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Baseline Study Support to the Civic Space Initiative (September 2024)
Beirut, Lebanon Design Monitoring & Evaluation – Middle East and North Africa / Consultant - International / Hybrid +
About the Project The “Support to the Civic Space” project is a 24-months project with an
overall goal: Empowering diverse civil society actors to contribute to the sustainable and equitable development of their communities.
The overall goal is supported by three Specific Objectives with their corresponding expected outcomes listed below:
Specific Objective 1: To foster
meaningful collaboration between diverse civil society actors to engage with communities and key stakeholders effectively. +
Outcome 1.1: Targeted CSOs have increased organisational and programmatic skills and capacities to develop and implement sensitive and sustainable collaborative actions.
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Outcome 1.2: Targeted CSOs, peace club members, and community stakeholders strategically interact to contribute to sustainable and equitable development.
Specific Objective 2: To foster a
safe and inclusive space for civil society actors, led by women, which contributes to the process of peacebuilding and democratic transformation. +
Outcome 2.1: The civic space initiative (CSI) has increased internal and institutional capacities to operate a secure and safe virtual platform.
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Outcome 2.2: To foster women-led, local, and cross-geographic community dialogue.
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Outcome 2.3: To connect civil society and other donors.
Specific Objective 3: To Monitor the progress of the work of the civil society toward its priorities, including the
Roadmap for Engagement with Civil Society. +
Outcome 3.1: Generation of knowledge contributing to empowering civil society and building consensus among community members.
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Outcome 3.2: Civil society actors gain deeper understanding of the Roadmap and regularly engage in its participatory monitoring process.
Planned activity streams are listed below:
Structured Capacity Building: Capacity assessments will be conducted for 24 CSOs to ensure they possess the knowledge and skills needed for effective community-based interventions. Search will implement a tailored mentoring and coaching program based on these assessments. This program will include institutional coaching sessions to assist CSOs in developing and implementing new operational policies and procedures. Programmatic support will cover areas such as conflict transformation, dialogue facilitation, stakeholder mapping, and gender transformation. Online training sessions will be provided to 60 Peace Club members on conducting conflict assessments, with knowledge transfer to other members. Six conflict analyses will be updated accordingly. Capacity-building sessions for CSI members will cover topics such as member engagement, digital safety, non-violent communication, and digital peacebuilding, alongside management and reporting skills development.
Fostering dialogue: + Community dialogue sessions within target area communities will foster communication and collaboration between CSOs and community stakeholders, enabling them to discuss emerging needs and strategic priorities. These sessions will provide an opportunity for participants to collaboratively identify community needs and entry points for sustainable development, with a focus on women, youth, PWD, and marginalized groups.
+ Cross-geography dialogues through the virtual platform CSI will transcend geographical barriers, promoting cross-learning and collaborative problem-solving among diverse communities. This interconnectedness will build confidence among civil society members.
+ Cross-track dialogues will enhance vertical and horizontal cohesion among civil society members and civic actors. The platform aims to facilitate dialogues across different tracks, including Track II and III, to progressively shift towards more inclusive dialogue and priority alignment spaces.
Small Grant Scheme: To address community needs and enhance stability and social cohesion in their respective areas, target CSOs will be invited to submit programmatic ideas that respond to priorities identified during peace club meetings. These ideas should also integrate outcomes from community dialogue processes. The initiatives proposed should align with project objectives, address identified community needs, demonstrate conflict and gender sensitivity, be relevant to community needs, feasible, promote collaboration among CSO partners, have a significant impact, and be sustainable, inclusive, and innovative. The funding process will be competitive and incentivize collaboration between CSOs. Ultimately, up to 24 CSO-led interventions will receive financial and technical support.
Policy Briefs Development: The facilitators and advisors will lead the writing of the briefs as well as the design of their dissemination strategy. Search will provide technical support in the review of the policy briefs, and will lead the copy editing and graphic design. The papers will notably respond to priorities identified in the Roadmap, and feed into discussions by the project participants. The policy briefs will also seek to document a shared understanding of selected issues and propose sustainable, conflict- and gender-sensitive responses that take into consideration the needs and positions of all groups, including vulnerable groups, such as youth, women, and girls, and people with disabilities (PWD).
Monitoring the Roadmap: Search, the advisors and facilitators will lead an inclusive design exercise to define the overall process, priorities, research questions, and assumptions to conduct a joint baseline and monitoring of the implementation of the Roadmap. The Roadmap tackles the roles civic actors could play in the future, the necessity to build their capacities and ensure their sustainability, ways to overcome the major challenges they face, and sets out what the donor can do to support these processes. In alignment with the validated process, the advisors will lead a participatory baseline study, with the support of Search and the facilitators. + The Terms of Reference for conducting the baseline study for the "Support to the Civic Space" led by Search for Common Ground (Search). The study aims to collect initial metrics which can be later used to measure the initiative's impact against its objectives in a final evaluation, focusing on empowering civil society amidst the country's complex challenges for the 24-month-long initiative. The baseline study will employ strict and well-informed conflict sensitivity. This baseline study will establish data-informed practices that will be integral to programmatic decision-making and later assess the program’s relevance, effectiveness, and sustainability.
Specific priorities of the study may be subject to change following changes in the context, in discussion with the chosen consultant/expert.
The key findings of the baseline study will: + To set this project up for maximal success, this baseline study will:
+ Validate the relevance of existing project indicators and set baseline values for the project’s monitoring and evaluation expectations.
+ Assess the relevance and inform necessary adaptations to the project's objectives and overall ToC.
+ Identify and assess the selected project stakeholders, including CSOs’, committee members, and platform facilitators’ capacities.
+ Establish a reference to measure the impact of the project and track its progress over time by collecting data for project indicators and providing benchmark information for measuring project outcomes based on the project log frame. More specifically, it will:
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4.1 Assess the collaboration, organizational, and programmatic skills of targeted CSOs, including their strategies for community and stakeholder engagement. This entails mapping partnersh
