The UNDP Country Office in the Solomon Islands is implementing a range of projects in support of Sustainable Development Goals.   At Goal 5 there is commitment to achieving gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls,   At Goal 16 there is commitment to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. Strengthening access to justice, rule of law and promoting human rights are cornerstones of UNDP’s work to achieve sustainable human development.

The Solomon Islands Access to Justice Project supports the building and strengthening of the capacity of the Public Solicitor’s Office (PSO) to enhance access to justice for the people of the Solomon Islands at national and provincial levels, including women, youth and marginalized groups in communities outside urban centers.

To achieve this initiative the A2J Project is currently implemented in two tiers:

1. The first tier introduced 14 Provincial Paralegals based in the provincial centers of Auki, Gizo, Kirakira, Lata and including Honiara where the PSO has an established office: five are based in Honiara, three in Gizo, two in Auki, one in Kirakira and one in Lata. There are plans in place to establish offices in Marau and Munda where one paralegal will be placed in each office.
2. The second tier is a pilot involving a limited number of 12 Community Legal Advocates (CLAs) - six female and six male CLAs. They are established and located in selected communities in Malaita, Western and Temotu provinces as identified with the PSO to serve as a bridge between the communities and formal justice sector.

The CLAs are based in the rural communities where they normally reside. As part of their primary role the CLAs provide a PSO presence at the rural community level, linking the community to the formal justice system.

The selected CLAs were trained and deployed to provide legal information as well as provide community awareness raising, mediation, problem solving solutions to community members and basic reporting of their required activities delivered in their respective communities.

This Terms of Reference is specifically for the purposes of strengthening the current reporting platform utilized by CLAs. As part of their current role the CLAs are required to provide monthly reports through weekly submissions of their logbooks and awareness reports to the A2J Project Management Unit. The submitted reports provide documentation of the CLAs activities including (but not limited to):

• number of community awareness conducted.
• number of communities visited through awareness.
• number of people reached through awareness.
• number of mediations facilitated by CLAs.
• number of referrals to the PSO, police, chiefs and other justice related agencies.

In light of the geographical and telecommunication challenges, currently CLAs submit their reports manually using smart phones. In certain provinces data connection and telephone signal is a significant challenge. A CLAs message group was created to facilitate CLAs’ general discussions and communications link as well as for the purposes of submission of reports. The CLAs capture digital images (photos) of their populated logbooks and post them on group with photos and attendance sheets and enquiries they mediated or referred to the PSO or other service providers. The A2J Project then downloads the images and enters data into excel for analysis. 

To enhance the CLAs’ data submission and reporting the A2J Project seeks to explore ICT mobile technology applications that would be more appropriate for rural settings, in Solomon Islands context. An application that at a minimum works on the 2G platform that is SMS based via using the application. 

The A2J Project seeks to engage the services of an experienced technical specialist in ICT technologies and mobile application development for smart phones. Specifically, someone who has proven and demonstrated experience in developing data collection and reporting applications based on SMS messaging platform. The Application Developer will be required to scope, design, develop and implement a new data collection, recording and reporting system. It will include the scoping, design, development, testing, training and implementation of several interlinked ICT applications and technologies:

• A smart phone-based data collection, recording and reporting application for CLAs (CLAs Data App).
• A smart phone-based gateway application to receive and analyse data.
• An automated data presentation dashboard hosted on a server that could be migrated to other servers in the future.

The new CLAs Data App will complement the existing platform to enable timely data submission and enhance data availability for analysis in real time.    

1. Key Objective

The key objective is to set up a simple and more integrated digital ICT based platform that will collect, store and display data sent by CLAs. This new system will include a new smart phone based CLAs Data App that an Application Developer will design, develop and implement in close consultation with the A2J Project Management Unit. The App will be installed on the CLAs’ smart phones. This new CLAs Data App will have predefined fields that CLAs will require to fill out and send over SMS through to a data gateway. The data gateway will automatically send all data to a centralized web-based dashboard that will store and display the data. 

Interested individual consultants must submit the following documents/information to demonstrate their qualifications. Please group them into one (1) single PDF document as the application only allows to upload maximum one document:

• Letter of Confirmation of Interest and Availability using the template provided in Annex II.
• Personal CV or P11, indicating all past experience from similar projects, as well as the contact details (email and telephone number) of the Candidate and at least three (3) professional references.
• Financial proposal, as per template provided in Annex II. Note: International consultants must quote prices in USD.
• High quality reports in English: Candidates should submit 2-3 reports in respect of criteria 5 above.

Proposals should be submitted to the Procurement Unit, UNDP Country Office, by e-mail to [email protected] till 29 September 2021