Consultancy: Call for Expressions of Interest Endline Evaluation Giving for Change Programme

About Giving for Change

Giving for Change (GfC) is a five-year, €24.2 million programme, which sets out a bold vision for transforming how “development is done” by focusing specifically on the recognition and importance of domestic resources in increasing local ownership, unlocking agency and strengthening communities’ ability to express and claim their rights from other stakeholders, including governments and international development institutions. The programme (which runs until the end of 2025) aims to advance the theory and practice of community philanthropy as a development strategy. Community philanthropy, which itself is an emergent body of work, is based on the premise that all communities have their own assets (money, skills, knowledge, networks, etc.) and that when these are pooled together, they build community power and voice and enable people to become co-investors in their own development. By drawing learning from current theory and practice, supporting and piloting new and emerging models of community philanthropy, and contributing to an enabling environment, GfC seeks to foster the conditions in which public participation, collective action and the expression of rights can thrive. The issue of power is central to the programme: in addition to an explicit focus on strengthening communities’ abilities to claim rights and entitlements from public government structures, GfC also seeks to overcome power dynamics and establish more equitable practices within the international development system itself.

GfC is funded under the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MFA) Strengthening Civil Society policy framework. Activities are structured around three domains.

• Central domain objective: To unlock the collective power of local communities, represented by Civil Society Actors, to express their opinion through community philanthropy.
• Domain 2 objective: To influence in-country national state and societal actors to support community philanthropy and domestic philanthropic giving.
• Domain 3 objective: To challenge and change the existing practices of international development donors.

The programme’s Theory of Change can be found here.

The GfC alliance comprises anchor partners from eight countries, and four consortium partners working at the international level, each of which shares the vision of community-led development through community and domestic philanthropy.

The alliance members are:

National anchor institutions:

• Brazil: Comuá Network and Coordenadoria Ecumênica de Serviço (CESE)
• Burkina Faso: Association Burkinabé de Fundraising (ABF)
• Ghana: STAR Ghana and West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI)
• Ethiopia: Development Expertise Center (DEC)
• Kenya: Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF), also a consortium member
• Mozambique: Fundação Micaia
• Palestine: Dalia Association
• Uganda: Uganda National NGO Forum (UNNGOF)

International consortium members:

• Africa Philanthropy Network (APN)
• Global Fund for Community Foundations
• Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF)
• Wilde Ganzen Foundation

The Giving for Change Endline Evaluation

The GfC alliance is looking for a team of experienced independent consultants to evaluate the Giving for Change programme’s outcomes and to document the programme’s lessons learned.

The evaluation will cover the period from January 2021 to September 2025.

Evaluation Objectives

The evaluation has three main objectives:

1. To enable the GfC alliance to learn about its successes, overall programme achievements, challenges and practices;

2. To provide strategic and programmatic recommendations related to community philanthropy for the GfC alliance and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for future programming and internal use;

3. To meet the accountability requirements of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Evaluation Questions

Overarching question: Based on evidence of the GfC programme’s outcomes and challenges, how can community philanthropy as a development practice be supported to thrive and to contribute to communities taking control of their own development and to larger efforts to reform and transform development aid?

Criteria: Effectiveness

What were the programme’s main (intended and unintended) outcomes, including emergent outcomes?

Did programme strategies/actions contribute to desirable outcomes? How? Which strategies/actions were more/less effective in different contexts?

To what extent and how were the programme’s strategies for influencing governments, donors, INGOs and power holders to adopt laws and policies that enable domestic philanthropic giving and respect human rights effective? What approaches were pursued, how did the programme respond to what was learned, and what alternative strategies were adopted?

Criteria: Coherence

To what extent were the different levels (local, national, regional and global) and the programme’s approaches, strategies, domains and activities connected? How did they contribute to one another (avoiding duplication or contradictions)?

To what extent was there alignment and complementarity among actors (within the alliance, between the alliance and the MFA and with other relevant stakeholders)? How was collaboration achieved? What collaborative approaches worked best?

Criteria: Sustainability

How are the different components and outcomes of the programme and partnerships likely to be sustained after the programme? What factors influence the long-term viability of the programme?

Criteria: Relevance

Given changes in the global political landscape since the start of the programme, including in regard to international development aid and roll back on human rights globally, how has the Dutch MOFA’s investment in the GfC programme and its focus on community philanthropy and on driving systems change from the bottom up contributed to the new / changed reality? How has the project influenced the mindsets/behaviors of key actors in relation to community philanthropy?

Criteria: Localisation/Southern Leadership

To what extent has the programme facilitated local decision-making and community leadership and in what ways? What approaches have enabled this and what have the blockages been? What learnings can be derived from the programme regarding efforts to advance local decision-making and community leadership?

Please note: The evaluation questions above have been articulated in a way to keep them overarching and general, and applicable to the entire programme. During the inception phase, the evaluation consultants are expected to further unpack, contextualise and refine these questions through a participatory process they will facilitate with Giving for Change consortium members and National Anchors Institutions.

Available project data: Project documentation and data will be made available to the evaluation team. We expect that the evaluation will include analysis of available project documentation and data. It is not necessary to rely solely on primary (new) data collection.

Approach and Methodology

The evaluation will be focused on learning and accountability towards the communities and local civil society groups the programme was set up to support. The evaluation should be carried out in line with feminist principles. It must also adhere to the guidelines for evaluations of the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department of the Dutch MFA (IOB). The GfC alliance recognises that there are challenges to balancing a participatory, locally accountable and feminist approach with the IOB criteria. We seek a skilled and creative evaluation team which is able to balance the compliance and learning components of the evaluation, embracing and promoting ways of working towards an emergent system (of global solidarity and development cooperation) while also complying with the needs of the existing dominant, and donor-driven aid/development system.

The Giving for Change Endline Evaluation Steering Committee envisages working with a team of consultants who are able to evaluate the programme as a whole. We envisage that the team would have experience and capacity to carry out the evaluation both at the global/systems change level, as well as the national level in the GfC countries. At the same time, given the broad scope of the programme, it will be necessary to focus on key areas which are illustrative of the programme (as opposed to evaluating all components of the programme in all eight countries). We are keen to hear from potential evaluation teams how they would address this challenge and achieve a balance between breadth and depth for the evaluation.

We encourage the use of methodologies which are 1) participatory, 2) centre community needs and perspectives, and 3) use power analysis. This is important to ensure that the evaluation is not exploitative and encompasses the views and address the needs of marginalised groups. Indeed, participatory methods should remove barriers that prevent women, LGBTQI+ persons and other marginalised groups from participating (such as language, educational attainment, ethnic affiliation/religion, cultural values, gender stereotypes or financial barriers).

Timeframe, deliverables and budget

The timeframe for the evaluation is April 2025 to March 2026.

Deliverables will include an inception report and a final report. Additional deliverables may be agreed by the consultant and the Endline Evaluation Steering Committee during inception.

The overall budget for the evaluation is 60,000 EUR (inclusive of all taxes).

Selection Criteria

Experience of:

• Working towards emergent systems and the #ShiftThePower movement
• Evaluating initiatives and theories of change for systems change (including how change happens in emergent systems vs dominant systems)
• Participatory monitoring, evaluation and learning practices which support participation, local accountability and power sharing, take into consideration diverse social groups (and celebrate diversity), facilitate collective learning and emphasise care and wellbeing
• Exposure to and experience in the countries of the Giving for Change programme

Skills:

• Awareness of or interest in the potential for community philanthropy as a strategy for driving locally-led development and of the #ShiftThePower movement more broadly
• Adaptability and openness to learn, to try different approaches, test them and adapt as needed
• Well versed in sense-making processes that foster understanding of complex systems in which many factors are involved
• Proficiency in quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection and analysis
• Ability to bring a creative and developmental approach to the evaluation
• Strong interpersonal skills and an ability to create trusting relationships with programme participants and to help facilitate discussions around and across issues of power and partnership
• Technical ability to analyse data in a way that is clear and helpful to developing recommendations for future partnerships and systems change work
• Excellent report writing skills, including conveying different viewpoints in a coherent way, and proven ability to form concise, actionable recommendations

Languages:

• Fluency in written and spoken English (deliverables will be in English)
• Portuguese, French and/or Arabic language skills (minimum two of these three languages)
• Local languages of GfC countries an advantage (eg. Swahili, Amharic, Mooré)

We also seek a balanced team composition, taking into account age, gender and cultural diversity, and relevant inclusion of national (in-country) junior and senior consultants.