Operation Support Coordinator

Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) helps deliver a climate-smart African future driven by science and innovation in agriculture.

AICCRA works to make climate information services and climate-smart agriculture more accessible to millions of smallholder farmers across Africa. With better access to technology and advisory services linked to information about effective response measures farmers can better anticipate climate-related events to take preventative action that helps their communities safeguard livelihoods and the environment. AICCRA has teams in six countries: Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Zambia. These teams collaborate with four AICCRA themes - Knowledge, Partnerships, Innovation and Gender and social inclusion. While these teams focus on accelerating impact in AICCRA focus countries, AICCRA also has several regional initiatives that complement national activities to deliver benefits for a broader range of stakeholders across East, West and Southern Africa.

AICCRA is supported by a grant from the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank, which is used to enhance research and capacity-building activities of CGIAR centers and initiatives and their African partners. The IDA grant to AICCRA fulfils the World Bank s commitment at the 2019 United Nations Climate Summit to increase its support to the CGIAR, a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security. The grant aligns to the ambitions of The Africa Food Security Leadership Dialogue (AFSLD), an initiative led by the African Union Commission (AUC) to address Africa s worsening food security crisis under climate change. AFSLD is supported by The African Development Bank (AfDB), The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and World Bank. AFSLD recently called for joint action against hunger in the face of climate change, at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has further increased the vulnerability of millions of households. And AICCRA is the World Bank s answer to that call.[1]

Requirements

Objectives

This document describes the need and call for an external consultancy to support the design and implementation of an impact evaluation of the three-year AICCRA project.

Timeframe

There is a desire that the external consultant(s) engage at two points with the team i) in form of a light touch already earlier starting from Q2, 2023 to start and help with the design early on to ensure that we can work on (right) evidence collection towards the impact evaluation questions during the lifetime of the project and ii) towards the end of the project when the consultant(s) conduct the evaluation. The final evaluation report needs to be available in Q2, 2024. The impact evaluation results can be used for future programming by the project teams and partners including funding partner(s).

Budget

The total available maximum budget for this impact evaluation consultancy, including expenses for required travel, is USD 100.000. There could be the following payment tranches for example 10% upon signature of the contract, 30% upon submission and agreement of the design of the impact evaluation, 30% upon submission of preliminary findings, and 30% upon submission and approval of the final report.

Description of Task

The consultant would need to take the lead in the following building blocks with the understanding that these are indicative and if the consultant is proposing a better option the leadership team and funders are open to evaluate, learn and adapt alternative propositions. We also expect the consultant to work in close collaboration with the AICCRA team. You will be given additional information and access to project documentation.

Benefits

If you are interested and would like to submit your Expression of Interest, please send a short letter of motivation why you would like to take on this consultancy and with what ideas to make this an added value to the AICCRA project and its Monitoring and Evaluation Framework to .