Consultancy for the review and improvement of key aspects of the BRCiS Community-Based Early Warning Early Action System

Background

Since its inception in 1992, Concern has operated in Somalia/Somaliland, where it has recently carried out a variety of emergency response, resilience and development interventions. Concern currently operates in 6 of the country’s 18 regions, including Banadir (Mogadishu), Bay, Gedo, Lower Shabelle, Awdal and Maroodi-Jeex (Gabiley), Togdheer in Somaliland. Concern works in resilience and durable solution programming, education, nutrition, social protection, livelihoods and environment, WASH and construction and emergency response. Concern is a member of a number of consortiums and leads the Somali Cash Consortium (SCC) and NEGAAD Durable Solutions programme. Concern has long-term partnerships with a number of local NGOs working in different sectors and contexts.

Concern is a member of the Building Resilient Communities in Somalia (BRCiS) consortium. BRCiS is a consortium of national and international organizations – Action Against Hunger (ACF), CESVI, Concern Worldwide (CWW), GREDO, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), KAALO, Save the Children, and Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) as lead agency. BRCiS’ objective is to work across the humanitarian-development divide, supporting marginalized communities in disaster-prone, rural Somalia to become more resilient to shocks and stressed, including as a result of climate change. BRCiS approach is contextually adaptive, focused on the specific shocks, needs, and priorities of individual communities. BRCiS was established in 2013 and is now implementing projects funded by multiple humanitarian and development donors in more than ten regions of Somalia.

BRCiS Resilience Programming in Somalia and Early Warning Early Action

The humanitarian situation in Somalia is complex, longstanding and dynamic with development indicators being among the worst in the world. In 2011-2012, Somalia experienced severe food insecurity and famine with at its peak more than 4 million people in need of urgent humanitarian assistance and where more than 258,000 people died. Again in 2017, after multiple below average rainy seasons, Somalia was at credible risk of famine, which was diverted through quick decision making and support through resilience programming. In 2022 after several seasonal rain failures Somalia was again under the threat of famine. In both 2017 and 2022 a number of factors contributed to the country not facing the same consequences as in 2011 including increased influence of social networks between urban and rural and the diaspora even amongst marginalised groups, the presence of early warning systems and the focus of donor agencies not to let it happen again, increased access in non-government controlled areas, the use of cash and decentralisation of the response amongst others. In sum the international response has improved but so importantly have the capacities of Somalis to respond to crisis and this needs to be understood and supported.

BRCiS Consortium is implementing BRCiS III, a five-year resilience project funded by FCDO, in more than twenty districts in South and Central Somalia. The long-term objective of BRCiS III project is to contribute to reduced severity of humanitarian needs and displacement in Somalia by supporting marginalized communities in disaster-prone, rural Somalia to have sufficient social, financial, and environmental assets to better cope with shocks and stresses and adapt to the effects of climate change. To achieve this outcome, BRCiS will implement a series of layered and sequenced, mutually reinforcing outputs designed to strengthen the systems most likely to support rural communities in Somalia to cope with high impact shocks and stresses in the short term and adapt to climate change in the medium to longer term. BRCiS III is designed and delivered at area-level with a focus on those that are most vulnerable and marginalized. This means that investments are made from a multi-sectoral perspective to generate systemic change and transformational resilience gains. These systems are local leadership systems that dictate how communities plan for shocks and distribute assistance; the natural ecosystem, capable of providing life- and livelihood-sustaining ecosystem services like water, healthy soil and productive land and market systems that provide equal, inclusive economic opportunities, financial assets, and inclusion.

The Early Warning Early Action system within BRCiS was developed and implemented in 2018-2022 and aims to enhance the resilience of communities and local systems to attain self-reliance and reduce the need for humanitarian response. The philosophy underlying the development of the system was that it should be embedded within the communities through a community-centred EWEA approach.

As part of the EWEA system the Real-Time Risk Monitoring (RTRM) system was developed to monitor the risk levels within the communities through a set of indicators and thresholds. The RTRM system starts by considering communities’ risk perceptions and capacities to anticipate, prepare for and respond to shocks. The communities along with project technical staff participated in the identification of risks, the identification of indicators and in setting the thresholds. Consortium technical specialists used community feedback to determine the most common shocks, stresses and coping strategies. This method resulted in the selection of a set of qualitative and quantitative indicators to warn of shocks (i.e., drought, flood, desert locusts, acute watery diarrhoea/cholera outbreaks and conflict) and another set to capture the impacts of these shocks (i.e., livelihood assets, market dynamics, migration and household coping strategies). BRCiS technical staff and community leaders collectively develop three indicator thresholds to measure the level of emergency when experiencing a shock: “normal”, “alert” and “alarm”. Each indicator falls under one of these thresholds, changing as the severity of the event grows or weakens. BRCiS uses the indicators and thresholds to adopt a harmonised triggering approach of early action called “red-flagging”. A target area receives a “red flag” either when a sudden, large shock such as flooding or a cyclone occurs or when too many of the indicators for that area pass the alert and alarm thresholds; either 1 alarm or 1 alert for the indicators of shock impact + 3 in alarm/ 2 alarm and 3 in alert for the indicators of shock impact

The implementation of this system aimed to harmonise members’ internal early warning systems, encourage joint periodic shock monitoring and analysis, increase information value through synergy and adopt a common approach to the triggering of early action and the Crisis Modifier. The strong level of community engagement and the flexible early action funding mechanisms that have until now been supported through a crisis modifier fund allocated to scale up early action responses when shocks occur.

A detailed description of the EWEA system can be found at:

https://www.nrc.no/globalassets/pdf/brcis-ewea-technical-brief.pdf

A website showing the current dashboard is at:

https://brcis.shinyapps.io/EWEA_dashboard/

Rationale of the study

The initial EWEA system was developed under BRCiS II and during the design of the third phase of the project a number of issues were identified by partners, these included:

• How to ensure the system is more relevant to the community, how they can be more involved in data collection and can use the data thus building the system towards a point where it is able to continue beyond the projects a stage in this is ensuring the data needed can be collected by the communities themselves.
• The need to review the appropriateness of the indicators and to ensure that they covered the hazards and reflected the risk levels.
• The need to review thresholds with many areas being always under alarm – meaning indicators were not adequately discriminating between chronic stress and acute stress levels
• The need to look at how the granularity of the current community-level system can contribute to a more area-based system.
• How external factors can be incorporated to be used to provide additional information and triangulate.

The present work will provide one specific part of a wider review of the system. It will look specifically at the RTRM other pieces of work will focus on producing community-driven anticipatory action frameworks, sustainability, capacity-building and potential links to looking at how the system can be expanded to include climate adaptation.

What we are trying to do?

Based on the objectives of the project and our understanding of the context, what we want to do is to:

• Enable communities to collect, analyse and use the local data more effectively to decrease risk and improve response – anticipatory or early thus reducing impact
• To enable responses to be more appropriate (community v household) and even earlier
• Incorporate non-localised data
• Enable the data to be used at different areal scales
• To provide an improved discrimination between chronic and acute stress – so that areas are not always flagged as being in crisis.

Purpose and Objectives of the Assessment

The overall purpose of the assessment is to review and contribute to the development of the RTRM system across the communities BRCiS works in.

Specific Objectives:

1. Identify key factors/risks and appropriate indicators within the shock occurrence indicators section of the RTRM. Review existing indicators to see how effective they have been in the past in identifying increased and triggering responses.
2. Review key indicators within the shock impact indicators section of the RTRM to evaluate. how effective they have been in the past in identifying increased and triggering responses including examining statistical relationships between the indicators. Identify potential gaps and the inclusion of new indicators whilst examining if all the existing indicators are still relevant.
3. Review thresholds with a focus on the livelihoods and markets sections including pricing of commodities within the market section in different areas to see if these thresholds are still valid.
4. Review the red-flagging approach and associated thresholds especially its ability to discriminate between chronic and acute stress.
5. Review the Data collection and Data quality assurance ensuring that existing procedures/ processes and the additional of a new modified RTRM is practical and can be implemented by communities.

Key documents/Projects to be reviewed and considered

The proposed study will not be conducted in isolation but will undertake a thorough review of existing documents and projects within the Somali and East African context. The following documents/projects should form part of the review, but the list is not exhaustive:

• ACTED 2013. Karamoja Drought Early Warning System (DEWS) An Assessment of Data Reliability, End-User Awareness and Early Action
• Concern Worldwide 2018. A review of community-centred early warning early action systems
• ActionAid 2019. Analysis of Community Disaster Early Warning Systems for Early Action in West Pokot County Kenya
• SPARC 2023. Anticipatory Action in Advance Of ‘Wicked Crises’

Projects/Initiatives:

• SOMREP EWEA
• FSNAU Dashboard
• SWALIM
• Drought Warning System
• Somali Cash Consortium
• MERIAM

Geographical Coverage

The assessment will mainly be conducted through desk reviews; however, provision should be made to visit 1 or 2 accessible areas where BRCiS partners work: these could include Galmudug and Somaliland, but locations will depend on security/access considerations. Consultants should budget for 1 internal flight (approx. 500USD).

Methodology

The data collection and analysis methodology to be applied should be proposed and further defined by the consultant (in the inception report) and revised at the outset of the consultancy with support from Concern team in consultation with the other BRCiS partners and the Consortium Management Unit (CMU) as deemed necessary. It is envisioned that a review of other community-centred EWEA in the region would be included to look at best practice.

The steps during the assessment could include, but not be limited to:

• Preparation phase: On-boarding meetings with BRCiS CMU and relevant consortium members staff in Nairobi and Mogadishu. Preparation of a short inception report outlining the primary and secondary information sources, assessment objectives and key analytical questions to focus on; and refining the suggested assessment methods and tools for collecting and analysing data.
• Desk review: Conduct secondary desk research to identify: (a) existing relevant community-centred EWEA systems in the region, (b) review of indicators and existing data from the system with identification of statistical relationships between indicators (c) prioritised information gaps relevant to this analysis.
• Data collection/ field phase: Data collection using qualitative methodologies will be organised on site in the project locations. Concern’s data protection policies, gender and other ethical considerations will be adhered to.
• Analysis, report writing: data analysis and validation of findings (including sharing preliminary findings and/or recommendations with BRCiS CMU and member representatives); report writing and incorporation of feedback.
• Debriefing: a debriefing will be organized (online) to discuss the results and the recommendations with the BRCiS CMU and representatives of the other BRCiS member agencies.

The proposal should indicate explicitly how the methodology proposed will deliver the results.

Management of the assessment

The BRCiS EWEA Workstream Technical Lead based with Concern Worldwide in Mogadishu with support from the BRCiS CMU MEAL Team will manage this consultancy and be the consultant’s primary focal point. The Technical Lead with support from Concern and where appropriate BRCiS partners will provide administrative and logistical support as needed.

All methodology and tools will be validated by these technical teams to ensure that they are relevant and focused on the key objectives of the assessment. The technical team will provide continuous feedback as appropriate throughout the whole study process and have regular calls with the consultant to monitor the assessment progress.

Concern will provide the following support to the Consultant team:

• Sharing of the relevant literature and data, as well as Concern’s policies and relevant existing assessment tools.
• Introduction of the consultant to key stakeholders and other important key informants.
• Assist in meeting arrangements with stakeholders, key informants, and beneficiaries, if requested by the consultant.
• Support of selection of data collectors, translators, facilitators, note takers, if requested by the consultant.
• Support in organising transport, internal flights and accommodation at Concern’s and partner compounds.
• Security briefings and support in relation to any fieldwork conducted in Somalia/Somaliland.

Deliverables

The expected deliverables are:

1. Inception report setting out the programme of works, timetable, detailed methodology and tools and reviewing, defining and agreeing the final detailed objectives (to be approved by Concern before starting data collection).
2. Draft assessment report for review by BRCiS CMU and EWEA Workstream.
3. Final report in English (max 30 pages, excluding appendices) that consists of:
   1. Executive summary which addresses all of the key objectives.
   2. Methodology followed and any limitations encountered or issues with the data collected.
   3. Findings, in line with each of the objectives and key analytical questions agreed on.
   4. Conclusions.
   5. Recommendations (short, medium longer term). Detailed recommendations against objectives agreed in the inception report along with how they can be installed/achieved.
   6. Appendices (including, for instance: TOR, inception report, data collection tools adapted specifically for the target populations, KIIs conducted).
   7. Databases with the assessment data.
4. PowerPoint presentation containing findings and recommendations to be presented to Concern and other BRCiS partners during de-brief workshop (online)

Note:

• Reports should be submitted in Microsoft Word format unless otherwise specified or agreed. All text should be unformatted. Graphs or other graphical devices should be editable (i.e. not pictures).
• All references must be cited according to professional convention, and detailed in a bibliography, using the Harvard system as set out in the UNESCO Style Manual. All verbatim quotations must appear in quotation marks and must not be of excessive length.
• All material submitted to Concern must be the original work of the consultant. Any plagiarism in any form, or any other breach of intellectual property rights, will automatically disqualify the consultant from receiving any further payments under the contract, and Concern will seek to recover any payments already made.
• All data collected under the consultancy must be submitted with the deliverables, in a widely recognised format such as Microsoft Excel.

Tentative Implementation Schedule

The duration of the assignment will be approximately 30-40 days’ work. Final allocation of days and activity details will be discussed with the successful applicant. The work should be undertaken in January and February 2024 and the final report submitted by the end of March 2024.

Qualification of the Consultant / Company

The consultant/s will be responsible for all phases in the implementation of the consultancy, including the design, collection and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, writing reports, presenting the findings and recommendations to BRCiS CMU/Concern, and producing the reports. The consultant will also supervise and provide guidance to any staff or enumerators involved in the data collection.

Mandatory requirements for the consultant, consultant team or consultancy company

• Advanced degree from an internationally recognized university in International Development, Livelihoods, Food Security, Social sciences, Economics, or another related field.
• Proven experience in Early Warning Early Action/ Risk Monitoring/Context Analysis in emergency/ resilience or development contexts for livelihood programmes.
• Experience of quantitative and qualitative data collection methods and strong statistical analysis capacity.
• In-depth knowledge of humanitarian/development projects, resilience experience an advantage.
• Familiar with issues related to Disaster Risk Reduction and Community Development and Data Collection.
• Familiarity with the Somali Context
• Fluency in written and spoken English for all team members, knowledge of Somali language is an asset.
• Excellent communication and demonstrable team leadership experience.
• Computer skills (word processing, spreadsheets, statistical analysis software application, internet research, etc.).
• Previous experience in Somalia and personal knowledge of the Somali context (mix-sex team, e.g. especially for the primary data collection) are an asset.
• The Consultant/Consultancy company will be guided by the following ethical considerations:
• The views expressed in the report will be the independent professional opinion of the consultants.
• Openness of information given to the highest possible degree to all involved parties.
• Broad participation: the interested parties should be involved whenever relevant and possible.
• Reliability and independence: the assessment should be conducted so that findings and conclusions are correct and trustworthy.
• Adherence to Concern security and safeguarding/code of conduct policies and Concern / Government of Somalia Covid-19 regulations will be required.

[1] Humanitarian Outcomes 2023. Somali capacities to respond to crisis are changing; how are humanitarian actors responding?