RFP - for Monitoring Firms to support India Safe Water Now SVS ILC Scale-up via DevNetJobsIndia

REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS

for

Monitoring Firms to support India Safe Water Now SVS ILC Scale-up January 24, 2024

  INTRODUCTION 

Evidence Action aims to be a world leader in scaling evidence-based and cost-effective programs to reduce the burden of poverty for hundreds of millions of people in the poorest places. EAII Advisors Pvt. Ltd. (EAII) acts as Evidence Actions technical partner in India, responsible for providing technical assistance to state government partners to implement Evidence Action programming.

Last year Evidence Action’s flagship “Deworm the World” program reached 280 million people with deworming medications, partnering with governments to launch, scale, and sustain mass school-based deworming programs, including in India. Meanwhile, Evidence Action’s Dispensers for Safe Water program provided 4 million people across rural Africa with clean water, saving thousands of young lives. The approach relies on an innovative and human-centric design to deliver clean water at the source. These serve as just two examples of the work Evidence Action is undertaking.

In addition to running these scaled programs, Evidence Action leverages its unique Accelerator to develop the next generation of programs. These programs are rigorously tested to ensure exceptional scale, cost-effectiveness, and clear evidence of impact. In 2019 Evidence Action launched an ambitious new strategy, intending to double its impact over the next five years, with much of that impact coming from new programs identified and scaled through the Accelerator.

To date, Evidence Action has a presence across 7 countries, including in India through EAII. Evidence Action’s programs have been recognized by GiveWell, the Skoll Foundation, the Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and covered in the Economist, NPR, and the New York Times.

In India, EAII, as Evidence Action’s technical implementing partner, currently provides technical assistance to select state government’s ministries of health, education, and women and child development to implement the school and Anganwadi based National Deworming Day program and Iron and Folic Acid (IFA) supplementation program to improve children’s health, education, and long-term development.

Moving forward, EAII aims to expand to provide technical support to more state governments and on other public health & nutrition issues. 

BACKGROUND

In 2019, the Indian Government launched Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) to provide safe tap water to every rural household in the country. JJM has made tremendous progress, building piped connections in over 85 million households.

EAII is now partnering with JJM and two state governments, Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Madhya Pradesh (MP), to support JJM’s goal of ensuring that the water is safe for human consumption by rapidly scaling up in-line chlorination. EAII is providing support at two levels:

• EAII is working with State governments to develop an optimized service delivery model.
• EAII, working with government partners will support development of systems, processes, and tools (including budgeting, tendering, policies & guidelines) to drive state-wide scale up, while states develop the capacity to self-manage the scale-up.

As part of this work, EAII will support the state governments of AP and MP to scale-up in-line chlorination (ILC) technologies at single village scheme (SVS) systems¹. The first scale-up ILC devices are planned to be installed in July 2024², with device installations continuing on a rolling basis. Independent Monitoring (IM) firm activities will start prior to July 2024 in order to verify water points and conduct baseline surveys before installation begins. During the period of performance for this contract (April 2024 – March 2025) , an estimated 78 ILC devices will be installed at SVS systems in AP and 129 devices in MP. 

PURPOSE

As part of its technical assistance to the state governments, EAII will develop a robust monitoring, learning and evaluation (MLE) strategy to track the progress and performance of the program scale-up. EAII seeks competitive bids from IM firms for data collection services pertaining to two aspects of the MLE of the program – process monitoring and performance monitoring. This Request for Proposal (RFP) describes the proposed monitoring activities in detail, outlines key responsibilities of contracted IM firms, and RFP submission requirements.

Broadly, the contracted IM firm would be responsible for all data collection activities falling under these two categories, data cleaning, sharing data with EAII, providing field reports detailing the data collection process with key successes and challenges, and to have consistent and clear coordination and communication with EAII on a routine basis throughout the engagement including regular meetings and coordination of data collection timelines. 

RFP TIMELINES

All communication, including the proposals should be sent to procurement@eaiiadvisors.in. Please mention in the subject line the title of the RFP as captured on the cover page. All of the questions to the RFP and the answers will be shared with every vendor that submits an intention to bid.

For detailed information, please check the complete version of the RFP attached below