Provision of Capacity Assessment Services for OCHA Somalia

The Somalia Humanitarian Fund (SHF) was established in 2010 as an upgrade of the Humanitarian Response Fund (HRF). Since its inception, the SHF received more than US$500 million in contributions from donors and funded more than 1,200 projects across Somalia. The SHF is funding activities in an environment which is often highly volatile and only partially accessible due to security constraints. This has severely affected the ability of the humanitarian community, including SHF, to provide oversight, monitor and verify the delivery of assistance and evaluate the impact of humanitarian action in Somalia. Consequently, ensuring that assistance provided reaches those in greatest need has been particularly challenging in this context. The SHF has the following main objectives: • Strategically fund assessed humanitarian action in Somalia to improve the timeliness and coherence of the humanitarian response; • Support priority clusters and regional priorities in accordance with the identified needs. OCHA’s Somalia Humanitarian Financing Unit (HFU) is responsible for the daily management of all programmatic and financial aspects of the Fund undertakes the following tasks: • Management of SHF operations and policy advice to the HC • Project Cycle Management • Implementation of the SHF Accountability Framework Brief Scope and Methodology The UN is seeking a contractor to conduct partner capacity assessments, in a timeframe of 23 months, under the overall supervision of OCHA Somalia. 1. The contractor should plan for assessments to be conducted across Somalia (tentatively 25 in Southern and Central Somalia, 25 in Puntland, 25 in Somaliland) and Nairobi, Kenya (tentatively 5), but the final distribution of allocations may vary. 2. The methodology for the conduction of the capacity assessments will have to follow the SHF Partner Capacity Assessment questionnaire either in full or partially. 3. The Contractor will have to complete the questionnaires through desk-based review of the documents provided by the implementing partner; interviews with the IP’s staff members; visits to the implementing partner’s country office(s) and, where possible, to one or more field offices; and interviews with key informants such as previous/existing donors and partners, cluster leads and members, and beneficiaries of the IP. 4. Partners and OCHA Somalia will provide the contractors with all relevant information required for conducting the capacity assessment. 5. Approximately 65 full capacity assessments of IPs will be commissioned. The full SHF Partner Capacity Assessment questionnaire will be applied where no other type of assessment has been conducted to-date. 6. The contractor will also be requested to conduct 15 partial capacity assessments for partners that have recently been assessed by other UN agencies and for which recent assessment data exists from comparable assessment exercises (for example, if HACT Micro Assessment exist the SHF Partner Capacity Assessment questionnaire will only be applied partially complete the gaps that may be evident in the former). 7. The exercise will aim to assess whether these partners have the requisite capacity to receive SHF funds and operate with maximum efficiency and effectiveness. 8. The capacity assessment exercise will provide guidance to the SHF in the following areas: • The partner has the requisite capacity to implement SHF projects • The partner has the requisite financial requirements to implement a SHF grant 9. It is envisaged that the contractor will provide a team of Task Manager, Operations Manager and Junior Expert (s).