GHN TEGA TECHNOLOGY PARTNER at Girl Hub Nigeria

THE NORTHERN NIGERIA LANDSCAPE.

The security situation in northern Nigeria is volatile, and continues to worsen.

The need to support the Northern Nigerian girl increases in correlation. For example, according to the DFID funded Gender in Nigeria Report 2012, Nigeria has the largest number of out-of-school children in the world, with the highest number of illerate and out of school girls based in the North. (70.8% of young women aged 20-29 in the Northwest are unable to read or write vs. 9.7% in the Southeast).

THE PROJECT.

TEGA, a bespoke GHN initiative, has been designed, and successfully piloted as a methodology that allows us to safely access girls and her world and gather authentic insights.

TEGA is Northern Nigeria’s first, and to date, only youth, mobile-based peer-to-peer research network.

It is designed to enable us, and our like-minded partners to gain a safe, authentic insight into this hard-to-reach audience. This insight enables and catalyses accurately designed interventions, programs, assets, and services that meet the current needs of Northern Nigeria’s most vulnerable girl.

TEGA currently comprises of 20 girls, each of whom research 4-6 vulnerable girls. Via modified mobile devices, we disseminate research tasks to her, She captures her findings via video and photo content, delivers them to us via an app.

The TEGA programme has been successfully piloted over 5 weeks.

During this period, 20 TEGAs embraced their new roles with gusto and created over 1500 videos and 600 photos.

This collective body of content has given us the most comprehensive intimate and authentic insights of the Arewa (Northern) girl we have ever encountered;

Previously and consistently, our understanding of the Arewa girl gained via first hand ethnographic experiences indicated she was compliant, obedient and shy.

The content we received via our TEGA’s showed us the Arewa girl we had never seen before; mischievous, confident, wily, sassy, loud and opinionated and rebellious. The removal of our presence, and subsequent research effect, allowed more openness and honesty

The TEGA offering is unique. No other network exists in Northern Nigeria that allows access safe insight into the Arewa girl.

SCOPE OF WORK

Girl Hub Nigeria seeks to identify a technology partner for the TEGA initiative.

Technology sits at the heart of the TEGA operation. It can adequately substitute the need for our presence, and the inevitable research effect and security risks it provokes.

The partner’s role is to advise, identify and produce all TEGA technology requirements. The partner’s responsibility is to ensure we are, at all times, utilizing the safest, most effective and most cost efficient technology solutions available in the market.

Technology will be used to:

1) Capacity build TEGAs.
2) Communicate with TEGAs and provide feedback.
3) Disseminate research tasks to TEGAs.
4) Capture and share findings.

We will preference approaches that build off of open modules and platforms and that minimize the need for bespoke development.

Our specific requirements include;

CONTENT CREATION AND SHARING
TEGAs to create content (video, text, and photo)
Content to be uploaded to video archive library
Content to be labelled/tagged
Analysis/commentary to be added to support/further explain content.
Instant feedback loop to TEGA

CONTENT LIBRARY
Create of a secure, encrypted, library to house all content created by TEGAs accessible to GH/NF and partners wishing to access the content.
Content to be searched for by TEGA, location, tag and time.
Alerts/notifications sent to relevant stakeholders when content is uploaded.
Recommendations for programmatic automatic video and audio translation from Hausa, (the dominant language spoken by TEGAs and peers) to English text in the digital or analogue way will be explored.
Create an automatically updateable dashboard to quickly analyse basic data (inclusive of geo- locational and demographic data).
We would like to understand what other useful, insightful passive data we can capture - such as location, journeys made and time stamps.

TECH ADVISOR
Be our hardware advisor and conduct rigorous audits of to identify the best options
Provide thoughtful, recommendations for the right hardware (i.e. mobile phones) we should deploy to our TEGAs
Advise on network provider options and negotiate to obtain the best rates/most cost effective approach

ONGOING MANAGMENT
Maintain, integrate, evolve and troubleshoot the back-end technology infrastructure

KEY SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Evidence of similar work and where it has worked especially in Africa/Nigeria.
• Knowledge of the Nigeria Internet environment specifically in Northern Nigeria.
• Understanding of online data management and trends in data or information.
• Excellent oral, written, presentation and communications skills in English.

DELIVERABLES

· Devise/identify/utilize a scalable technology platform to meet our unique needs that leverages existing low cost systems/tools/code, integrates with existing Girl Effect platforms where possible. For scalability, the agency should identify a low cost platform.
· A GHN TEGA communication app that works for Nigeria environment and on a wide range of mobile devices
· A virtual library linked with the App accessible to the owner with ability to share or transfer ownership
· Delivery of training to at least 4 relevant GHN staff and 20 TEGA on usage of the application and the virtual library.
· Software that analyze large data (translation will be an added advantage).
· A period or retainership for troubleshooting.
· In view of constantly evolving technology, the App should be capable of working on either smart phones, or simple feature mobile phones using either a Wi-Fi or a 3G network.