The Indonesia Higher Education, Leadership and Management (HELM) project is a five-year, USAID implemented project in Indonesia. This project will provide technical assistance to strengthen the capacity of Indonesian higher education institutions to perform effectively in four core areas: financial management; general administration and management; quality assurance; and collaboration with external stakeholders. These core management areas have been selected after thorough consultation with the Directorate General for Higher Education (DIKTI) at the Ministry of Education and Culture (MOEC). These areas are critical to enabling institutions to adopt, deliver and sustain quality teaching, research and service. Absent such capacity strengthening, it is difficult to see how the targeted higher education institutions will make and sustain major improvements in how well they prepare students for success in learning and work.
Part of the HELM project involves assessing the adequacy of the existing student financial assistance system (loans and grants) for reaching the government's participation and access goals and making recommendations for its further improvement. In order to make effective policy recommendations, more knowledge is required about the extent and scale of financial barriers to higher education and the size of the potential market for student loans. This Request for Proposals (RFP) asks for assistance of a qualified Indonesian firm for assistance in gathering data to answer these questions.
The Request for Proposals contains three distinct projects (please the Statements of Work, below). Bidders are encouraged to put forward proposals on all three projects; however, each proposal will be judged separately and contracts for each may be awarded to different firms.
INSTRUCTION TO BIDDERS
Bidders may submit proposals on all three projects, but they will be evaluated separately. Bidders are thus requested to send and label their proposals separately, using the titles "Project 1", "Project 2" and "Project 3".
Bidders are requested to submit their bids in English.
Bidders are requested to clearly address the following areas in their proposals:
Project Team. Please include Curriculum Vitae for all team members involved in the project.
Relevant Prior Experience. Please provide details of previous projects on which your firm, or project members working individually, have completed which are relevant to this project. This could either be projects in related policy areas (e.g. youth, education) or projects with similar methodologies (e.g. national-scale survey work)
Writing Sample. Please provide a copy of a previous report which your firm has worked on. Works in English are preferred, but not required.
Methodology and Project Plan. Proposals will be judged on the quality and rigor of their proposed methodology and Project plan. Particular attention will be paid to how interim deliverables and project milestones are articulated.
Allocation of Effort. When drafting the Project Plan, bidders are requested to clearly indicate the roles that each team member will play, as well as the expected hours they will spend on various stages of the project.
Price. Detailed breakdowns of costs are required for each project. Joint costing across projects is not permitted.
Projects will be judged according to their ability to provide us with a high-quality product at a reasonable price within the time frames provided. We reserve the right not to offer a contract to the cheapest or indeed to any bidder.
Interested bidders are requested to be available at any time during the period Tuesday 17 April – Thursday 19 April for interviews in Jakarta.The winning proponents will be contacted no later than Thursday 19 April, 2012. Successful proponents must be available for meetings with the client in Jakarta on Friday, April 20, 2012.
Research Questions: What are the costs – both direct and indirect – that Indonesian students face in attending university? How do Indonesian university students finance their education? Who currently makes use of loans to cover the cost of education? How do students feel about borrowing for their education?
Preferred Methodology: A quantitative survey of currently-enrolled university students. The sample need not be fully nationally representative, but must cover students at multiple institutions in both private and public universities, have a reasonably diverse geographical coverage (i.e. not just Jakarta or Java), and – most importantly -have good representation of students from lower-income backgrounds. Vendors may make recommendations with respect to sample size, and strategies for sample acquisition, but provided a reasonably diverse sample is assembled, we would expect that samples over 2500 would not be necessary.
The survey instrument will be based on questionnaires used for similar purposes in North America and Europe; the successful vendor will be required to assist in "Indonesianizing" the instrument so that it is useful in the local context.
Outputs and Timeline. A vendor will be selected during the week of April 16-20, 2012. Successful vendors will be required to complete the implementation of the survey, provide a full-cleaned SPSS file with the results, as well as a report containing simple frequency tables, by no later than June 30, 2012. Vendors will be required to submit short weekly progress reports throughout the duration of the project.
PROJECT 2: Interviews with Sekolah Menengah Atas students
Research Questions: What do secondary students with above-average academic records, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, think about higher education? What are their educational ambitions? What barriers do they see to achieving these ambitions? How do they feel about borrowing in order to continue their education?
Preferred Methodology: Individual interviews with secondary school students. For reasons of cost-effectiveness, subjects should be drawn from a limited number of sites, but these sites need to be relatively diverse; some rural, some urban, and some of which must be outside Java. Because we are looking at barriers to education, the target sample should be drawn with an eye to ensuring that a large proportion of subjects are capable of succeeding in higher education but are likely to face financial barriers to doing so.
Vendors are to make recommendations with respect to sample size and strategies for sample acquisition, but ordinarily, we would not expect a project of this nature to require more than 100 interviews.
Vendors will be expected to collaborate with the client on developing the discussion guide for the interviews.
Outputs and Timeline. A vendor will be selected during the week of April 16-20, 2012. Successful vendors will be required to complete the implementation of the interviews, and provide a full report on the same, by no later than June 30, 2012. Vendors will be required to submit short weekly progress reports throughout the duration of the project.
PROJECT 3: Interviews with School Principals and Senior Teachers at Sekolah Menengah Atas
Research Questions: What do secondary students with above-average academic records from poorer backgrounds do after they complete secondary school? How many of them end up in universities or polytechnics? How many of them who have the skills to proceed are prevented from doing so for financial reasons? What do students prevented from going on to higher education end up doing instead?
Preferred Methodology: Individual interviews with secondary school officials – either school heads or senior teachers. The position the individual holds is less important than their familiarity with what students go on to do after school. For reasons of cost-effectiveness, subjects should be drawn from a limited number of sites, but these sites need to be relatively diverse; some rural, some urban, and some of which must be outside Java. Vendors are to make recommendations with respect to sample size and strategies for sample acquisition, but ordinarily, we would not expect a project of this nature to require more than 50 interviews.
Vendors will be expected to collaborate with the client on developing the discussion guide for the interviews.
Outputs and Timeline. A vendor will be selected during the week of April 16-20, 2012. Successful vendors will be required to complete the implementation of the interviews, and provide a full report on the same, by no later than June 30, 2012. Vendors will be required to submit short weekly progress reports throughout the duration of the project.
--
JOB VACANCIES INFORMATION CENTER
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indojob
JOKMATIC - THE FIRST IN THE WORLD!
http://www.indojob.co.id/jokmatic/
######################################
No comments:
Post a Comment