Help Age International (www.helpage.org) is the secretariat to the Help Age Global Network, which brings together a wide range of organisations and individuals working to promote the rights and meet the needs of older women and men, nationally and/or internationally.

Purpose of the Learning and Evaluation activity

The purpose of the exercise is to evaluate the effectiveness, sustainability and learnings of the Exit Fund AFFORD Programme in contributing to the development of inclusive, effective and rights-based social protection systems in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania.

Evaluation Objectives

• To assess if the programme was effective in achieving its intended objectives and identify factors that may have contributed to its successes and challenges.
• To assess whether, and to what extent, benefits generated by the programme, and activities initiated, are likely to continue after the end of this programme.
• To document lessons learnt from the programme implementation, successful approaches, key challenges and recommendations for future work on social protection (including shock-responsive social protection) and accountability to older people.

Evaluation Questions

Effectiveness

• To what extent have the expected outputs and outcomes been achieved or are likely to be achieved in relation to programme objectives and its results framework?
• How effective have Older People Associations (OPAs) and Older Citizen Monitoring
• Groups (OPMGs) been in improving accountability/access to social protection/promoting older peoples’ voices? Were they particularly effective in a specific contexts/for particular groups/or vis-à-vis specific social protection systems?
• Were there similarities/variations of performance across countries?
• In which areas (geographic, components, gender, disability and other issues) does the programme have the greatest achievements? Why and what have been the supporting factors?
• How well have resources and inputs (funds, expertise, time, etc.) been allocated or used strategically to achieve the expected results?

Sustainability

• To what extent are the programme interventions likely to be maintained or even scaled-up and replicated by partners and/or other organisations (including government) after major assistance has been completed?
• To what extent did the programme build the capacity of local partners?
• How are OPAs/OPMGs likely to continue working after the completion of the programme?
• To what extent has the programme developed scalable and replicable models that can be used for future programming?
• To what extent are the results of the intervention likely to have a long term, sustainable positive impact on older men and women and their communities?

Qualifications and Experience Required

• Post-graduate degree in Social Sciences, Development Studies, Statistics, Public Engagement, Communication or related fields.
• Strong background and experience in qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis.
• Proven experience in undertaking multi-country programme evaluation/research or leading evaluation/research teams, with outstanding skills in qualitative and quantitative research and data analysis using relevant software such as STATA, CSPro or SPSS.
• Technical expertise in evaluating social protection, social accountability, advocacy and rights programmes, and ability to draw strong and valid conclusions.
• Excellent communication and report-writing skills.
• Ability to travel to the target countries.