Deadline: 19 April 2019

The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) has announced an open competition for organizationsinterested in submitting applications for projects that focus on testing new or alternative evaluation methods to explore how they can best be applied in democracy, human rights, labor rights, and governance programming overseas.

DRL’s goal is to ensure that democracy and human rights foreign assistance policies and programs are informed by systematic evaluation and evidence, ensuring accountability to stakeholders and improving the relevance and impact for beneficiaries.

DRL’s objective is to invest in the deployment, use and testing of evaluation methods with the intent to foster a shared understanding of their utility in the field of democracy and human rights, by producing and sharing tested methods notes for use by practitioners in the field. In doing so, methods and methodologies should align with their bureau’s ongoing mission—promoting democracy, protecting human rights and international religious freedom and advancing labor rights globally.

Proposals should identify evaluation methods or methodologies that engage beneficiaries in evaluation and contribute to a broader understanding of how these methods can be applied in democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) programs. Methods may include, but are not limited to the following approaches:

• Participatory Evaluation : A wide set of methods that engage stakeholders (especially intended beneficiaries) in the design, data collection and analysis of an evaluation. This may include, but are not limited, to the use of various methods such as outcome and ripple effect mapping, storytelling approaches, and others.
• Collaborative Evaluation: Approaches that seek to limit the distance between stakeholders and evaluators in the evaluation process, by having them as active participants in it.
• Empowerment Evaluation: A participatory approach designed to provide groups with the tools and knowledge so they can monitor and evaluate their own performance
• Utilization-Focused Evaluation: An approach that focuses on primary intended users to guide decisions about how an evaluation should be conducted.
• Culturally-Responsive Evaluation: A context-aware evaluation approach that accounts for culturally relevant variables by responding to and learning from the evaluated community’s culture, life experiences, and understandings.
• Principles-Focused Evaluation: An approach used to evaluate principles-based initiatives and the extent to which they hold to those principles

Funding Information

• Award Ceiling: $300,000
• Award Floor: $50,000

Eligibility Criteria

• DRL welcomes applications from U.S.-based and foreign-based non-profit organizations/nongovernment organizations (NGO) and public international organizations; private, public, or state institutions of higher education; and for-profit organizations or businesses.
• DRL’s preference is to work with non-profit entities; however, there may be some occasions when a for-profit entity is best suited.

How to Apply

Applicants can find application forms, kits, or other materials needed to apply via given website.

For more information, please visit https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=313062