Terms of reference for Evaluation of the Women In Business Initiative

Project timeline: 2022 - 2023

August 2023

Norrsken Rwanda Ltd

1. BACKGROUND

In 2022, the Swedish International Development Cooperation (Sida) through the Embassy of Sweden in Kigali and Norrsken East Africa partnered to support tech-enabled women entrepreneurs in Rwanda through ‘Women in Business Initiative’.

The overall objective of the Project is to explore effective methods for encouraging and supporting women entrepreneurs in Rwanda. This overall objective was expected to be achieved through the following objectives.

• Test and design an effective approach to creating an ecosystem that would support women entrepreneurs in Rwanda
• Reach a high understanding of specific constraints that women entrepreneurs face, and the type of support services that they need to grow and accelerate their business.
• Pilot service offerings, events, activities, and programs for women entrepreneurs and women-led startups
• Identify and/or help create regional women role models in the entrepreneurship ecosystem

NORRSKEN RWANDA

Norrsken Rwanda is registered in Rwanda and is 100% owned by Stiftelsen Norrsken Foundation. Stiftelsen Norrsken Foundation is a non-profit organisation founded in 2016 in Stockholm Sweden, with the aim of establishing an enabling environment for impact entrepreneurs to solve some of the world's pressing challenges. The foundation runs Europe's biggest co-working space and impact entrepreneur’s hub in Stockholm, Sweden. The foundation opened Norrsken Kigali house in December 2021 and the hub which currently hosts 1000+ entrepreneurs is expected to reach at least 1200 entrepreneurs by the end of 2023.

Norrsken Kigali House aims to become one of Africa’s biggest hubs for entrepreneurship & innovation. The House aims is to accelerate sustainable and inclusive socio-economic growth for East Africa, by enabling entrepreneurs to grow scalable businesses. Successful entrepreneurs have the potential to become societal role models and have a direct impact on the region by creating local employment, helping to adapt new tech locally, contributing to the region’s tax base and public services, and attracting more talent and capital to the ecosystem.

The Kigali House also aims to become a ‘hub of hubs’ that brings together innovation, health, education, and technology. In other words, the House will work closely with leading companies and organizations, to facilitate a supportive infrastructure of resources and advisory services for the entrepreneurs to tap into, to further improve their likelihood of success.

2. Objective and Scope of the Evaluation

The Project has been implemented for the period 2022-08-12 - 2023-08-31. This end of project evaluation focuses on the entire implementation period.

Similar Jobs in Rwanda
Learn more about Norrsken Rwanda Ltd
Norrsken Rwanda Ltd jobs in Rwanda

The purpose of the final evaluation is to provide an independent assessment of the results achieved and contribute to learning by understanding cause-effect relationships and what factors made possible or created obstacles to the achievement of these results. The evaluation should contribute with key evidence-based lessons and actionable recommendations to improve future interventions.

The evaluation should effectively capture lessons learnt and provide information on the nature, extent and where possible, the potential impact and sustainability of the Women in Business Initiative.

The evaluation must also assess the project design, scope, implementation status and the institutional capacity to achieve the project predetermined objectives. It will collate and analyze lessons learnt, challenges faced, and best practices obtained during implementation.

The emphasis on learning lessons speaks to the issue of understanding what has and what has not worked as a guide for future planning. It will assess the performance of the project against planned results.

The evaluation will assess the preliminary indications of potential impact and sustainability of results including the contribution to the women’s business development and achievements. The results of the evaluation will draw lessons that will inform the key users of this evaluation for informed future interventions.

3. Evaluation approach and methodology.

The evaluation must follow the OECD/DAC (2002) evaluation criteria. The components of the criteria that will be adapted include, relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability as discussed below.

• Relevance: under this criterion, the evaluation should assess if the intervention right things, if the intervention’s objectives and design respond to the beneficiaries’ needs and priorities or if the stakeholders view the intervention as useful and valuable
• Effectiveness: this will analyze the extent to which the project achieved its objectives. Within the Evaluation, effectiveness analysis will determine progress made towards indicators, targets and outcomes set at project inception. The evaluation should also identify possible unintended effects the intervention might have had.
• Efficiency: the evaluation will assess whether activities of the project were implemented in a cost-efficient manner. Can the costs of the project be justified by its results? The evaluation will also assess to what extend the results were achieved within the intended timeframe.
• Impact: This criterion will document positive, negative, short, medium- and long-term changes attributed to the project directly or indirectly, intended or unintended. The evaluation will address the following questions: What has happened as a result of the project? What real difference has the activities and results made to the beneficiaries?
• Sustainability: here the evaluation should examine how the benefits from the intervention will last, the evaluation should give an insight on how these benefits will continue or likely to continue.

Besides the OECD/DAC evaluation criteria, the evaluation will also consider the following criteria in undertaking this evaluation. Some of the criteria are cross-cutting in the criteria above, i.e, gender equality and inclusion.

• Gender equality and Inclusion – since this was a women-targeted project, the evaluation must adopt a gender sensitive assess if the needs of the women entrepreneurs were both well incorporated in the design of the intervention and during its implementation. The evaluation should also identify how the gender related issues were dealt with and should give recommendations on how this can be further strengthened in related future interventions.
• Theory of Change Framework - the intervention theory of change or results framework must be the point of departure for this evaluation in analysing the intervention design, interpretation of findings, and making recommendations.
• Monitoring, Review and Evaluation (MRE) – the evaluation should examine to what extent has MRE delivered robust and useful information that can be used to assess progress towards outcomes and contribute to learning? to what extent has Women in Business Initiative used performance information to improve the project delivery? What M&E tools and accountability mechanisms are effective?

4. Deliverables of the Evaluation

The evaluation must deliver.

1. An evaluation report clearly capturing what is discussed under both item 2&3. The evaluation must have a list of annexes not only including, a) Data collection toolkit including the list of interviews/KIIs/FGDs conducted, b) Evaluation Matrix, c) updated results framework & indicators (where necessary, e) ToRs of the evaluation

2. The recommendations from this evaluation should be compiled into a 3-Pager Concept Note for a 1-Year extension to this intervention. (The structure of the concept note should be part of the submitted technical proposal & final structure will be discussed in the inception meeting).

5. Expression of interest

Any interested firm or candidate must submit their consolidated proposal to Phionah Ingabire – phionah@norrskenfoundation.org. The proposal must include;

1. Technical proposal should include the following.
   1. Proposed timeline (refer to proposed schedule below)
   2. Detailed proposed survey methodology and sampling frame logic, including types of data collection tools and data collection activities
   3. Participants targeting approach & Data collection procedures.
   4. Organization and Composition of consultancy team (if any) with CVs
   5. Evidence of experience and similar/relevant work completed.
   6. Data management, analysis, and reporting (Cleaning, analysis, and reporting)
2. The financial proposal should include all costs related to this assignment broken down into expert fees, reimbursables (if any) and all legible taxes. The expert fees must be costed on a daily basis.

6. Timeline and duration of the evaluation

The Evaluation work is expected to be conducted within a maximum of 10 days; key dates and timelines are indicated in the table below.

7. Candidate qualifications and professional experience

• Advanced degree (Masters or PhD) in Entrepreneurship, Project Management, economics, statistics, or any other relevant discipline.
• At least 7 years of professional experience in development programs evaluation, sustainable development, impact assessment or socio-economic research.
• Evaluation experience evaluating at least 5 programs of similar scope and complexity. Having worked with women-targeted projects will be an added value.
• Extensive experience in applying, qualitative and quantitative research methodologies including participatory approaches (mixed methods).
• Extensive knowledge and experience in the design, implementing and evaluating programs within the relevant thematic focus including market-development, Product Development, enterprise development, skills development.
• Excellent research skills both for qualitative and quantitative research purposes
• Good knowledge of Rwanda’s innovation and entrepreneurship space.