Monitoring tool for the regional programme: Promoting female employment for Africas green transformation (WE4D)

Unemployment and underemployment are prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and cause personal and social need. Women are particularly affected by this. The situation is exacerbated by the low competitiveness of large swathes of the local economy, which offers few employment opportunities and then only under poor working conditions. In addition, the companies usually do not operate in an ecologically sustainable manner. Improving the employment situation for women and a faster ecological transformation are essential to achieve the partner countries" development objectives. The module objective of the "Promoting female employment for Africa"s green transformation" (WE4D) regional program is therefore as follows: The employment and economic situation of women, especially in companies driving the green transformation, has improved. The new WE4D regional program (01/23-12/26) builds on the current regional program "Employment and Skills for Development in Africa", and will be implemented in Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda. The program is designed as a multi-donor initiative that can receive funds from other commissioning parties through combined financing and thereby scale approaches and results. To date, the new project has been co-financed by the EU through the regional Team Europe Initiative (TEI) "Investing in Young Businesses in Africa" (IYBA). Further regional and bilateral combined financing is expected. Thanks to additional financial contributions to the program, it may be possible to include further implementation countries (Malawi, Namibia) in the future. The projects" outcomes on the program"s indicators are measured in a standardized way to enable overall aggregation and reporting on WE4D"s results to commissioning parties and the public. Data is collected in decentralized sample surveys by local external service providers, in some cases by the project staff itself, or by the GIZ country teams themselves and then used to manually calculate a project"s outcomes. The numbers are quality-checked, entered into the monitoring tool and aggregated first on country level and then on the overall program level, involving the M&E focal person in the country and the M&E team at headquarters that reports on the WE4D regional program. Up to now, the processor programme E4D used an Excel format (called "Steemo", see Annex 2 for details) to follow up on the projects" contributions to overall indicators and to aggregate such numbers on country and program levels. The Excel file includes a template for semi-annual reporting ("M&E Status Update"). Through the present tender, WE4D seeks to replace the current Excel-based process by a digital monitoring tool covering (at least) the same functions.