Terms of Reference (ToR) Resilience Analysis – West Bank At Oxfam Novib

Background

This Terms of Reference (ToR) is developed to support the implementation of the BMZ-funded Transitional Development Assistance (TDA) programme titled “Building Resilience in the Communities of the West Bank to Transform the Current Shock into a Sustainable Future” (2025–2029). The resilience analysis is a core activity within this programme and is designed to directly inform project design, intervention strategies, and the Theory of Change.

The West Bank faces multiple and overlapping crises that undermine the resilience of communities and systems. These include Israeli occupation policies, land fragmentation, water scarcity, economic dependency, and governance fragmentation. In recent years, the Gaza war’s spillover and political polarization have intensified pressures on already fragile communities, particularly in East Jerusalem, Ramallah and Al-Bireh, Jericho, and the Jordan Valley. These areas are further impacted by climate-induced vulnerabilities and limited access to basic services, land, and market opportunities.

The BMZ-funded TDA 2025–2029 programme aims to support crisis-affected populations to stabilize their livelihoods, adapt to structural risks, and transform community systems in a way that fosters long-term resilience. This resilience analysis will serve as a key input into the program’s strategic design, providing a detailed assessment of contextual risks, existing capacities, institutional gaps, and community priorities.

Objectives

The objective of this consultancy is to conduct a portfolio-informing and project-designing resilience analysis that provides a comprehensive understanding of the following:

Contextual Risk and Vulnerability Analysis: Identify and analyse the main risks, crises, and vulnerabilities affecting the target locations, with particular attention to gender dynamics, exposure to shocks, and underlying structural inequalities.
Stakeholder and Actor Mapping: Map affected and responsible actors and structures, including their strengths, capacities, and potential for coping with and responding to risks and crises.
Institutional and Community Capacity Assessment: Assess institutional and community-level capacities and gaps in preparedness and response to shocks.
Cross-Sectoral Crisis Management Needs: Identify needs and opportunities to strengthen cross-sectoral crisis management and resilience capacities.
Resilience Analysis Across SAT Dimensions: Analyse key resilience capacities across the three dimensions: stabilization, adaptation, and transformation (SAT).
Gendered Resilience Assessment: Examine gender-specific risks, gaps, and capacities across the SAT dimensions to inform inclusive resilience programming.
Peacebuilding and Governance Opportunities: Identify peacebuilding and governance opportunities that contribute to strengthening local systems and social cohesion.
Strategic Gender-Responsive Recommendations: Provide strategic, gender-responsive recommendations to inform the programme’s Theory of Change (ToC) and implementation roadmap.
Resilience Capacity Matrix Development: Develop a structured matrix mapping resilience capacities at the individual, community, and institutional levels across SAT dimensions, highlighting strengths and gaps.
Indicator and Proposal Design Inputs: Provide concrete inputs to support the formulation of SMART, gender-responsive indicators and guide the design of the TDA project proposal in alignment with the ToC.
Participatory and Adaptive Analysis: Ensure the analysis is participatory, contextually grounded, and aligned with national strategies and BMZ priorities, while identifying mechanisms for adaptive learning within the TDA programme
Desk Review: Conduct a focused review of existing documents on resilience, fragility, local governance, food systems, and gender policies to establish a foundational understanding of the context.
Stakeholder Mapping: Identify and map key actors across sectors—such as ministries, local councils, cooperatives, CBOs, and women-led organizations—to understand their roles, capacities, and interconnections in resilience and service delivery.
Focus Group Discussions (FGDs): Organize participatory discussions with farmers, women, youth, municipal representatives, and CSOs to gather qualitative insights into local perceptions of risk, coping strategies, and priorities.
Key Informant Interviews (KIIs): Engage institutional and government stakeholders through interviews to identify structural capacities, coordination challenges, and resilience gaps at policy and governance levels.
Gendered Resilience Analysis: Use the SAT (Stabilization, Adaptation, Transformation) framework to assess how women, men, and marginalized groups experience and build resilience differently, identifying both capacities and constraints.
Risk and Crisis Assessment: Analyze exposure to shocks and stresses—such as conflict, economic disruption, and natural hazards—using both secondary data and community perspectives to capture current and emerging risks.
Power and Access Analysis: Examine how power dynamics, exclusion, and inequality affect access to resources, participation, and decision-making—particularly for vulnerable or marginalized populations.
Gender Norms and Social Barriers: Explore how traditional gender roles, norms, and responsibilities influence access to services, control over resources, and exposure to risk—especially for women-headed or disability-affected households.
Intersectional Inclusion: Analyze how overlapping identities (e.g., gender, age, disability, displacement) interact to shape people’s resilience and vulnerabilities, ensuring the programme is inclusive and equitable.
**Climate Risk Lens:**Assess the impact of environmental risks—like water scarcity, drought, and land degradation—on livelihoods and resilience, particularly in agriculture and food systems.
Conflict Sensitivity and Peacebuilding: Integrate a conflict-sensitive approach to identify potential tensions, protection risks, and opportunities to strengthen peacebuilding and social cohesion, while applying do-no-harm principles.
Validation Workshop: Facilitate a workshop with community members and stakeholders to validate findings, gather feedback, and collaboratively develop a practical resilience capacity matrix.
Theory of Change and Roadmap: Develop a localized, gender-responsive Theory of Change and roadmap with clear pathways for change, inclusive of intersectional needs, and aligned with national strategies and donor priorities.
Good Practices Documentation: Identify and document innovative local practices that enhance resilience and inclusion—especially those led by women, youth, or marginalized groups—for possible scaling or replication.
Final Report: Prepare a comprehensive final report synthesizing all findings, including gendered risks, resilience capacities, conflict dynamics, and actionable recommendations for programme design.

Scope of Work

The consultant’s scope of work will include, but not be limited to:

Key Questions

The consultant is expected to explore the following key questions to ensure a comprehensive, inclusive, and context-specific analysis of risks, capacities, and opportunities. These questions will guide data collection, stakeholder engagement, and analysis to inform the design of the BMZ-funded TDA programme. They align with TDA principles and BMZ priorities, with a focus on gender, governance, climate, social inclusion, and conflict sensitivity.

1. Risks, Crises, and Vulnerabilities

What are the main risks and crises affecting the target areas, and how do these vary across gender, age, disability, displacement, and socio-economic status?
What gender-differentiated risks and vulnerabilities are most relevant to the objectives of the TDA programme?
How do environmental and climate-related risks (e.g., drought, water scarcity, land degradation) affect resilience at household and community levels?

2. Resilience Capacities (SAT Framework)

What stabilisation, adaptation, and transformation capacities currently exist among individuals, communities, institutions, and systems?
How do these capacities differ across gender and other social identity factors (intersectionality)?
What local innovations or practices have contributed to building resilience, particularly those led by women, youth, or marginalized groups?

3. Actors, Power, and Governance

Who are the key actors—formal and informal—in resilience, service delivery, and governance across sectors?
What roles do these actors play in enabling or hindering resilience and inclusive crisis response?
How do power dynamics and decision-making structures affect access to resources, participation, and agency for different groups?

4. Contextual and Structural Influences

How do political, economic, social, and environmental conditions interact to shape resilience opportunities and constraints?
How do gender norms and structural inequalities impact people’s ability to respond to, adapt to, and recover from shocks?

5. Gaps and Opportunities

What are the key resilience gaps that the TDA programme can effectively address through its interventions—including, but not limited to, gender inequality, geographic marginalization, youth exclusion, climate vulnerability, economic disempowerment, disability inclusion, social cohesion, and the digital divide?
What institutional and community-level gaps exist in cross-sectoral crisis preparedness and response?
What peacebuilding and governance opportunities exist to strengthen social cohesion and local systems?

6. Programme Design and Strategic Direction

How can programme interventions be designed to strengthen inclusive, gender-responsive, and conflict-sensitive resilience across the SAT dimensions?
What strategic recommendations can inform a localized Theory of Change, inclusive roadmap, and indicators aligned with BMZ and national priorities?

7. Localization and Community Ownership

How are local actors—particularly municipalities, CBOs, and informal networks—involved in resilience planning and crisis response?
What mechanisms exist to support local ownership, sustainability, and institutional continuity beyond external funding cycles?

8. Accountability and Participation

What accountability mechanisms are in place (or missing) to ensure responsiveness to community needs, especially those of women and marginalized groups?
How are community voices—including women, youth, and persons with disabilities—integrated into decision-making, programme design, and implementation?

9. Knowledge, Learning, and Adaptation

What systems or practices exist for learning, monitoring, and adaptive management in resilience programming?
How can the TDA programme strengthen knowledge sharing, data use, and feedback loops among stakeholders?

10. Digital Access and Innovation

How does the digital divide affect access to information, services, and resilience-building opportunities?
What role can digital tools or innovation play in enhancing early warning, market access, or civic participation—particularly for excluded groups?

11. Private Sector and Market Resilience

What role can the private sector, cooperatives, or social enterprises play in supporting resilient livelihoods and inclusive economic recovery?
What barriers exist for smallholders or informal workers to participate in value chains or benefit from market-based resilience strategies?

Methodology

The consultant will adopt a participatory, mixed-method approach that combines qualitative and contextual analysis with inclusive stakeholder engagement. The methodology will be designed to ensure gender responsiveness, conflict sensitivity, and alignment with the SAT (Stabilization, Adaptation, Transformation) framework. Key components will include:

Desk Review: Review of relevant background literature, policy documents, prior assessments, and programme reports related to resilience, fragility, food systems, governance, climate risks, and gender dynamics in the target areas.
Key Informant Interviews (KIIs): Semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, including representatives from government institutions, local authorities, civil society, women-led organizations, and development partners, to gather insights on capacities, governance bottlenecks, and structural constraints.
Focus Group Discussions (FGDs): Facilitated discussions with diverse community groups—including smallholder farmers, women, youth, persons with disabilities, and other marginalized groups—to capture local knowledge, risk perceptions, resilience practices, and priority needs.
Participatory Resilience Capacity Matrix: Co-developed with stakeholders during facilitated workshops to map existing and required resilience capacities across the SAT dimensions (stabilization, adaptation, and transformation) at individual, community, and institutional levels.
Conflict and Peacebuilding Scan: Integration of a conflict sensitivity lens through the mapping of local actors, analysis of conflict dynamics, protection risks, and peacebuilding opportunities. This includes application of do-no-harm principles and identification of social cohesion entry points.

The methodology will ensure intersectional analysis, uphold inclusion and accountability principles, and generate evidence to inform the Theory of Change and programme design for the BMZ-funded TDA initiative.

Deliverables

The consultant is expected to submit the following deliverables, each contributing to the overall resilience analysis and design of the BMZ-funded TDA programme:

1. Inception Report

Detailed methodology outlining data collection tools, key questions, and analysis framework.
Proposed work plan, timeline, and list of stakeholders to be consulted.
Ethical considerations and approach to gender, inclusion, and conflict sensitivity.

2. Preliminary Risk and Resilience Assessment

Synthesis of key insights from the desk review, initial KIIs, and FGDs.
Contextual overview of existing risks, vulnerabilities, and gendered dimensions of resilience.
Emerging themes and gaps to be explored in subsequent stages.

3. Stakeholder and Resilience Capacity Mapping

Mapping of formal and informal actors, their roles, influence, and interrelationships.
Overview of existing resilience capacities across stabilization, adaptation, and transformation (SAT) dimensions.
Identification of coordination gaps and enabling actors.

4. Gender-Responsive Resilience Matrix and Conflict Sensitivity Analysis

Structured matrix summarizing resilience capacities and gaps at household, community, and institutional levels, disaggregated by gender and other relevant identity factors.
Conflict and peace scan identifying local risks, dividers, connectors, and opportunities for social cohesion.
Reflections on power dynamics, protection risks, and do-no-harm considerations.

5. Draft Theory of Change and Resilience Roadmap

Programme-specific, gender-responsive Theory of Change aligned with BMZ-TDA priorities.
Suggested programmatic pathways, target groups, resilience outcomes, and context-specific indicators.
Roadmap outlining actionable, inclusive, and locally grounded strategies for resilience strengthening.

6. Validation Workshop

Facilitation of a participatory workshop with key stakeholders to present draft findings and gather feedback.
Verification of conclusions, stakeholder inputs into the resilience matrix, and refinement of proposed ToC and roadmap.

7. Final Report

Comprehensive, evidence-based report integrating feedback from the validation process.
Structured into clear sections: context, risks, resilience capacities, gender and conflict analysis, gaps, and recommendations.
Executive summary (max. 2 pages) summarizing key findings and strategic insights.
Submitted in English, editable Word format, with annexes including: methodology, data collection tools, stakeholder list, and resilience matrix.

8. Presentation Deck

A concise PowerPoint presentation (max. 15 slides) summarizing key findings, strategic recommendations, and the Theory of Change for internal and partner communication.

Timeline

The consultancy is expected to be completed within 20 working days over a 5-week period. A detailed work plan and timeline will be agreed upon jointly between the consultant and Oxfam at the start of the assignment.

The proposed timeline is structured as follows:

Phase

Duration

Phase

Duration

Contracting and Inception

Week 1

Data Collection

Weeks 2–3

Analysis and Drafting

Week 4

Validation Workshop & Finalization

Week 5

Budget

Applicants should provide a detailed budget, including all relevant costs such as professional fees, transportation, accommodation, communication, and any other necessary expenses. The budget should be in EUR, inclusive of all applicable taxes. All costs must be clearly itemized and justified in the financial offer. The budget should reflect value for money and demonstrate cost-effectiveness.

Required Qualifications

Minimum 7 years of experience in resilience, DRR, or fragility assessments;
Familiarity with the Palestinian political, socio-economic, and climate context;
Expertise in participatory and gender-responsive methodologies;
Strong facilitation and analytical reporting skills;
Fluency in Arabic and English.

Geographic Focus

The analysis will be conducted across ten locations in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the governorates of Ramallah and Al-Bireh, as well as Jericho and the Jordan Valley. These areas have been prioritized due to their heightened exposure to compounded risks and their strategic significance to the TDA programme.

Ethics, Consent, and Safeguarding

The consultant must adhere to Oxfam’s ethical research guidelines, including informed consent, data protection, and the safeguarding of participants. All engagement with right holders must be conducted in a safe, respectful, and inclusive manner. The consultant must also integrate do-no-harm principles in all stages of data collection, analysis, and dissemination, particularly in politically sensitive contexts like East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.

How to apply

Application Process

Interested candidates should submit the following:

A technical proposal outlining their approach, methodology, and timeline.
A financial offer including breakdown of fees, travel, equipment, etc.
Samples of previous work.
CV(s) of the consultant or team members.

The abovementioned documents can be submitted through:

Hand deliver or send by registered post to the following mailing address:
Oxfam OPTI
Or send an electronic copy by email to the following email address:
Procurement.Jerusalem@oxfam.org

5th floor Mikkawi Bldg., Al Masayef – Ramallah

Deadline for submission: July 23th, 2025, at 16:00 Jerusalem time

Contact for submission/inquiries: Procurement.Jerusalem@oxfam.org

Technical and Financial Evaluation

Proposals will be evaluated using a weighted scoring system, where 80% of the score will be allocated to the technical proposal and 20% to the financial proposal.

• The technical evaluation will assess the relevance and clarity of the proposed methodology, understanding of the assignment, alignment with the objectives and deliverables outlined in the ToR, experience and qualifications of the consultant/team, work plan, and overall quality of the submission.
• The financial evaluation will assess the cost-effectiveness, clarity, and realism of the budget in relation to the proposed scope of work and deliverables.

Only proposals that receive a minimum technical score (as defined by Oxfam internally) will have their financial proposal considered.