Organisational Background

Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people affected by war or disaster to survive and rebuild their lives. We commit to stay as long as we are needed, helping survivors to heal, recover and rebuild their communities to be stronger, more stable and more democratic. At work today in over 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities, we restore safety, dignity and hope to millions who are uprooted and struggling to endure. Building local capacity and self-sufficiency—and promoting human rights, participation and accountability—are at the core of all of our innovative programs. The IRC leads the way from harm to home.

Project Background

Ahlan Simsim:

Children and their families living in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria have been exposed to levels of adversity that threaten their development and jeopardize the future prosperity and stability of the societies in which they live. Research shows that the development of basic skills can help promote resiliency and, for the most vulnerable children, help mitigate the negative effects of conflict and crisis. But such care and education are unavailable to many children. Ahlan Simsim’s theory of change is based on the idea that Sesame Workshop’s signature culturally relevant, localized production approach, with its engaging Muppets and other elements, coupled with the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC’s) expertise in delivering services to people affected by conflict and crisis, will enable the creation of a scalable, replicable intervention for early childhood programming to help a generation of conflict-affected children achieve their developmental potential.

ECED services are provided by different key players in Jordan, the most important of which are the institutionalized and home-based nurseries that are not formalized yet except for a certain number, due to financial deficiencies and lack of capacities and the lack of protection and safety measures. While one main factor that encourages women economic participation is the existence of childcare services in the work place or within their residence area, that type of demand leads to creating low quality child care service that raise protection concerns since there is no dedicated nursery space within the home. Additionally, not all nurseries provide materials that encourage learning and play, and the lack of pre- and in-service training as formal preparation required for managing a group of children for teachers.

The Human Resources Development Strategy (HRDS) highlighted significant shortcomings in access, participation and quality of current ECED provision, including the lack of family and community engagement in formal and informal ECED activities and poor quality teaching and facilities, either with no formal curriculum or curricula that are outdated or little used, knowledge, attitudes, and practices which do not reinforce the connection between early childhood health, nutrition and the development of early childhood learning.

Consultancy Purpose

The purpose for this consultancy is to co-develop, with the NCFA and MoSD, a Quality Management System (QMS) that guides the improvement of the developmental and educational services targeting the children aged 0-4 years 8 months and that infuse Ahlan Simsim modality, to ensure the quality of services in the institutionalized and home-based nurseries. This system shall be multi-dimensional and based on the Nurturing Care Framework (NCF), aiming to improve the service quality of the home-based and institutionalized nurseries. Another purpose for this consultancy is to adapt the current in-service training that was created by NCFA and add more applied skills to the content in synergy with the QMS framework and integrating AS modality to improve the nursery workers’ competencies.

The consultant shall achieve the following tasks:

Phase 1: Inception

1. Review the current tools that are adopted by the Directorate of Family and Child to monitor the institutional and home-based nurseries services,
2. In-depth review of available drafts on the national standards for nurseries, child activities manuals, and training packages for service providers drafted by MoSD. Other related documents include nursery curriculum developed by MOE, HRDS national strategy as well as international experiences in curriculum development for children under 4 years old and any other related documents,
3. Review the current and foreseen bylaws of licencing home-based nurseries and institutional nurseries, as well as any other documents related to nurseries competencies,
4. Draft the assessment report (deliverable 1), including the details of the methodology and a detailed action plan, to be presented to and approved by MoSD and NCFA. The proposed methodology needs to be appropriate to capture all agreed ingredients necessary for development of the learning and development framework and the curriculum.

Phase 2: Development of the standards

1. Conduct focus group discussions with a group of educators/nurseries’ workers employed in licenced and unlicensed home-based nurseries to identify the challenges, and the training needs,
2. Conduct field visits to a group of home-based and institutionalized nurseries to learn more about the work environment and the demands of parents as well as children’s educational and protection needs,
3. Design the first draft of QMS matrix in terms of main areas, components, factors, indicators, and guiding principles, and discuss it with the NCFA technical committee for amendments,
4. Design the rubric monitoring instrument for each area, add clear description as well as means of verifications to the instruments,
5. Present the instruments to the technical committee coordinated by NCFA, to collect their feedback and reflections,

Phase 3: Development and implementation of training materials

1. pilot the instruments on a group of home-based nurseries educators to ensure they are contextualized and can be easily applied,
2. Generate learnings from the pilot and adapt the instrument accordingly
3. Prepare the instructions manual or handbook for the QMS to guide the MoSD and/or Municipalities staff during the application, and prepare the training of trainers’ manual,
4. conduct the training of trainers’ workshop targeting the public sector staff,
5. Finalize the draft training packages for facilitators
6. Facilitate consultation meetings/workshops throughout the process to support the deliverables review and validation process.
7. Prepare reports on validation workshops, final report on the assignment, other brief progress reports as required

NCFA and IRC will organize the workshops and cover cost of participants. The consultant will be responsible for technical inputs and facilitation of workshops.

All deliverables will be submitted in Arabic language

Deliverables table

Level of Effort

It is estimated that the consultant will need up to 100 working days to deliver the tasks.

Length of Work

4 months starting March 1st 2021 and to be concluded no later than July 31^st, 2021.

Payment Schedule

Payments will be scheduled based on the finalization of the set of deliverables mentioned in the table above.

Location

Amman- Jordan.