Applied & Policy Research — Research, Studies & Evaluation

About research, studies & evaluation tenders

Research and evaluation assignments are commissioned by UN agencies, development banks, bilateral donors and international NGOs, and are almost always awarded on quality-and-cost rather than price alone — commonly 70:30 or 80:20 in favour of the technical proposal. The decisive elements are the proposed methodology, the named team and the evaluator's independence from the programme being assessed. Expect to be asked for a sampling frame, an analysis plan, ethics and safeguarding arrangements for research with human subjects, and prior assignments of comparable scope. Terms of reference frequently name a specific framework — the OECD-DAC criteria for evaluations, or a donor's own results framework — and a proposal that ignores it loses marks that were freely available. Data ownership and publication rights normally sit with the commissioning agency; check whether you may cite the work later.