Evaluation consultancy services

Tender description

The British Council is seeking a contractor to conduct an evaluation of DICE. The purpose of the evaluation is to learn lessons from the programme to strengthen and improve its implementation and the design, and to inform its potential future development. The British Council launched an ambitious, 2-year pilot programme, Developing inclusive and creative economies (DICE), in March 2018. A 7 500 000 GBP programme, DICE seeks to promote sustainable and inclusive development by stimulating and strengthening the social and creative enterprise ecosystems in 5 emerging economies: Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and South Africa — in partnership with the UK. The global DICE team works purposefully and collaboratively across silos, systems, sectors, organisations, generations and borders to deliver global and in-country initiatives at 3 levels of the economy – systemic, institutional and individual. The British Council is seeking a contractor to conduct an evaluation of DICE. The purpose of the evaluation is to learn lessons from the programme to strengthen and improve its implementation and the design, and to inform its potential future development. To do this, the evaluators are expected to collect evidence to test the hypotheses behind DICE’s theory of change, the causal pathways of the programme intervention, and the ‘space’ in which the programme exists. Through this, the evaluation will explore the ‘proof of concept’ of the programme. The primary target audiences for the evaluation are within the British Council both centrally (UK) and in offices globally, including the 5 DICE countries. In addition, the results of the evaluation will be shared with a number of secondary audiences including UK government departments, funders/donors and partners; and with those that received grants from the DICE Fund. More generally aspects of the evaluation will likely be relevant to share with the UK general public about the work of the British Council through the Council’s wider communications strategy. Given the DICE team’s agile planning approach (Values, Section 1.6) and by nature of it being a pilot programme, we are seeking an evaluation that is developmental and supportive in approach. As a result, it is not expected that the evaluation will have traditional baseline, mid-term and end-term elements. Rather, it is expected that the evaluation will be ongoing in nature over the life of the programme (i.e. to March 2020) and should be designed and implemented in such a way to allow continued evaluation beyond that time should there be a successor or follow-on programme.