WHO announces RFPs for Community Engagement Implementation Research

Deadline: 07-Jul-2020

The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the Community Engagement Implementation Research.

The proposal prepared by the bidder, and all correspondence and documents relating to the proposal exchanged by the bidder and WHO shall be written in the English language.

Objectives

The purpose of this Request for Proposals (RFP) is to enter into a contractual agreement with a successful bidder and select a suitable contractor to support priority countries to develop and evaluate innovative community engagement models, prototypes, and intervention package as part of the COVID-19 response and recovery efforts and implementation science. Provide process design/facilitation, knowledge production/management, and capacity building expertise.

Requirements

WHO requires the successful bidder, the Contractor, to carry out the following tasks:

Overall project development, documentation and knowledge management
- Support the strategic conceptualization/architecture of the overall project and develop an overarching evaluation framework covering the 5 project phases in the CE research strategy document.
- Produce concept briefs and narratives for different phases of the project.
- Map elements of facilitated sessions in a visually appealing and easy-to-grasp format.
- Produce multi-media products that facilitate project implementation and uptake of project outputs. Process design and facilitation
Expand on the preliminary work carried out by WHO and conduct detailed stakeholder mapping and scoping at global, regional and country level.
- Design and facilitate country level stakeholder dialogues on CE evidence (scientists & policy makers, researchers and CE practitioners, service providers & service users) based on the outputs of the evidence synthesis conducted by the WHO Collaborating Centre. Each of the four countries may have identified different entry points and/or communities for the setting and scope of their intervention sites.
- Collate, analyze and synthesize the outputs of the stakeholder dialogues. Use this information to codevelop with the WHO project team and implement engagement processes that support relationshipbuilding and meaning-making between project stakeholders to ensure overall project coherence, technical integrity and successful delivery of outputs and outcomes.
- Conduct and analyze interviews with researchers, community engagement practitioners and decisionmakers within research countries to understand their perspectives, challenges and needs.
- Design and facilitate (implement) inter-governmental dialogues on CE evidence and policy development.
Development and evaluation of innovative community engagement models, prototypes and intervention packages
- Compile and analyze documented examples of effective and successful community engagement interventions/processes implemented at scale from health, education, agriculture/environment, justice and development sectors.
- Design and convene at least 3 knowledge harvesting dialogues across the country research teams to accelerate horizontal, iterative learning. Rapidly synthesize and share findings with country teams.
- Compile, compare and evaluate CE prototypes and engagement interventions emerging across research sites in the four selected WPR countries.
Capacity building
- Co-design and deliver a capacity building programme that includes virtual workshops/webinars to a) prepare country research teams for collaborative research design and implementation, b) acquire skills for joint thinking, shared decision-making and collaborative action as they move through the phases of designing, prototyping and testing CE models and interventions.

Methods to Carry Out Activties

Overall:
- A timeline and a detailed implementation plan (including estimated budgets) for process milestones and deliverables based on the WHO CE research scoping and strategy document.
- Monitoring and evaluation framework(s) that capture critical metrics for each of the project phases, including overall process and project success as well as methods for evaluating impact/outcome by country.
- Baseline and post-project assessments of learning/observable adaptations in collaborative thinking and practice (inner and outer process learning).
- Collation and packaging of meeting, agenda and stakeholder dialogue designs including any used visual frameworks, templates and tools, process road maps, dialogic practices, and reports etc. to enable replication and ongoing adaptation by WHO and programme implementation partners.
- Documentation of significant learning and/or change moments in the project cycle.
- Multi-media products ready for public dissemination.
- Facilitator and learner guides for the capacity building programme.
- Copyright- The copyright of all deliverables will be solely invested in the World Health Organization.
Project Phase 2
- Project stakeholder profiles and network architecture.
- Country profiles: stakeholders analysis,intended entry point(s), purpose and setting for CE prototyping.
- Engagement strategies for country level stakeholders (service providers, service users, decisionmakers, CE practitioners and researchers) on CE evidence and gaps in each of the four countries.
- Knowledge products for country research teams to engage with evidence synthesis findings.
Project Phase 3
- Preliminary content for the capacity building programme.
- Compiled and packaged research protocols.
- Synthesis of country level dialogues.
- Knowledge briefs from harvesting dialogues.
Project Phase 4
- Packaging of primary research outputs for different audiences.
- Packaged CE models, prototypes and interventions per country.
- Analysis of evaluation reports from country research teams.
Project Phase 5
- Final evaluation and technical report.
- Final learner and facilitator guides: building country capacity for interdisciplinary CE research.
- Presentation and dissemination video on the project journey, findings, lessons learnt and impact

Eligibility Criteria

Status
- The provider shall be a institution operating in the field of with proven expertise in participatory and systemic, collaborative action between diverse stakeholders (across sectors, disciplines and professions) towards achieving a common purpose and goal. They should have worked with academia, governments and community-based organizations and be highly skilled in relationship management and evaluation of complex projects.
Previous experience
- Previous work with WHO, other international organizations and/or major institutions in the field of: Helping a system to see itself through the process of organizational transformation is desirable. Proven experience required in:
  - High level and community multi-stakeholder dialogues;
  - Designing and implementing action research leading to policy development and impact at community level;
  - Communicating complex issues while confidently working in emergent processes.
  - Evalution of innovative and/or proof-of-concept approaches to demonstrate impact and outcome.