Partnership/role title: Quality Assurance

Location: Bangladesh
Apply by: 20 March, 2015
Start date: 01 April, 2015
End date: 31 March 2016, with possibility for extension if programme continues

Project description – about the project
English and IT skills are strongly connected to the labour market but the opportunities to develop and strengthen these skills in Bangladesh are limited, especially for adolescent girls. Girls and women in Bangladesh have less access to education and ICT than boys and men, and less access to learning English. This is resulting in a gender digital divide – which could lead to a serious gendered skill imbalance and unequal life chances for girls and women in the future. There are 28 million adolescents aged 10-19 years in Bangladesh which make up about one fifth of the total population. This is a big challenge for Bangladesh in terms of employability and skills development.
BRAC ADP and the British Council initiated the English and ICT for Adolescents (EITA) project in 2012, to stimulate the educational possibilities for young girls in Bangladesh. The project creates and provides easy access to education by offering English and ICT education for adolescents at their doorstep through non-formal after school clubs. The long term goals of the EITA-project are to stimulate adolescents’ chances of future employment as well as to contribute to the social and economic empowerment of women and girls in Bangladesh.
Since the project started, almost 700 girls have been reached directly through approximately 50 clubs within the network of over 8,000 clubs BRAC currently manage (these reach 250,000 adolescents, 90% of whom are girls). The British Council has accessed some funding in 2015-16 to scale up this project, and to pilot a similar model in India and Nepal. To this end, a robust review of the project is planned in March 2015 by an externally appointed reviewer (already appointed), the findings of which will inform the design of the project in the second phase, as well as the pilots in India and Nepal.

Role description – about the role
The British Council is seeking an institutional partner to work alongside them and country partners to support the project design, quality assurance and ongoing research, monitoring and evaluation of the second phase of the programme across the three countries in the region. We hope the relationship would evolve if the programme is successful so that the British Council and the selected HE Institution could jointly bid for donor funding to extend the programme from 16-17.
The partner would be expected to put forward experts in the following areas to contribute to different elements of the programme as required by the implementation plan: gender and education, uses of ICT for education, skills and language skills capacity building initiatives, non-formal education, educational research, monitoring and evaluation (with a specific focus on impact evaluation). Ideally the team of experts would be led by one individual who would decide, in consultation with the British Council and country partners, which expert(s) would be required for each deliverable.