Expert Pool for Adaptive Social Protection in Pakistan

The German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has commissioned the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH to implement the project "Adaptive Social Protection in Pakistan" (ASP). It builds on the results of the ongoing GIZ Pakistan Social Protection - Social Health Protection (SP-SHP) project implemented since 2016. The objective of the new ASP project is to sustainably improve living conditions for Pakistan"s poor and vulnerable population by strengthening the social protection system and expanding it to mitigate crises caused by climate change and other factors. It aims at improving the institutional, financial, and technical conditions for implementing adaptive and gender-transformative social protection in Pakistan and is going to foster coordination and cooperation between social protection and disaster risk management as well as climate actors. The project contributes to developing capacities and improving capabilities and promoting organisational development in Pakistan, as well as achieving better coordination and policymaking across executing agencies and programmes. It works with numerous government partners at the different administrative levels. At the federal level, it supports the Ministry for Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety (MoPASS), the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), the Ministry of Climate Change (MoCC) and the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). At the provincial level, the project operates in three provinces - Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh. Here it supports the Social Protection Authorities/responsible units and departments for Social Protection as well as the Provincial Disaster Risk Management Authorities (PDMAs). The project focuses on five main intervention areas: 1. Strengthening the institutional and financial foundations of the adaptive social protection system 2. Providing better access to adaptive social protection programmes especially for women 3. Improving technical and institutional conditions for regular data exchange on planning and implementing adaptive social protection programmes 4. Integrating social protection into disaster management practices 5. Promoting social protection programmes for climate change adaptation. The target groups of the project are the experts, managers and practitioners responsible for the effective implementation of adaptive social protection measures in the partner structures at federal and provincial level. The partner practitioners act as intermediaries for the Pakistani population, who benefit from better access to adaptive social protection in the medium to long term. The programme focuses in particular on poor families and families at risk of poverty, with a specific focus on women. In order to support the government partners in building adaptive social protection systems, timely, thorough and flexible expertise and advisory services needs to be provided to them depending on their needs and adapting to the (often rapidly) changing environment often caused by climate change. Hence, the GIZ project seeks to engage a highly qualified consulting firm or a consortium of firms (the "Consultant") to support the achievement of the project objectives.