Safety, Support and Solutions Phase II Programme (SSS II) is the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) Migration and Modern Slavery Department’s flagship migration and protection programme in North and West Africa. It aims to improve safety and living conditions for migrants in 13 North and Sub-Saharan African countries along the Central Mediterranean Route, whilst also generating evidence on what works to affect migrant choices.

Integrity leads a consortium of four partners to implement the two-year Independent Monitoring and Rapid Research and Evidence Facility (IMREF) project for SSS II. IMREF aims to support FCDO and its implementing partners to better understand how SSS II is performing, thereby building accountability and facilitating learning across the programme, whilst also generating evidence to inform future UK interventions.

To achieve its objectives, the IMREF project conducts verification visits of remote implementation sites in Mali and Libya, which are inaccessible to FCDO and many key implementing partner staff, providing FCDO and implementing partners with a critical insight into the results which are being achieved. IMREF also conducts assessments of implementing partners Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) systems, providing tailored recommendations to support implementing partners to improve their MEL systems – including their tools for capturing beneficiary feedback, and monitoring and responding to conflict sensitivity and gender and social inclusion issues. Finally, IMREF produces rapid research across SSS II geographies to respond to key evidence gaps and delivers learning activities to support dissemination and uptake of key lessons generated across SSS II and through all IMREF activities.

In order to deliver these activities and achieve IMREF’s objectives, Integrity has built a team of senior consultants and expert consortium partners with the required technical expertise and thematic and geographic specialization and access. In particular, the project requires a team of MEL experts with sufficient experience in humanitarian programming to provide credible, contextually relevant, and actionable recommendations to FCDO and its implementing partners. The research and learning workstreams require a nuanced understanding of migration programming in order to deliver research which can inform programme strategy and policy making decisions and add value in a saturated space.