country program have gradually shifted from Education in Emergencies to long-term resilience and reduced aid dependency of both refugees and vulnerable host communities. These goals are promoted especially through various livelihood interventions.

The Municipal Businesses project, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aims to improve social-economic prospects for refugees and host communities in six municipalities in Jordan through holistic interventions focusing on protection and support by developing locally appropriate businesses. The project was implemented by Finn Church Aid (FCA) and HelpAge International (HAI) in cooperation with six Local Development Units (LDUs) of six municipalities in different governorates in Jordan (Dhlail in Zarqa governorate, Sahab in Amman governorate, Mahis in Balqa’a governorate, The greater Jerash in Jerash governorate, Alza’tari & Almansheah in Mafraq governorate, and Jnaid in Ajloun governorate). This aimed to help to localize the support and link the project to the decentralization agenda of the government, ensuring sustainability and utilizing local resources. The project has specifically focused on self-employment of Syrian refugees and vulnerable host community members with special attention to youth, women, people with disabilities and household heads with older or disabled members of the household. The project directly supported the establishment of 246 businesses and the expansion of 60 businesses, creating over 406 new jobs in total, thus supporting over 2,274 household members that will also benefit from increased access to social and health services.

The project builds on the tested model used in previous FCA interventions that succeeded in creating and expanding sustainable enterprises for Syrian refugees and Jordanians in Jordan.

In vulnerable families, income is needed to support family members with special needs. By linking livelihood interventions to the protection of and social and health services to these vulnerable groups, the project helped to reduce the burden on young members of the family, thus providing a more integrated and sustainable response.

2. Rational, purpose and priority objectives of the evaluation

FCA Jordan’s project Municipal Businesses (MuBu) will come to its end by end of 2021*.* In adherence to Core Humanitarian Standards and its own PMER requirements, FCA considers itself accountable to its beneficiaries and donors for achieving the promised outcomes and wants to have a realistic understanding to what extent it has succeeded in delivering the intended outcomes in the mentioned project. This understanding also serves FCA’s goal of being a learning organization that builds its future work on systematic analysis of the on-going and past interventions.

More specifically, FCA Jordan needs an external evaluation on successes and shortcomings of the project that was implemented in 6 municipalities over the course of 30 months, as well as an analysis on the reasons behind them.

The main purpose of this evaluation is to evaluate the overall project quality implementation, achieved targets and impact on the targeted communities. Furthermore, it is expected to produce lessons learnt and turn them into recommendations for future interventions and the donor.

3. Scope of the evaluation.

The project’s ultimate focus, is to evaluate the impact of the intervention, improving the socio-economic prospects for refugees and host communities in six municipalities in Jordan. The evaluation must cover the social and protection activities implemented by HAI and economic empowerment activities implemented by FCA between May 2019 and October 2021 at the six areas mentioned earlier. The intervention stakeholders are mainly the direct beneficiaries from Syrian refugee and host communities, and their families, in addition to members from the Local Development Units (LDU) at the targeted municipalities. These activities have resulted into the following which should be further evaluated by the consultant:

• Output 1: Vulnerable Syrian refugees and host community members have improved their economic and social prospects through involvement in local market-driven businesses and protection activities.
• Output 2: Vulnerable refugees and host communities have improved their livelihood by getting involved or expanding income generating activities.
• Output 3: Vulnerable people (such as older family member and family members with disabilities) from families selected for livelihood activities have improved access to vital services (health, protection, PSS) through community-based protection programming.

The evaluation will comply with aspects of quality and accountability as per the Core Humanitarian Standards (CHS) general framework.

Due to the nature of this evaluation, it will focus on examining only a limited number of aspects in this project, namely effectiveness, coordination, impact and sustainability that serves projects’ three main results.

4. RELEVANCE

· How the project implementation and activities related to the Project design, conducted activities are the same in the Log frame.

EFFICIENCY

· To what extent the intervention implementation was aligned with the planned timeframe? Did the implementers mitigate COVID pandemic risks that affected their promised deliverables? How?

Effectiveness

· How do project beneficiaries in targeted areas assess the usefulness of the provided 1) selection for beneficiaries at project activities 2) How to Start My Own Business (Entrepreneurship skills) course (implemented by FCA)3) financial support (grants) given to MSEs 4) business coaching in terms of strengthening their entrepreneurial skills (implemented by FCA) 5) Women Support Group implemented by FCA 6) Homebased care provided by HAI 7)Community Based protection such as referral, home-based care, and psychosocial support (PSS).

· How do LDUs assess the usefulness of the provided capacity building and training needs in terms of training rooms and its related furniture/ equipment and accessibility for PWD’s/ elderly community members.

Coordination

· Who are the relevant stakeholders of the intervention at the six municipalities and to what extent did the project manage to engage with them during the two cycles implemented at the targeted areas? What are the views of stakeholders (HH members of beneficiaries who received grants) on project economic impact on the household.

· How HAI interventions supported the Older and their ability to access health services.

Impact

· What is the perception of project beneficiaries in the targeted areas on the socio-economic status of their households at the time of the evaluation in comparison with the time prior to the project?

· To what extent do they assess the project has contributed to eventual changes AND what other factors do they see shaping their situation?

Sustainability

· How many of the supported businesses in targeted areas were still operational at the time of the evaluation and how have their profits developed after the support from the project?

· What kind of factors do the beneficiaries themselves and the project staff identify for the successes and failures of the businesses in the targeted areas overall?

· What have been the key factors that have supported businesses to overcome challenges related specifically to COVID-19 in the targeted areas and what are the factors that have made them particularly vulnerable to the pandemic according to the project beneficiaries and the project staff?

· How do the project beneficiaries and the project staff see the future prospects of the surviving businesses?

· How do supported businesses employees recruited during intervention see the provided employment opportunity and what consideration should be taken into account in the future if there is any?

· How LDU’s are linked with the youth mentor network, and how its aligned with the Local development plans/initiatives?

· How older people will keep receiving similar support to HAI in future?

5. Methodology required & Available data

· The evaluation team will have full access to the project documents and data through SharePoint and One Drive. The available resources on SharePoint will be utilized to inform the design of the evaluation and relevant assessment tools. Primarily, the evaluation team will be requested to align the data collection tools with the inputs of logical framework of the project. Evaluation team is expected to design interview tools and survey forms, collect and analyze outputs which address the four main aspects mentioned under section 3-Scope. The evaluation team will store the data they collected be stored on Kobo. In addition to that, the evaluation team will collect qualitative and quantitative data through semi structured and structured interviews approaches. While the quantitative data will be analyzed using Microsoft Excel to provide key business statistics, the qualitative analysis will be done to supplement the results and dig deeper in the issues or challenges raised by the right holders. The analysis of the data obtained through these questions

· should pay particular attention to differences between Syrian refugees and Jordanian project participants.

· The target of the evaluation will be beneficiaries of the project’s both cycles and who were involved in any component of the project. The total number of beneficiaries is 406 HH 6 municipalities . For evaluation.

· The plan is to have samples of 10% of grant receivers, 5% of trainees enrolled at how to start your own business and did not receive grants, 2% of women group discussions participants will be surveyed through quantitative tools, while the evaluation lead will decide on random sample size for the qualitative data collection approach. However, the sampling size and scope will be confirmed by the evaluation lead in alignment with budget allocated for the evaluation.

6. Timetable

Activity as below:

• Document review (Project documents, progress reports, baseline survey report and any other documents)
• Evaluation design, methodology and detailed work plan

Inception Meeting with FCA Jordan (to be followed by arrangements for the field

visits – travel, logistics, interviews – as per approved plan; sometimes feedback is

sought from colleagues before approving the inception report so some time needs to be reserved for this)

Deliverable:-

Inception report.

Duration:-

Five days.

Data Collection.

Duration:- 15 days

Data Analysis:-

· Presentation workshop of initial findings (to be followed by a review period of the draft report by FCA, compiling and communicating feedback)

Deliverable:-

Draft Report.

Duration:-

12 days.

. Submitting Final report.

Finalizing Evaluation report incorporating feedback provided by stakeholders.

Submission to FCA with a presentation workshop

Deliverable:-

Final evaluation report.

Duration:-

10 Days

7. Terms of contract

· All information gathered from FCA, partners and beneficiaries must remain confidential and not shared with any party without FCA written consent.

· The Consultant is responsible for payment of all social costs, other employment related costs and insurance contributions and for all other liabilities of a statutory nature.

· The consultant will have to abide by FCA CoC, Child Safeguarding policy and any other relevant policies

· Changes in total number of assignment days are allowed if below 42 days only, nevertheless the applicant can make changes on allocated days for each deliverable and provide justification for each change.

· Copyright for the report will remain with FCA.

· FCA do not provide any mean of transportation for consultant.