Request for proposals: Process Evaluation of the DELTA Pilot Program Kisumu and Homa Bay Counties, Kenya

1. Background

Tiko is an African non-profit organization partnering with governments, health providers, and local community-based organizations to deliver integrated care for adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) aged 15-24 in six African countries. Tiko's model addresses the Triple Threat of unintended pregnancy, HIV incidence , and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), integrating platform-based service delivery with community-level peer support and, through the DELTA program, economic empowerment. DELTA, an integrated health and livelihoods program for AGYW nested within the broader Tiko model, was launched in January 2026 in Kisumu and Homa Bay Counties, Kenya. The program brings together five interconnected components along a structured support pathway: (1) peer mobilization, through which AGYW are identified, informed, and supported to participate; (2) health access, connecting AGYW to SRH, HIV, and SGBV services; (3) skills development through training, covering entrepreneurship, financial literacy, digital, and vocational skills; (4) opportunity linkage, connecting AGYW to TVET institutions, business support, mentorship, and employment; and (5) longer-term outcomes, including income, education, confidence, and economic participation. The central hypothesis of DELTA is that addressing health and economic barriers through a connected support pathway, rather than separate interventions, generates greater and more durable change than either stream alone. Based on program data and formative assessments to date, DELTA has achieved strong reach on health and peer mobilization dimensions and has linked approximately 7500 AGYW to livelihoods training. Two formative studies provide an initial picture of the participant journey; one explored participants’ training activity experience, and another examined what happened after training. Together, these studies identified that 85% of trained AGYW received no structured post-training linkage support, that only approximately 15% were linked to an economic opportunity, and that livelihood sustainability varied substantially by pathway type. Peer mobilisers were credited with 47% of successful livelihood linkages and were described as central to every stage of the DELTA journey. These findings reflect both the DELTA model’s potential and implementation gaps that must be understood and addressed to inform scale-up decisions. Tiko now requires a focused process evaluation to assess implementation fidelity across the five-component pathway, understand and identify barriers and facilitators to moving from one component to the next at the community, household, partner, and structural levels, test whether the integration of health and livelihoods training reinforce each other or not, and generate actionable recommendations for model refinement and to inform potential scale-up decisions.

2. Purpose of the Assignment

The purpose of this consultancy is to design and conduct a pragmatic process evaluation of the DELTA pilot in Kisumu and Homa Bay Counties. The evaluation will assess how DELTA has been implemented in practice relative to its intended design, identify what is working and what challenges remain across the five-component pathway, and produce findings that can directly inform model adaptation and scale-up planning. The evaluation will be grounded in the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), which organizes implementation determinants across five domains: intervention characteristics, outer setting (county and community context), inner setting (organizational and partner capacity), characteristics of individuals (peer mobilisers, CBO staff, livelihoods trainers, AGYW), and the implementation process itself. RE-AIM dimensions (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation fidelity, and Maintenance) will provide the organizing structure for communicating findings to program and scale-up audiences. Together, these frameworks will allow the evaluation to move from describing what happened to explaining why, and to identifying which factors can be modified within the current pilot and which require structural responses at scale. Specifically, the evaluation should address the following questions:

- Fidelity: To what extent is the five-component DELTA pathway being implemented as designed, and where do implementation gaps occur?

- Pathway continuity: At which stages of the DELTA pathway do AGYW disengage, and what factors drive disengagement?

- Post-training linkage: What barriers and facilitators explain the gap between training completion and structured opportunity linkage, and what adaptations could reduce this gap? - Peer mobiliser effectiveness: How is the peer mobiliser role being operationalized across different contexts, and what distinguishes high-performing mobilisers and teams from others? - Partner adoption: To what extent are CBO, TVET, and employer partners adopting their intended roles in the pathway, and what factors shape their engagement? - Contextual fit: How do county-level, community-level, and economic contextual factors enable or constrain DELTA implementation? And do AGYW perceive DELTA as acceptable and as addressing their needs? - Scale-up readiness: Which DELTA components appear most scalable, which require adaptation, and what enabling conditions would be needed for sustainable scale?

- Cost: What resources/costs are required to fully implement one round of the five component pathways?

3. Evaluation Framework and Approach

The selected consultant will propose a pragmatic mixed-methods approach suitable for the available timeframe and resources. The evaluation should build on the findings from the completed formative studies to deepen understanding of implementation dynamics. The following methodological elements are expected: 3.1 Qualitative Methods - Key informant interviews (KIIs) with a purposive sample of DELTA program staff, peer mobilisers, CBO partner staff, technical vocational education and