Evaluation of Transparency, Responsiveness, Accountability and Citizen Engagement (TRACE) Fund for Zimbabwe

The DFID Zimbabwe country office is seeking a Monitoring and Evaluation partner (either consortium or company) to work alongside our Service Provider in the design and delivery of the Transparency, Responsiveness and Citizen Engagement (TRACE) Programme. The overall aim of the TRACE programme is to empower citizens to hold the Zimbabwean state to account for its use of resources and its respect for human rights and democratic principles, through the provision of financial and technical support to Civil Society. TRACE will be co-funded by Australia and Denmark. The main purpose of the M&E partner is to (i) ensure M&E is prioritised within the TRACE programme (ii) work with the TRACE Service Provider to jointly agree and develop M&E baselines, milestones and results and ensuring M&E frameworks are technically sound (iii) provide a level of independent scrutiny ensuring there is a degree of contestability on results from the programme’s M&E systems (iv) work with the TRACE steering committee to identify evaluation questions that help further the evidence base for supporting civil society working in authoritarian contexts and in particular testing assumptions linking outputs to outcomes/ impact (v) in coordination with the TRACE service provider, help to identify and strengthen M&E capacity weaknesses and actively support CSOs to establish robust M&E systems that assess performance throughout the project cycle (vi) play an active role in annual reviews of TRACE (vii) lead on taking forward independent mid-term and end of programme evaluations and (viii) build the capacity of CSO partners to use performance information to ‘think and work politically’ and adapt their programs to suit the political context.