MESCLA_RFI_Released.pdf

SPECIAL NOTICE: REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI)

Solicitation Number: SOL-522-15-000008

Notice Type: Special Notice – Request for Information (RFI)

Subject: USAID/Honduras

M&E Support for Collaborative Learning & Adapting (MESCLA)

Issuance Date: May 22, 2015

Closing Date: June 8, 2015*

This is a Request for Information (RFI) pursuant to FAR Part 15.201(c), (d) and (f) and FAR

Part 10.002 (b)(2)(iii). The purpose of this RFI is to:

invite comments regarding acquisition strategy (including contract type, terms and conditions, and acquisition planning schedules); feasibility of the requirement

(including performance requirements, statements of work, and data requirements);

recommendations regarding evaluation criteria; the availability of reference documents; and any other concerns or questions; and improve the understanding of Government requirements and industry capabilities, thereby allowing potential offerors to judge whether or how they can satisfy the

Government’s requirements, and enhancing USAID/Honduras’ ability to obtain quality services at reasonable prices.

An additional purpose of this RFI is to increase the efficiency in proposal preparation and evaluation, negotiation, and contract award in the event USAID/Honduras elects to issue a solicitation requesting proposals. However, this is an RFI, not Request for Proposals (RFP), and is not to be construed as a commitment by the U.S. Government to issue any solicitation or ultimately award a contract on the basis of this RFI, nor to pay for any information submitted as a result of this request, nor does it commit the Government to pay for costs incurred in the preparation and submission of any comments. Proprietary information should not be sent. USAID may use any information provided without incurring any obligations.

Submit comments to this RFI to Raphael Metzger, Contracting Officer, USAID/Honduras at oaahonduras@usaid.gov.

Sincerely, Raphael Metzger

Contracting Officer

USAID/Honduras

*Responses to this RFI may be provided after June 8, 2015. However, responses received on or before the June 8 closing date are more likely to receive consideration during mission planning.

mailto:oaahonduras@usaid.gov

M&E Support for Collaborative Learning & Adapting (MESCLA)

DRAFT

SECTION C: STATEMENT OF WORK

C.1 PURPOSE

The USAID/Honduras Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Contract seeks to support achievement of

USAID/Honduras’s Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) Development Objectives by assisting the Mission in planning, designing, conducting, disseminating, and learning from rigorous monitoring and evaluation of USAID/Honduras development activities. This includes designing and implementing both quantitative and qualitative evaluations and assessments, as well as providing expert analysis to improve USAID/Honduras’s projects. The Contract will also support the Mission to measure the effectiveness of its efforts to promote gender equality, support vulnerable populations, reduce migration flows, and prevent violence through its place based strategy for violence prevention.

USAID/Honduras will use the products and deliverables from this contract to:

(a) improve project effectiveness through informed decision-making within the Mission,

(b) enable USAID/Honduras to comply with Agency accountability and M&E requirements,

(c) fill knowledge gaps by identifying new evidence and learning from a variety of sources, including information that comes out of similar work in Central America and beyond,

(d) achieve consistency with respect to how data is obtained, organized, validated, and reported to the

Mission for mission-wide use, and

(e) improve learning and adapting within the Mission and among donors and the Government of

Honduras (GOH).

C.2 BACKGROUND

USAID/Honduras recognizes that it cannot attribute impact to its projects unless performance monitoring and evaluation effectively supports learning. This is both an operational and technical challenge.

Operationally, USAID/Honduras and its implementing partners collect a vast amount of highly relevant data in the course of activity implementation. The methodologies and approaches by which this data is collected may vary from activity to activity. However, achieving consistency with respect to how data is obtained, organized, and reported to the mission for mission-wide use is fundamentally an operational challenge. This is a key management requirement for CDCS implementation necessary to support evaluation and design that reflects learning.

Technically, USAID/Honduras must have the capacity to fill knowledge gaps by identifying new evidence and learning from a variety of sources, including information that comes out of similar work in

Central America and beyond. Improving current data collection and evaluation processes and identifying new approaches will allow USAID/Honduras to prove how our portfolio is directly contributing to improving citizen security and addressing extreme poverty in our target populations.

By improving these core functions, Mission staff will be better equipped to adapt, change, and improve strategy, project design, and implementation, when necessary. As this information is applied and shared http://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1862/Honduras%20CDCS%20Public.pdf throughout the Mission, our staff’s ability to integrate and maximize impact will improve. This Contract would serve as a tool to help the Mission apply a more analytical and strategic approach to management, project design, and activity implementation to increase impact and effectiveness.

C.3 MISSION OVERVIEW

USAID/Honduras recently approved their 2014-2019 CDCS in December 2014 with the two

Development Objectives (DOs): Development Objective 1(DO1): Citizen Security increased for vulnerable populations in urban, high-crime areas and Development Objective 2 (DO2): Extreme poverty sustainably reduced for vulnerable populations in Western Honduras.

Considering the innovative and cutting age nature of interventions in DO1, this Mission seeks to enhance its understanding of dynamics underlying the development hypotheses and provide the data and evidence of what approaches lead or not to improved citizen security. This will be done through impact and pilot evaluations, contextual assessments, and improved data gathering, analysis, and sharing.

To achieve this, USAID/Honduras is requiring implementing partners to collect, organize, and report data in accordance with general specifications consistent with regulatory requirements and agency policy on monitoring, as well as including requirements to coordinate and cooperate in engagements with third-party entities (see below) that may be relied on by the mission to support mission M&E and functions.

This information will allow USAID/Honduras to improve knowledge and learning of DO1 success and challenges as well as focus resources on activities that have the greatest impact in preventing crime.

For DO2, this Contract will provide the data and evidence to understand the benefits of different approaches to achieve the development objective. To achieve this, the Mission will conduct impact evaluations of DO2 activities and contextual assessments. In both DOs the Contract will help us fine-tune target setting to ensure we achieve high-level impact in the expected time period.

The Contract will provide data to ensure USAID/Honduras alignment with the U.S. Strategy for

Engagement with Central American Strategy (CEN strategy) and the Central America-led Alliance for

Prosperity. Both strategies emphasize increasing economic opportunity, reducing crime, and improving governance, which complement the CDCS’s overarching goal and two development objectives. The knowledge gained from the activities conducted by this Project will be shared with other US agencies to support interagency learning and coordination for programming.

Additionally, this Project will help USAID/Honduras develop and answer CDCS initial evaluation questions and other such evaluation questions as they arise during CDCS implementation.

C.4 STATEMENT OF WORK

The primary objective of this contract is to support achievement of the CDCS Development Objectives by assisting the Mission in planning, designing, conducting, dissemination, and learning from high-quality

M&E activities.

The M&E Contract will provide USAID/Honduras with flexible, demand-driven services. These services will include technical, analytic, advisory, training, monitoring, evaluation, and related support services.

These are necessary for performance measurement, planning, monitoring, evaluation, reporting, activity https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/03/16/our-central-american-strategy https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/03/16/our-central-american-strategy mapping, and knowledge management and dissemination activities. These services will assist the Mission in complying with evaluation, monitoring, and project design requirements under USAID Forward and

USAID’s Automated Directives System (ADS) 201 and 203.

Services to be provided under this Contract include M&E technical support to the Mission for performance management at the Goal, DO, Project, and Activity levels; designing and conducting evaluations, assessments, surveys, and studies; strengthening Mission knowledge management; and building USAID/Honduras and its implementing partners’ M&E capacity.

It is critical that the Contractor use flexible and adaptable systems and work plans in case of unanticipated changes. Should new M&E priorities arise during the course of this contract, the Contractor must recognize and adhere to adjustment of tasks in line with the overall M&E Contract Statement of Work

(SOW).

The Contractor must provide the level of expertise specified by the Mission to complete discrete M&E tasks within the development sectors of violence prevention, nutrition and food security, agriculture, environment and natural resource management, migration push factors, education, economic growth, and democracy and governance. For a period of five years, the primary Contractor will ultimately be held responsible for carrying out the various components of this activity as outlined below.

While USAID/Honduras seeks to augment its M&E capacity with this Contract, primary responsibility for monitoring and evaluating USAID activities, ensuring data quality, and applying M&E data to programmatic decision-making, rests with the Mission. The responsibilities of the Program Office, DO

Teams, Agreement/Contracting Officer Representatives (AOR/CORs), and M&E Specialists are not to be delegated to the Contractor. The Contractor will fully support the work of these staff but will not serve as their representative in the field. The Contractor will make recommendations and observations for USAID program improvements primarily to USAID and not to implementing partners. The Contractor will neither replace nor substitute for (1) the contractual obligations of USAID/Honduras implementing partners for their monitoring, or (2) the responsibilities for AOR/CORs, DO Teams, or the Program

Office to carry out their monitoring.

C.5 PROJECT COMPONENTS

The M&E Contract has three major components as outlined below.

Component 1: Evaluation:

1. Design performance and impact evaluations, including identification of evaluation questions, methodology design, baselines and data collection, reporting, and dissemination of findings.

2. Collect additional data to complement performance monitoring data needed to answer evaluations.

3. Provide training for and involve USAID/Honduras staff in the entire evaluation process.

Component 2: Monitoring

1. Provide surge capacity in certain phases of the monitoring process

(i.e. baseline analysis).

2. Strengthen the performance monitoring capacity of

USAID/Honduras implementing partners.

3. Provide training and technical assistance to USAID/Honduras to improve the effectiveness of the Performance Management Plan

(PMP) and Project- and Activity-Level M&E Plans particularly those managed by local organizations and government institutions.

4. Identify and implement an information management solution.

5. Support USAID activities in identifying and documenting unanticipated positive results.

Component 3: Design and conduct analyses, analysis, surveys, studies, and assessments

1. Analyze existing activity-generated data to provide development insights and recommend project redirection if necessary.

2. Conduct surveys, analysis, studies, assessments, and analyses to: a) assist USAID/Honduras decision making; b) test critical assumptions; c) describe changing circumstances that affect project effectiveness; and d) test development hypothesis.

3. Incorporate, self-generated and partner-collected, geo-located data into its analyses and evaluations.

4. Use existing and newly generated data to understand gender, vulnerable populations, and migration dynamics that impact

USAID/Honduras results.

Component 4: Support improved knowledge management, learning, and community within the

Mission and outer stakeholder

1. Strengthen the capacity of USAID/Honduras staff to conduct M&E tasks and use data effectively

2. Conduct and support events and seminars that promote collaboration and learning among USAID, implementing partners, and other stakeholders, including beneficiaries.

3. Organize community of practice events.

4. Support the implementation of standardization of

USAID/Honduras M&E practices, including guidelines and more detailed specifications for standardized reporting formats for other

USAID activities.

5. Ensure that relevant, reliable data reaches the appropriate decision-makers in a timely and user-friendly format;

6. Design and implement processes to document and disseminate information. Using programmatic data, synthesize data to generate information products for a broader audience.

For each of these tasks, the Contractor must work closely with the Program Office and DO Teams, augmenting their M&E capacity but not substituting their overall leadership of M&E processes. In performing these tasks, the Contractor must support the Mission’s efforts to promote cross-DO integration and organizational learning.

The Contractor must also work to complement and avoid duplicating the efforts of existing

USAID/Honduras contractors currently conducting M&E activities (e.g., the Feed the Future local M&E contractor, ongoing evaluation and assessment contractors, USAID/Washington-contracted expert surveyors, etc.).

C.7 PROGRAM MANAGEMENT AND PERSONNEL REQUIREMENTS

C.7.1 MANAGEMENT AND RELATIONSHIPS

Core Office

The Contractor shall establish an office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras to provide necessary support for management and technical assistance activities. This core Monitoring and Evaluation Activity office shall provide all administrative and management support to the Contractor, including implementation of financial and accounting systems for procurement, arranging for and supporting in-country training, processing and hosting of key, short-term consultants, and provision of all travel and support for long-and short-term personnel. The Chief of Party shall provide oversight and supervision of the office and program staff.

Relationships with USAID/Honduras

The Contractor shall be responsible for ensuring achievement of all results, products and reports required under this Statement of Work. The Chief of Party shall be authorized to represent the Contractor in all matters pertaining to the execution of the Statement of Work. The Chief of Party shall serve as the

Contractor Representative in Honduras and will be responsible for the activities of all long and short-term personnel.

The Chief of Party shall receive technical direction from the COR. During the Monitoring and Evaluation

Activity contract management meetings and expanded team meetings, the Contractor shall interface with the relevant officers on coordinating the Contract’s assignment and work implementation issues. The

Contractor shall keep the COR or designee informed about the results of such consultations.

Relationship with Other USAID Implementing Partners

Ensuring that respective USAID activity managers and AOR/CORs are aware of salient communication and reporting relationships, the Contractor shall work collegially with USAID implementing partners

(both international and Honduran) to gather information and provide training and support as needed to achieve the Contract deliverables. The Contractor will likely engage mainly with the approximately 30 prime partners based in Tegucigalpa.

[END OF SECTION C]