Ethiopia Resilience Measurement Consultant

Background

LINC is a mission-driven small business headquartered in Washington, DC, dedicated to strengthening local actors and systems. At LINC, we believe that a practical approach to engaging committed, capable local actors increases international development effectiveness and sustainability. The recipient of USAID’s “Small Business of the Year” award in 2017, we are a team of reflective practitioners, passionate and energetic in our work, and committed to locally-led development. We have developed ground-breaking tools to map organizational networks, measure social capital, and leverage systems-based approaches to development. We partner with major universities, foundations, local NGOs and consulting firms, USAID, and FCDO among others. Our country experience spans Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. For more information on LINC, please visit www.linclocal.org.

In Ethiopia, LINC is implementing the new five-year, USAID-funded Resilience Learning Activity (RLA). The activity supports USAID and its resilience partners with learning, collaboration, and research around resilience issues in Ethiopia. RLA serves as a “learning sidecar” to USAID/Ethiopia and its implementing partners, helping them to better understand what relief and development interventions can help make households, communities, and systems more resilient to increasingly persistent shocks and stresses. RLA provides support with learning processes and frameworks, development and consolidation of learning and research agendas, and support to resilience partners for adaptive management, results measurement, and the increased integration of systems thinking and rapid feedback into their respective toolboxes.

Position Description

The Resilience Learning Activity (RLA) requires an international expert in resilience measurement to support the elaboration of a resilience measurement framework over the course of several months in 2024. The jumping off point for this consultancy is the recently elaborated Resilience Learning Agenda, developed by RLA as the product of extensive consultations with USAID staff and more than 20 resilience implementing partners. We are hopeful that this measurement framework will be of utility to our implementing partner network, and provide RLA and USAID Ethiopia with more consistency in measurement and a pathway to “aggregate-up” the impact of its resilience investments. The successful candidate should have a rich background in both resilience subject matter and monitoring, evaluation, and analytics. Further, the candidate should have in-depth familiarity with USAID’s methods and approaches to resilience measurement and materials produced by the “Resilience Evaluation Analysis and Learning” (REAL) mechanism.

The consultancy is expected to extend over several months in the first half of 2024, and include remote work and travel to Addis Ababa.

Activities and Tasks

• Review relevant materials, work and issues encountered to date.

• Lead consultations with partners and develop an inventory of both resilience conceptual frameworks and measurement methods utilized by partners.

• Build-out a conceptual framework for resilience measurement based upon the initial framework advanced in the already-finalized Resilience Learning Agenda.

• Conduct consultations and validation exercises with USAID and resilience partners to ensure the coherence and applicability of the conceptual framework to USAID and partners needs and best practices.

• Refine the inventory of measurement methods to directly align with the RLA Learning Agenda and conceptual framework elaborated.

• Develop and author a “Resilience Measurement Framework” providing a menu of measurement methods that can be utilized by partners to answer specific learning questions and advance the conceptual framework. The playbook should be targeted to resilience partners, providing them with a roadmap and flexible options for resilience measurement that will “stack-up” across multiple partners and into the mission.

• Support staff to operationalize the playbook, working with partners to collect appropriate data and aggregate-up. This may include a pilot in the Somali region, where USAID partners are working to support the regional government’s Multi-Year Resilience Strategy.Work with RLA technical and analytics staff to develop a dashboard of attributes and indicators and a data management system to track them across multiple partners.

• Support RLA efforts to socialize the framework across the resilience partners, including presentations as needed.

Deliverables

• Resilience Measurement Inventory Report (January 2024)

• Conceptual Framework for Resilience Measurement

• Resilience Measurement Playbook (May 2024)

• Data management and visualization platforms built and staff trained on processes.

• Develop a presentation on the framework and playbook for USAID and resilience partners.

• Develop a Learning Brief on the process and method undertaken as a culminating work product.