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Monitoring & Evaluation Research of the MideastCreatives Project

Terms of Reference for Part-time Impact Evaluation Researchers

in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia
 

About the Assignment:

Istebdaa’, LLC is a Consultancy & Research Company specialized in innovation management and it is based in Cairo. It was appointed to conduct an impact evaluation study on ”Mideast Creatives,” a regional development program supporting co-working spaces in the MENA region. By assisting co-working spaces in these countries in reaching their financial sustainability, Mideast Creatives aims to support creative and innovation-intensive start-ups (hosted in these spaces) for a more sustainable job creation, growth and cross-collaboration among the creative sector. This is to be achieved by means of providing support to collaborative workspaces and incubators, setting up training programmes for entrepreneurs in the aligned industries and finally improving their access to finance.

Objectives of the Research Project:

The aim of the 2-year impact evaluation research is as follows:

• Filling the knowledge gap about the “coworking” culture in the Arab world
• Serving policy makers, managers/founders of coworking spaces and researchers from the region in identifying challenges and opportunities of coworking spaces.
• Providing co-working spaces founders & community managers a social network analysis of their hosted startups, and providing an analysis on what are the clusters that are being created and in which field of business, type of startups… to help them identify the segment they are attracting.
• Providing and engaging policy makers with evidence-based policy recommendation on the effectiveness of incubation and clustering in the MENA region
• Providing advice to the Mideast Creatives team on the implementation of their program in order to refine and adjust it based on the needs and the feedback from startups.
• Presenting the results of the research in a regional conference by end of 2016.

Responsibility of the Local Researcher:

Each local researcher will be assigned to his country of residence (namely Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan or Tunisia) and he/she will work within the regional research team and under the guidance and supervision of the Lead Researcher. The expected responsibilities of the local researcher will be as follows:

• Prepare and execute data collection, analysis and interpretation using a harmonized methodology with his other peers in other countries (by end of January 2014)
• Conduct a baseline survey and write a country report on the status of incubator spaces (by end of February 2014).

• Prepare a regular short country research briefs about the updates of the coworking spaces every 4 months
• Write up yearly monitoring reports in accordance to research guidelines.
• Contribute to final regional report and present the country-specific results in the final conference
• Act as feedback loop between the coworking space and Mideast Creatives (e.g. reporting back any research findings that might affect the program implementation).

Requirements:

• Passion in research in one or more of the following fields: Economics, Business Management, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Social Network Analysis, and/or Statistics.
• Proven academic or business analytical skills.
• Good knowledge of the co-working and incubation eco-system in the assigned country.
• Fluent Arabic and English written and spoken skills. French is a plus, but required for applicants from Tunisia.
• Time commitment and ability to travel either within or outside their country of residence.
• Resident of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon or Tunisia.

Workload:

The research will be conducted on period of at least 2 years. The local researcher is required to demonstrate high commitment as a part-time researcher during this period.  The workload will vary during this period depending on the expected deliverables, therefore the candidate should be flexible in his time allocation, but on average, the local researcher will be asked to dedicate 10 days per quarter for this assignment.

The local researchers will be meeting frequently during the project and will be provided guidance by the lead researcher.

Application:

If you are interested enough, kindly send your CV to info@istebdaa.org as soon as possible. Kindly provide also a motivation letter of 1 page maximum explaining the reason behind your interest in the subject of the research. Only selected researchers will be invited for an interview.