External Review of DFID Malawi’s Private Sector Development Programme

Contract For: External Review of DFID Malawi’s Private Sector Development Programme
Purchase Order Number: PO 6961

Objective:

This consultancy has three purposes - Ensuring Accountability, Continuous Learning and Assessment of Systemic Change.

First is to help DFID Malawi meet its accountability requirements by objectively and independently validating, triangulating and providing assurances on the results reported by the different implementing agencies for their respective components. The reviewer will assess progress made against project outputs and how this is contributing to the overall project outcome and impact. The ER will do this by being actively and iteratively involved in providing core findings that can feed into DFID Malawi’s Annual Review and Project Completion processes and identifying key achievements, challenges and lessons throughout the lifetime of the programme. The ER will be crucial in providing an objective assessment of the status of the PSD programme and its components during regular intervals and advise the DFID’s Growth and Resilience Team accordingly with practical recommendations. Under the accountability purpose, the reviewer will help answer questions related to what results have been achieved through the Private Sector Development programme, and look at the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, coverage and equity of delivery.

Second is to help strengthen continuous learning across the programme by helping to synthesize key lessons and findings from individual components and feed these back to implementing agencies and DFID Malawi through specially convened workshops organized by DFID Malawi. Under the learning purpose, the reviewer will help answer questions related to challenges and lessons being learnt from the programme looking at what works, what does not, why, for whom and under what conditions and contexts. This will help DFID staff and implementing agencies to incorporate learning into programmes throughout the lifespan of the review.

Third is to provide an ex-post assessment of systemic change being achieved by examining the effects of the different individual components 2 years after their completion. Given the limited resources available for this review, it is expected that through annual engagement with the PSD programme, the reviewer will have established sufficient networks and contacts to assess systemic change by building on existing data collection and monitoring systems even after implementing agencies stop implementing their relevant programmes. The ER will have to demonstrate how they will conduct an ex-post assessment with the inputs available in their tender submission and developed further in the inception report. Under this purpose, the reviewer will help answer questions related to the longer-term impacts and sustainability of the different PSD programme interventions.