Consultant for Design & Development of MYTH Tracker Tool at Mercy Corps

Background

• Mercy Corps has been present in Nigeria since 2012, focusing its interventions on humanitarian assistance, economic development, and conflict mitigation. With the ongoing insurgency in Northeast Nigeria causing the displacement of millions of individuals, Mercy Corps started its humanitarian response in 2014 to address the rising humanitarian needs. As the crisis has persisted, Mercy Corps’ strategy has also expanded to address the root causes of the conflict and seek to build the long term resilience of communities with integrated programs focusing on governance, the recovery of markets and livelihoods, social cohesion and social protection, youth empowerment, and local conflict management.
• The GASKIYA (Hausa for ‘Truth’), Addressing COVID-19 Myths through Technology project is a Cisco-funded pilot initiative being implemented from June to October 2020.
• The overall goal of the project is to improve community-level behavioral change related to COVID-19 prevention measures through strategic risk communications in Borno State. According to a listener assessment by a local radio station in May 2020, 96% of its listeners had heard COVID-19 messaging on its station, but 45% still did not believe that COVID-19 was ‘real or deadly’. Rather, most local communities rely heavily on local myths and rumors being propagated by local leaders and over social media. As a result, current sensitization efforts around COVID-19 continue to fall short of their intended impact.
• Mercy Corps seeks to address these barriers by effectively combatting COVID-19 myths, informing strategic risk communications, and enhancing positive personal and social behaviors that can mitigate the spread of the virus in Borno State.

In order to achieve these results, Mercy Corps is undertaking three core activities:

• COVID-19 Messaging Assessment – Mercy Corps will conduct a comprehensive and community-driven assessment of community access to COVID-19 information, attitudes towards messaging content, messengers, and modalities for both factual and false information, and recommendations for improved campaigns. The results of the assessment will inform the design of subsequent myth tracking.
• Rumor Tracker Tool - Mercy Corps will pilot a digital tool that can receive and aggregate data about new rumors and conspiracy theories emerging in hard-to-reach communities, fact-check this information, and share new trends on a digital dashboard with government, humanitarian, and media stakeholders, for more effective communications campaigns.
• Participatory Analysis and Reports – Mercy Corps will also invest in the production of comprehensive, bi-monthly analysis reports that aim to synthesize information for government, media, and humanitarian stakeholders, as well as local communities themselves.

Consultancy Objectives
In line with Activity 2 above, the overall objective of this assignment is to:

• Design and develop a 2-way communication interface: This tool should enable community members to report rumors through simple voice and text options via SMS (and/or WhatsApp), accounting for local languages (Hausa and Kanuri) and issues of literacy. The tool should also enable sending of feedback to the original submitting user.
• Enable automatic compilation of a rumor database: Data coming from users should directly populate a back-end database, enabling staff moderators to perform analysis (such as risk rating, true/false designation, etc.).
• Link database to live, accessible dashboard: The database should connect to a live dashboard that can be shared publicly among key stakeholders, to present visualizations of key analysis and program recommendations.

Scope of Work
To achieve the above objectives, the consultant will perform the following tasks:

• Consult with the GASKIYA team on design of the rumor tracker tool
• Produce a design document detailing the user journey and analyst entry points
• Develop the communication interface tool and linked back-end database
• Design and develop the dashboard page
• Facilitate rapid user testing of the tool with Mercy Corps-supported community groups
• Incorporate user feedback from beta-testing period to revised tools

Deliverables and Timeframe
Key Deliverables Estimated Deadline:

• User Journey Design Document - 31st July 2020
• Rumor Tracker Tool Beta Version - 14th August 2020
• Back-end Rumor Database - 14th August 2020
• Digital Dashboard, with visualizations - 4th September 2020
• Revised Tool, Database, and Dashboard - 25th September 2020

Skills and Experience Required of the Consultant
The consultant firm or individual is expected to have the following skills and qualifications:

• Demonstrated experience developing and managing information communication technology (ICT) systems for community engagement in peacebuilding and/or development programs
• Demonstrated experience developing databases for efficient quantitative data management and analysis
• Demonstrated experience producing interactive visualizations to present data analysis
• Ability to transcribe Hausa and Kanuri language content and translate data into English.

Interested and qualified candidates should send the following documents to: mdg-procurement@mercycorps.org using the Job Title as the subject of the mail

Documents includes:

• Organizational profile (if relevant) and CVs of all key personnel
• Narrative proposal, detailing recommended approaches to develop a rumor tracker tool that will fulfill the established objectives, as well as the methodology for implementation and long-term maintenance of the tool
• Cost proposal, in line with proposed tasks and level of effort