Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
Ministry of Education
Education Quality Improvement Project- EQUIP II
REQUEST FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST
(CONSULTANCY SERVICES – FIRMS SELECTION)
COUNTRY:
NAME OF PROJECT:
Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
Education Quality Improvement Project- EQUIP II
Assignment Title: Consultancy Services for developing a Human Resource / Teachers Management
Information System (HTMIS).
Date of Issuance:
June 30, 2014
Date of closing: Reference No. :
July 15, 2014
Grant No:
Project ID:
MoE /EQUIP -II/QCBS-29
TF093962-AF
P106259
The Ministry of Education of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has received financing from
Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) / administered by the World Bank, towards the cost of
Education support, and intends to apply part of the proceeds for above mentioned consulting services
briefly illustrated as follows:
OBJECTIVES OF THE ASSIGNMETN:
The objectives of the assignment are to:
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HTMIS will be a web-enabled system ensuring transparency in every aspect of employees,
teachers and school administrators’ management.
HTMIS will ensure easy accessibility to the system for all the stakeholders.
A centralized database of employees, teachers and school administrators, regularly updated through
a web interface shall make employees, teacher and school administrator management
(accountability, incentives, career ladder, postings and transfers) easy and effective.
HTMIS will be enabled to store information of TTC (Teacher Training Colleges) students for
current and past 40 years, and generate their transcripts and ease the hiring process.
This system should also support TTC management and TTC students’ management to explore
synthesized guidelines for policy makers related to planning for development and sustainability of
Teachers Training Colleges (TTC), and to manage students’ related data including transferring
students’ from/to TTCs, TTC Pre-Service students recruitment in schools as a teacher and etc.
It will enable identification of all employees, teachers and school administrators through allocation
of a unique ID as well as availability of Photo IDs for all on the database.
The system should be able cater to Pashto and Dari language requirements of Government of
Afghanistan. The system should be localized to Afghanistan’s official languages.
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Possible linkages to the Treasury and payment system shall ensure that fake records and ghost
teacher and school administrator problems are reduced to the minimum. Movement of employees,
teachers and school administrators between districts and schools shall be facilitated and timely
actions will be initiated to ensure seamless transition of teachers and school administrators.
HTMIS will be able to integrate with existing EMIS and other MISs within MoE.
SPECIFIC TASKS:
The assignment includes the following specific tasks:
a) SMS Mapping and situation analyses:
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Data Center Creation: The data center for the proposed application shall house servers
for web enablement, application hosting, database management, antivirus protection as well
as security services. This server software will either be hosted on servers installed in the
racks at the MoE Data Centre. While the overall system architecture is shown in the
description of services chapter, detailed design shall emerge at the time of actual
implementation. Consultants are encouraged to bring out specific data center architecture
complete with server / network component, system software specifications. Government
of Afghanistan, Ministry of Education already operates a state of the art data centre and all
the servers required for the current application are expected to be hosted through this data
centre.
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Application Software Customization / Development, Testing & Roll out. The features
required for the Human Resource / Teachers Management Information System (HTMIS)
are in the nature of human resource management systems. Several solutions with
customization are expected to be available with many “Custom off the Shelf Software
(COTS)” solution providers /developers. It is therefore advisable that a ready-made
application with appropriate customization be implemented for the purpose of HTMIS. A
well written Software Requirements Specification document is likely to capture all the
needs of such an application succinctly and is likely to result in the customization of a
system that fully meets the expectations of all the stakeholders.
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Data Gathering and Management: Currently there are close to250,000 employees of
which 190,000 are teachers and over 20,000 are school administrators in the Government.
Another 10,000 teachers are expected to be added to this number in the current financial
year to take the total number of teachers to 200,000. Administrative & Financial data
pertaining to all the teachers in the Government (Including pictorial data capturing every
teacher Photographs) is likely to occupy a large storage space. Such a data management
shall require data capture, data migration (Existing data available in the current Schools
Management Information system), data digitization, data entry, data authenticity &
Verification and finally data warehousing. Such a data gathering and management exercise
needs to be carefully planned and executed to make the system operational and useful in a
short time.
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Networking and Bandwidth Provisioning: Web enabling HTMIS will mean creation of
a data center that shall connect to the rest of the world via the World Wide Web. This shall
require availability of communications bandwidth at the data center. For a good
connectivity speed it is estimated that an initial bandwidth of 2Mbps (Mega Bits Per
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Second) is considered adequate. The Data Centre at MoE shall provide the rack space and
the network equipment along with the bandwidth. However, the selected vendors shall be
required to provide all the servers required for the project..
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Maintenance & Facility Management: The developed infrastructure for the HTMIS
project will need regular maintenance as well as facility management. The facility
management component shall include user management, data management, application
management etc. The maintenance component will include system and application software
maintenance, hardware maintenance, network hardware maintenance and bandwidth
management, power backup management etc. These components are likely to be absorbed
in the warranty maintenance clause of the project in the first year. However from the
subsequent years the component will require specific cost provisions, which should be
included by the bidders in the cost estimates.
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Training and capacity Building. To efficiently operate the developed system the
department of education will require enhancing its capacity. The capacity building exercise
shall include training in the application areas of the HTMIS software, facility management
and day to day maintenance of the system as well as management of change within the
department. The selected vendor of the project shall impart all the above trainings to ensure
that the HTMIS roll out in the department goes through seamlessly.
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System Documentation.
The documentation of information system is a component of
communication, control and monitoring of the development, operation and maintenance
project. At the same time, the documentation should be regarded as one of the results of the
stages of the system life cycle. This is why, the system documentation is important from
the viewpoint of the project management and of its operation.
For more information, please download a copy of Terms of Reference from www.moe.gov.af
The Ministry of Education now invites eligible consulting firms to indicate their interest in
providing the Services. Interested Consultants shall provide information demonstrating that they
have the required qualifications and relevant experience to perform the Services.
The short-listing criteria are:
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Organization’s Technical and Financial capacity to fulfill the assignment.
Specific Experience of the firm relevant to the assignment. (provide list of previous
assignments in the specific field with brief scope of work, monetary value, country
of assignment and duration etc)
Organizational Staffing Structure
A consultant will be selected under Quality and Cost Based Selection (QCBS) method as defined
in World Bank procurement guidelines for selection and employment of consultants January, 2011.
Any further information required, can be obtained at the address below from Saturday to Wednesday
during office hours, [i.e. 0900 to 1400 hours].
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Expressions of Interest must be delivered in written to the address below (in person, or by E-mail) on
July 15, 2014, 14:00 hrs. (Kabul Local Time).
Attn: Wahidullah Sultanie, Procurement Director
Address: 3rd Floor, Procurement Department, Ministry of Education
Mohammad Jan Khan Watt, Deh Afghanan
Kabul, Afghanistan
Tel. No.: (+93)752-118-731 or (+93) 782721527
Email: hw.sultani@gmail.com [copy to agalokozai@gmail.com ,
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