Request for Proposal (RFP) - Country Learning Hub Partners for Immunization Equity at Gavi The Vaccine Alliance

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is a public-private partnership that helps vaccinate half the world’s children against some of the world’s deadliest diseases. The Vaccine Alliance brings together developing country and donor governments, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, the vaccine industry, technical agencies, civil society, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private sector partners.

Since its inception in 2000, Gavi has helped immunise a whole generation – over 822 million children – and prevented more than 14 million deaths, helping to halve child mortality in 73 developing countries. Gavi also plays a key role in improving global health security by supporting health systems as well as funding global stockpiles for Ebola, cholera, meningitis and yellow fever vaccines.

Applications are invited for:

Title:Request for Proposal (RFP) - Country Learning Hub Partners for Immunization Equity in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and Bangladesh

Reference No: 055-2022-GAVI-RFP

RFP Background and Context
Equity is the organising principle of Gavi 5.0, with a critical focus on reaching zero-dose (i.e., unreached with routine immunisation) and under-immunised children and missed communities with immunisation. This is also a key priority for the global community Immunization Agenda 2030, which was endorsed by the World Health Assembly in May 2020. Reaching children with a first vaccine is an important step to bringing children toward full vaccination as children who have been reached tend to receive several vaccines.Reaching the communities where these children live is important as are at risk for disease outbreaks and often deprived of other basic health services. This will entail working in collaboration across governments, international agencies, and civil society.

To reduce inequities, including gender, in accessing immunisation, the focus of Gavi’s support is to build and strengthen immunisation services that sustainably reach children and communities who are missed by immunisation and other critical health services.

Challenges to increasing equity and reaching zero-dose children and missed communities, and bringing them into the health system requires an understanding of subnational country contexts and addressing those specific barriers. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation with disruptions to routine immunisation services and health worker availability, declines in vaccine administration, and interrupted supply.Zero-dose children and missed communities exist in many geographic settings. Approximately 45% of the 9.7 million zero-dose children live in urban/peri-urban, remote rural, or conflict settings, while the remaining are in non-specific settings. Zero-dose children are more likely to live in extreme poverty and in communities that experience high child mortality and maternal deaths.

The underlying causes for a child to be zero-dose include socio-economic factors, barriers and vulnerabilities related to poverty, conflict, force migration, homelessness and religious or cultural marginalisation. There may be gaps in delivering primary health care services and important gender barriers. Successfully reaching zero-dose children and under-immunized differentiated, targeted sub-national strategies and a strong learning agenda.

The learning hubs are a key component of the zero-dose learning agenda to enable country-level learning, programmatic course correction, capacity building, and accountability. The learning hubs along with zero-dose case studies, and countries’ M&L plans, and analytics come together at the global level to share learning across countries, improve immunization program policies and guidance, improve Gavi’s ability to describe how progress is occurring in the 5.0 strategic period, and inform Gavi mid-term and zero-dose evaluations.

Gavi Zero-Dose Country Learning Hubs
The purpose of the RFP is to identify and select a partner or consortium of partners to implement the learning hubs in each of the following countries: Mali, Nigeria, Somalia,and Bangladesh.The intention is to make four awards, one for each country. Bidders should submit one proposal (technical and financial) per country. Partners may lead or be a sub-partner on more than one bid. The make-up of the lead partner and any sub-partners should be suitable to the country. Each proposal will be evaluated against other proposals submitted for the same country. A bidder may win more than one award and implement the project in more than one country subject to bidders’ capacity to run multiple projects in parallel.

The Learning Hubs in each of Mali, Nigeria, Somalia,and Bangladesh will provide systematic and robust monitoring and learning for the IRMMA interventions by working in conjunction with the government, local academic institutions, and civil society organizations (CSOs) in order to maximize data use and learning.

Objectives
The objectives of the country-level learning hubs are to:

• Generate and synthesize learning on the barriers to children being reached to influence programme planning and tailored approaches to identify and reach zero-dose children and missed communities.
• Strengthen the evidence base of effective approaches to identify and reach zero-dose children and missed communities by understanding what works, should be scaled up, and what does not work and to do so in a timely, iterative manner.
• Improve metrics, measures, and methods to access and use data on a regular basis to improve reaching zero-dose children and missed communities.

The Learning Hub activities will be focused in targeted, subnational areas where there are high numbers of zero-dose children and where there are planned or ongoing activities to identify and reach zero-dose children and missed communities with immunization.Learning hub activities in targeted,subnational areas with high proportions and number of zero-dose children will be important to learn about methods for improving identification, reach, and monitoring and measurement. These activities should be aligned with national-level strategies and contribute to filling country-identified information gaps.

The design of the learning hubs is guided by the following principles:

• Tools and methods address specific zero-dose questions aligned with the IRMMA framework within the Gavi 5.0 equity learning priorities, across a diversity of settings (e.g., urban, extreme rural, conflict, and other settings where more than 50% of zero-dose children are located), in a prospective manner, and employing processes to regularly review data and learning about what works to provide timely information for course correction and in Gavi 5.0.
• Strong engagement with local institutions connected to all bodies governing and implementing Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) and ensure country-level collaboration and buy in and joint alignment with country priority questions, capacity strengthening needs, and programme plans and processes.
• Gavi resources, learning hubs and global learning partner activities augment and build on other investments (including other Gavi and non-Gavi resources) and activities.
• Learning hubs are implemented at country-level by learning partner(s) with in-country presence and with established, trusted relationships in place, including capacity strengthening (e.g., local research and technical institutes, embedded model, etc.), and with potentially sustainable approaches.
• Managed by Gavi to ensure Secretariat and Alliance learning needs are met through strong feedback loops between in-country partners, country-level learning partners, and regional and global immunization partners in order to bring learning together with clear, usable examples of successes and failures.
• Learning is augmented by a global learning partner who will provide targeted capacity reinforcement and synthesize and share learning to and from country learning hubs and across other initiatives at the global level.

Part of the role of the country learning hub provider is to facilitate the development of country-led processes to focus and tailor the learning priorities (below) to the
country-specific context and priorities for each of Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, and Bangladesh.

Qualifying Criteria

• Bidders must provide a copy of their Corporate Social Responsibility Policy or documentation to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability, diversity, inclusion and the environment
• Bidders must be able to provide at least 3 reference contacts within their proposal

Application Closing Date
23rd May, 2022.

Submission of Proposals
Bidders must submit a copy of their Proposal to Gavi by email to: procurement@gavi.org

Note

• The subject heading of the email shall be "055-2022-GAVI-RFP - Technical Proposal - [Bidder Name]” and “055-2022-GAVI-RFP- Financial Proposal - [Bidder Name]".
• Bidders may submit multiple emails (suitably annotated - e.g. Email 1 of 3) if the attached files are too large to suit a single email transmission.
• Please ensure that the different Proposal elements are returned in either MS Office Format or PDF.

Click Here (MS WORD) for a detailed description of the RFP.