The chief of party (COP) must provide overall task management, technical and operational guidance, and strategic vision/direction to all members of the SMLP-2 consortium partners and project staff. The COP is responsible for ensuring a high quality of work products, the timely completion of deliverables, and overall USAID contractual compliance. This includes day-to-day supervision of technical, administrative, security, financial management, and operational support teams. The COP has oversight for all tasks listed in this statement of work and is based at the project’s head office in Nairobi, Kenya.

The purpose of the Somalia Monitoring Learning Project-2 (SMLP-2) is to establish a third-party monitoring (TPM) system to collect data that verifies partner-reported outputs and selected outcomes, and to deduce lessons learned from humanitarian programs in Somalia funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) in Somalia. The overall goal of this contract is to increase BHA/Somalia’s access to independent, verifiable data related to the 1) quantity and quality of activities delivered, and 2) performance of BHA-funded programs in Somalia. This increased access to data will allow BHA/Somalia to make more evidence-based program design, implementation, and strategy decisions. The SMLP-2 contract period of performance is October 1, 2022, to June 30, 2027.

SMLP-2 is implemented across five key tasks, namely:

1. Conduct monitoring of outputs and verification of quantity and quality of goods and services delivered by BHA supported activities;
2. Establish a virtual third-party monitoring reporting platform;
3. Facilitate and strengthen BHA’s learning objectives related to Somalia, to include conducting learning events or workshops for BHA and implementing partners;
4. Conduct annual data quality assessments (DQA) on select partners and indicators; and,
5. Conduct special studies on specific awards, program sectors, or specific emergency response themes, as needed, to include monitoring of selected immediate outcomes, as well as other activities as requested by BHA such as IP meetings in accordance with the approved work plan.