CoST seeks team of experts to carry out external review of programme

| CoST International

The CoST International Secretariat is seeking a team of experts to carry out an external review of CoST, the Infrastructure Transparency Initiative on behalf of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MinBuZa).

CoST is a UK registered charity with a Board of Trustees that has outsourced the management of the programme to Engineers Against Poverty. DFID is providing up to £7 million to CoST between April 2015 and July 2020 as part of the Infrastructure for Cities and Economic Development Programme (ICED). MinBuZa is providing €1m between October 2018 and December 2021 as part of its economic development programme. This second contribution to CoST follows a similar grant between July 2014 and December 2017.

In July 2020, DFID’s funding to CoST will come to an end. There is therefore a need to conduct a review to assess CoST with regard to its relevance; effectiveness; efficiency; impact; sustainability; complementarity and help inform a decision about further support beyond 2020.

The deadline for proposals is 10am UK time Monday 20th May 2019. Please email proposals to John Hawkins, CoST International Secretariat Head of Programmes at j.hawkins@infrastructuretransparency.org. Please contact John for any clarifications or further information (+44 (0)20 3206 0489).

Following receipt of several questions about the Terms of Reference for the review, we would like to publish the following clarifications:

  • Please disregard the timelines in section 7 and use the indicative timeline in section 6.
  • We have received several queries about the potential CoST members that should be included as case studies. We would suggest that you consider 3-4 countries with a reasonable geographical spread that also reflects DFID and MinBUZA priority countries. For example, 1 Latin America, 1 Europe / Asia, 1-2 Africa, 2 DFID and 1 MinBuZA. Ultimately, we are open to different ideas and options about how this is carried out within the available budget.

Please download the full terms of reference here.