Evaluation consultancy services

Description

The TradeMark East Africa (TMEA) programme aims to improve trade competitiveness in East Africa by reducing transport time/costs and improving the trade environment. It targets an increase in trade of 10 % (above trend) by 2016, contributing to sustained economic growth and poverty reduction. TMEA was designed by DFID and officially launched in 2010/11 as a specialist not-for-profit agency to promote trade growth in East Africa. TMEA is currently funded by the UK, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden and USA. TMEA's secured budget to date totals about 330 000 000 GBP ($540m). The first phase runs until June 2016 with the possibility of a new programming phase beyond that. This is a large, high-profile programme in an area of great interest for continued development work, which calls for a robust and independent evaluation. DFID is commissioning this key evaluation as acting Evaluation Manager on behalf of all TMEA donors. The evaluation has 2 purposes: (i) to identify and feed lessons learnt into the management of the remainder of the current programme and the design of any potential continuation of the TMEA programme and/or future regional trade integration programmes (driver: improving trade development programmes and enhancing the global evidence basis); and (ii) to account for progress at outcome and impact level in an internationally recognised independent and impartial manner (driver: oversight and accountability requirements). The core objectives of the evaluation are: —Test the Theory of Change (TOC), assessing all causal links and the robustness of underlying assumptions (including links between trade, growth and poverty reduction), and adjusting the TOC to serve as a reliable guide to interpret the programme and to make programme improvements. — Analyse and, to the extent possible measure: The regional integration programmes' impact on regional trade, growth and poverty (and on the various stakeholders, in particular on men and women separately, poor and vulnerable groups, as well as traders and consumers); and sustainability. — Assess the effectiveness of the TMEA programme, including organisational effectiveness, and whether the programme represents Value For Money. —Throughout, identify lessons learnt relevant beyond TMEA, i.e. insights on enabling and constraining factors, critical actions and gaps which would be generalizable to future programmes or to other contexts.