INTRODUCTION

CARE is an international NGO with local staff and community partners in 100 countries. We create local solutions to poverty and inequality and we seek dignity for everyone every day and during times of crisis.  These solutions have a broad range, from disaster response to food and nutrition to education and work for women and girls to healthy mothers and children. CARE puts women and girls at the center of everything we do because when they have equal access to resources, they lift their families and communities out of poverty. Our staff live where they work, which makes us effective at understanding the challenges they face. We’ve been doing this for 75 years, since World War II. It started with the world’s first CARE Package® of food for the post-war hungry in Europe. Our work today is as important as ever, we believe that poverty and inequality are historic injustices that we can end within a generation, for good. If you share our core beliefs: poverty is an injustice; poverty is solvable; and together, we have the power to end it, join us, and Fight with CARE.

In Sudan, Care is leading the implementation of a new USAID-funded project, MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience (MIHR), with IMA World Health, and JSI Research and Training Institute. At the global level, IMA has been awarded a Cooperative Agreement from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to lead the MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience (MIHR), a five-year global project working in fragile settings to strengthen quality maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH), voluntary family planning (FP), and reproductive health (RH) care and service delivery, to reduce maternal, newborn, and child mortality and morbidity and increase the health resilience of families, communities, and nation-states. Care is a sub-partner under this award, and the lead implementing partner for MIHR’s work in Sudan. In Sudan, MIHR will work in one state to improve the readiness, availability, quality, and utilization of maternal, newborn, health (MNH) and WASH services; improve the governance and accountability of health systems; and increase the adoption of healthy behaviors and demand for health services, with the goal of a more resilient health system that supports improved health outcomes.  

Working in complex environments while sequencing, layering, and integrating public health activities across the humanitarian development nexus requires in-depth contextual awareness for effective programming. To initiate work in these fragile settings, MIHR has created the F2C (Fragility, Crisis, Complexity) combined assessment tool that will inform the project design and monitoring systems for crisis-sensitive and complexity-aware programming.

Issuance of this RFA does not constitute an award commitment on the part of CARE nor does it commit CARE to pay for costs incurred in the preparation and submission of an application. Further, CARE reserves the right to reject any or all applications received. 

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES OF THE ASSIGNMENT

The purpose of this assessment is to better understand the context where MIHR will work in Sudan, specific shocks (including conflict and other crises), and stresses that are both more likely in fragile settings and perpetuate fragility. This information will enable MIHR/Sudan to initiate evidence-based crisis-sensitive interventions that build resilience through strengthening absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacity. Information will also inform monitoring systems that allow MIHR/Sudan to track the context surrounding the project’s interventions at the district, facility, and community levels.