External Evaluation Consultant - Terms of reference

Country: Belgium

Starting date: As soon as possible

End date: March 2024

Under responsibility of: Jennifer Schatz, Project Officer CESAGRAM

Missing Children Europe is the European federation for missing and sexually exploited children, representing 32 organisations from 27 European countries. Our mission is to enable the development of effective and holistic child protection systems to prevent children from going missing; support missing children and their families; and protect children from any risk of violence and abuse that may lead to or result from going missing.

Thematically, Missing Children Europe focuses on missing unaccompanied migrant children, runaways and international parental abductions.  Our role is to support the work of our member organisations by developing cross border solutions to help resolve the issue of missing children at both the national and the European level.

Our priorities are based around four pillars of work:

1. Ensuring the quality of services and tools
2. Providing research and evidence
3. Raising awareness and promoting prevention
4. Stimulating the development of effective polices and laws at European level

• Title: CESAGRAM – Comprehensive European Strategy Against GRooming and Missing
• Start: 1^st of January 2023
• Duration: 2 years

• Total budget: EUR 1.908.852,50 EUR
• Donors : European Commission and Oak Foundation (prospective)
• Enhance the understanding of the process of grooming, and more particularly how it is facilitated by technology and how it can lead to child sexual abuse and missing, in order to, based on this better understanding:

– Ensure that grooming for sexual abuse (and potentially leading to going missing) is prevented insofar possible.

– Ensure that victims of grooming are identified by first responders and frontline workers and that they receive appropriate support, including before, during and after a disappearance.

• Specific Objectives:

1. Research the links between missing and grooming for sexual purposes to advance existing knowledge on prevention and responses.
2. Identify key risk indicators of grooming before, during and after a child has experienced sexual abuse and/or has gone missing for better victim identification and identification of those at risk.
3. Develop tools and material to increase understanding and awareness of the grooming process for young people and their carers.
4. Train frontline workers to increase their skill and knowledge to better identify and respond to victims of grooming.
5. Design, pilot and evaluate an AI based tools that will facilitate the prevention and detection of grooming content online aimed to enhance the operational prevention and detection capabilities of the relevant end users.
6. Create knowledge hub to share knowledge on grooming and missing children with professionals and experts to further develop and build on existing expertise and resources.
7. Study of legislation and development of recommendations to advise the improvement of the legal and regulatory environment to support protection systems.

The overall objective of the external evaluation is to develop a mid-term and final evaluation to complete the ISF output and result indicators report. The mid-term evaluation will assess the impact and progress achieved so far, through the review of results, indicators and progress in the milestones, as well as to formulate recommendations to adjust the project plan, where necessary, and improve the project’s impact. The final evaluation will assess the final impact and progress achieved at the end of the project through the review of final outputs, and indicators.  Additionally, the consultant will aid in the construction of the evaluation indicators and set up monitoring activities to be conducted throughout the project lifecycle.

The expected results of the evaluation are:

• The project activities are evaluated trough the following criteria:
  1. Project effectiveness, sustainability, and impact
• A mid-term interim evaluation to inform project management and provide suggested adaptations to timeline and deliverables.
• Lessons learned and recommendations for improving the criteria are shared with Missing Children Europe and the Consortium at the mid-term Consortium meeting (especially for the next phase of the project and particularly looking at how impact can be evaluated)
• Final evaluation of impact and indicators with final evaluation report.

The final evaluation report will provide conclusions and recommendations to the following areas:

• Exchange of information between and within competent authorities and relevant Union bodies, offices and agencies and, where relevant, with third countries and international organisations
• Cross-border cooperation, including joint operations, between competent authorities in relation to serious and organised crime with a cross-border dimension
• Projects’ capabilities in relation to preventing and combating crime

Overall evaluation approach and data collection methods proposed:

• Briefing with Missing Children Europe
• Consultation with members of the Consortium
• Secondary data review
• A revised inception report from the evaluator, stating the methodology (e.g. sources of information and tools for collection), work programme and timetable for the evaluation. The methodology will be agreed between MCE and the evaluator with respect to the objectives, scope, time and expected results of the evaluation.
• Analysis and debriefing phase: the recommendations and preliminary conclusions will be presented to MCE for reporting purposes, and shared at the sixth Consortium meeting
• Final evaluation report

Deliverables include:

• Mid-term evaluation and recommendations for the purpose of an interim report
• Presentation of recommendations at the sixth Consortium meeting
• A final report (max 30 pages excluding annexes).

• Minimum 3-5 years proven experience in child-rights based and child-led project evaluations
• Previous experience working on an EU project with a child rights organisation
• Excellent knowledge and skills in qualitative methodology
• Fluent English and excellent writing skills (the report should be in English)

Interested candidates should submit:

• A technical offer including:
• An understanding of the issues at stake in the project and the Terms of Reference (ToR): development of problems and formulation of questions which the offer will aim to answer
• Methodology and proposed tools
• Timetable including the different phases of the evaluation, briefing and debriefing
• A financial offer including of a detailed budget
• An up-to-date CV
• Technical sample of an evaluation report for a child-rights project done by the candidate
• 2 recent references

The applicants must send off requested documents electronically to jennifer.schatz@missingchildreneurope.eu

The deadline to apply is 20 March 2023