Foreign economic-aid-related services

Tender description

DFID's aim, through this programme is to deliver new, operationally-relevant evidence on understanding how natural disasters impact on basic services in developing countries, and the best response to it, that supports more evidence based — and therefore effective — development initiatives by DFID and its partners in a range of DFID priority countries. The new research should build a body of evidence and directly identify operational solutions that are then taken up in programmes. The recipients of this service will be DFID. DFID intends to award a contract for an initial term of 60 months with a maximum budget of 14 800 000 GBP (inclusive of VAT and all applicable governement taxes). DFID may extend the duration up to an additional 30 months with a maximum total contract value of 22 000 000 GBP (inclusive of VAT and all applicable taxes). DFID will contract one supplier, or lead consortium member, who will be responsible for delivering the contract. The contract will consist of 2 phases: — Phase 1 wil be a 6 month period, — Phase 2 will be expected to begin immediately upon satisfactory completion of Phase 1 and will last for 54 months. The supplier will be directly responsible for the delivery of the 3 main programme components: 1) What works to deliver essential services that respond and flex in response to natural disasters? The supplier will be charged with designing a tailored and adaptive research programme that works closely with DFID country offices and DFID funded programming, to identify how shocks impact on essential services in developing countries; the extent to which essential services can flex and respond as a system rather than independent parts; and how best essential services can prepare and respond to shocks. 2) Integrating learning back into programmes and systems in DFID focal countries This component will support country offices that participate in the research to access short term specialist technical expertise on a call down basis to help them to integrate research findings into ongoing programme design in order to strengthen the response to shocks. The supplier will be responsible for sourcing appropriate expertise on a call down basis to provide support to selected focal countries to take the evidence from the research and feed it back into programme development. 3) Promoting research uptake across DFID and the international community. This component will be achieved through the development of a research uptake strategy, dissemination of robust research outputs, and lesson learning events which will share the emerging lessons with DFID offices, policy teams and other relevant stakeholders. A key element of this will be establishing partnerships early on with potential early up takers of the findings e.g. other actors (such as the World Bank, the EU and the UN), DFID implementing partners or key focus country government departments.