Deadline: 30 July 2019

Organizations are invited to submit proposals on generating evidence for what works to improve women’s economic empowerment in India. This RFP is designed with the objective of supplementing government efforts at generating data as well as promote evidence for policy uptake around important determinants of WEE.

The Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE) aims to engage suitable individuals/organization(s) with potential and expertise in generating evidence around work of women in paid, unpaid, care work and improvement of labour force statistics. There is a need to improve the evidence base around these issues in the context of women’s economic empowerment, both to capture the burden of unpaid work as well as to enable unpaid work concerns of women, which has significant impact on overall economic growth. IWWAGE aims at supporting this and prioritizing the generation of evidence for enablers of WEE; policies, strategies, best practices, and identification of ‘what works’.

Focus Areas

The RFP would thus focus on:

• Primary evidence generation women’s work by different segments of women in India (state and sub-state level) spread across demographic, geographical and /or sectoral categories through field based methods;
• Assessing gender inequalities in the distribution of resources, responsibilities and the opportunity cost of non-asset building responsibilities and activities;
• Measuring/Evaluating the impact of the government initiatives for WEE;
• Identifying the enablers of unpaid work, especially care work, including a systematic review of relevant social protection/cash transfer/maternity benefit programmes in the country.

Scope

They are seeking proposals from experienced research and policy organizations to meet the aforementioned objectives.  The scope of work will involve undertaking primary level research with the aim of creating an enabling environment for achieving WEE. This can include but is not limited to:

1. Policy deep dive on the current space for policy action, identifying opportunities to promote policy that would positively influence WEE;
2. Rigorous analysis of barriers for women’s access to the labour force;
3. Gender-based assessment of macro-economic schemes and social protection programmes;
4. Creating methods for improving national labourforce statistics.

The proposed methodology should include undertaking primary level research at the state and sub-state levels. The proposal may be a review of potential solutions and/or mapping and assessing state specific instruments and measures to improve female labour force participation by reducing associated barriers around unpaid work.

Skills and Experience

• Qualifications
  • At least 10 years of organizational experience in undertaking gender based research/policy research preferably in the area of analysing women’s labour and related issues.
  • A team with senior members with at least 10 years of prior work experience in the field of women and labour, behavioural economics, policy research etc.
• Technical Proposal
  • The technical proposal should include:
    • Building the context through rigourous framing of the hypothesis using existing evidence.
    • Detailed methodology and conceptual framework with expected deliverables and timelines.
    • Profile of the firm/organization indicating why they are suitable for undertaking the assignment and demonstrating suitable experience.
    • Recent and detailed CVs of proposed team.
• Financial Proposal
  • The financial proposal shall be submitted indicating breakup of all proposed activities.
  • The narrative and the deliverables sheet should indicate clearly the payment linked outputs along with the expected percentage of payment to be disbursed.

How to Apply

Interested organisations should submit the required documents via email at the address given on the website.

For more information, please visit https://ifmrlead.org/iwwage/