81268299-Establishment of a Third-Party-Monitoringsystem in the Liptako-Gourma Region

Since 2015, the Liptako-Gourma region comprising of the border triangle of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, has increasingly become the epicenter of the escalating violence in the wider Sahel. In Burkina Faso alone, more than one million people have been displaced from their homes due to the complex compound of political grievances, competition over natural resources, organized crime, inter and intra-communal conflicts and a growing influence of jihadi ideology and de facto control over territory by non-state actors. Years of national and international efforts to curb the underlying factors such as poverty, historical marginalization of the peripheries, and the exacerbating effects of climate change, have been undermined and access to the most vulnerable populations for humanitarian actors have grown increasingly difficult. Additionally, national security actors have repeatedly accused humanitarian actors of supporting terrorists, while human rights organizations have blamed security actors of indiscriminate killing of civilians. With regard to the situation described above, the Federal Foreign Office (FFO) has strengthened its stabilization engagement in the Liptako-Gurma region in recent years through a variety of instruments. In particular, the recently launched pilot phase of a stabilization facility by UNDP in close cooperation with the Liptako-Gourma Authority is a promising tool for bringing together key players from important political, security, and social fields on the ground. However, due to the tense security situation, the presence as well as on-site visits of FFO staff or staff of implementing organizations in project regions is often not possible. Therefore, the overall objective of the consultancy is to provide a political monitoring system with a geographical focus on (but not exclusively limited to) (1) Burkina Faso, Sahel region and (2) Niger, Tahoua and Tillaberi regions that allows FFO to: 1) Better manage/monitor the implementation of its projects, particularly in terms of compliance with policy red lines e.g. indirect terrorist financing; 2) Identify relevant conflict dynamics and risks at an early stage in order to take appropriate action. The monitoring of dynamics relevant to foreign policy is not a standard TPM service that is limited, for example, to the review of aid deliveries or individual project activities. Rather, the focus is on monitoring factors relevant to foreign policy red lines and project management, e.g., in the area of terrorist financing or the capture of implementing partners by terrorist currents. This means that TPM data, surveys, and reports must be focused on the needs and issues of the FFO, not on individual projects. In this context, the service provider is not expected to provide conclusive answers to all questions addressed to it. However, the service provider should very well be able to indicate the degree of probability or even limitations in answering the questions. This type of monitoring or reporting requires a strong expertise and ability to critically evaluate, analyze, and prepare data in a way that can be used for operational decision making in FFO project work.