Consultant for Developing S-City Mobile Phone Application

TERMS OF REFERENCE

Development of S-City Mobile Phone Application
for Promoting Safety for women and girls in public spaces and improving Public Services

I. Background

S-City is an application in mobile phones, allowing the users to voice their concerns and feedbacks on the safety of women and girls in the public spaces, and on quality of public services in the cities. The application is designed for all, who care about their city, who want to stop violence against women and girls in public spaces as well as have a voice in the quality of the public services.

S-City application was first developed by ActionAid Vietnam with funding from Irish Aid-supported Women Rights Project (2012 – 2016). The S-City application offers different functions including mapping safe routes, reporting unsafe places, making an emergency call, evaluating public services, reporting incidents of sexual assault or harassment, group chat for information sharing.S-City can be freely downloaded from the App Store (for iOS devices), CH Play (for Android devices) and Windows Store (for Window devices) by searching for “S-City ActionAid”. Detailed information about the application can be found on http://safecity.vn/en/home-page/.

S-city app was officially launched on June 27th, 2017. Since then, the app has gathered a regular user base of 800. The S-city application, however, is still to be upgraded to be friendlier for users in communities, especially for those who are not speaking English or Vietnamese well. It will also need to be useful for people with impairments of mobility, hearing or vision.

In 2015, at ActionAid’s recommendations, the Gender Equality Department (GED) at the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) included the development of a set of criteria for the Safe City into the National Action Plan for Gender Equality and Ending all forms of Violence Against Women till 2020. In 2017, GED signed an MOU with ActionAid Vietnam, Aid for Social Protection Programme Foundation Vietnam (AFV) and Plan International in piloting the criteria in 14 cities of the country, aiming at reviewing the relevance and effectiveness of the criteria by end of 2018. In this work, GED has agreed to use the feedbacks from citizens and visitors on city’s safety and public services as an important source of inputs to shape the safe city criteria, should there be 10000 or more regular users of the application by end of 2018.

AFV and AAV received grants from different donors with components to use S-City as an effective tool to end sexual harassment against women and girls in public spaces (city, factories, markets...), promote safe community/city and a tool for people to voice their views on public service quality in their communities and cities.

With this, there is a need to enhance the S-city application to have more functions that will address the above objectives, at the same time to be more user friendly and attract more users.

Data collected from the application will be used for policy dialogues, media engagement to advocate for more gender responsive policies. This component will be supported by 5 projects: EC4, C&A, Forum Syd, Irish Aid and ChildFund Korea.

II. Objectives

To upgrade the application so that it will be used widely by the public to end sexual harassment against women and girls, as well as to voice their views for improvement of public services in the cities and communities.

In general, the upgrading will include (but not limited to):

• Improve the application’s quality through upgrading different functions and features which allow users to use the app easier, faster and more interactively.
• Effectively do tracking and reporting on the status of public services (Lighting, sewage, drainage, pavement, public bus, public toilet, etc.) that are under quality to secure safety for women and girls in the city.
• Develop a reference page to advertise the app on Uber and Grab, to enable users of motorcycle and taxi services to link to S-City to view and report safety issues
• Improve emergency function and feature which will allow users to find out hot lines in any locations;
• Upgrade more languages so that the app can be used in remote areas, as well as globally;
• Improve “add friend”, “notification” and “finding location” functions and features for easier and friendlier use.
• Find useful information about sexual harassment and sexual health (Address of clinic, hospital, hotline)
• Send alarming report and seek for support when facing gender-based violence and sexual harassment
• Seek online counseling on law on sexual harassment/abuse and sexual health
• Evaluate, feedback and monitor the quality of public services on health care, water supply and waste water treatment
• Implement survey on different issue
• Gather the data for advocacy and research work

III. Expected outputs

1. Review current S-City application to find out and fix the error on system

2. Improve s city application to add below functions and features:

• For end user
  
  • User registration with more personal information and image (SMS confirmation)
  • Can easily connect with friend and invite to join the application by 1 click
  • Easily follow the application tutorial which is improved to be shorter, clearer and innovative
  • Can download all document
  • Send reporting and do the review by picture and/or wording and/ or click on the status of safety and quality of public services related to streets, lighting, public toilets, parks, health care, water supply and waste water treatment
  • Report by picture and/or wording and/ or click when violations/ sexual harassment occurs and guide what next steps to take;
  • Use chat function with friendlier tools (video call, stickers, typing indicator, read receipts and Location Based Chat)
  • Create group chat and video chat
  • Link to the essential website, Facebook such as AAV, AFV, CKC and donors
  • Link to the safety public transport such as timbus.com; Hanoi taxi group;
  • Seek online counselling on sexual health and sexual harassment/abuse
  • Find useful information about sexual health and sexual harassment/abuse
  • Search information on the safety of places, routes or means of transport
  • Fill in the survey form
  • Save the uncompleted survey form
  • Review the survey form before sending

• For application admin
  
  • Receive and gather the data which classified into different issues/topic/location/users/time/....
  • Extract the data with clear sources of information
  • Send the data and information to selected/ all end users
  • Create event and invite end users to joint
  • Create more topic/ issues for end user to evaluate/ report
  • Control the information posted to the application
  • Design survey form and request all/selected end users to complete the survey
  • Remind end-user to complete the survey form
  • Receive and gather the survey information feedback
  • Provide online counseling

• Others
  
  • The interface is user friendly with more pictures and simple symbol
  • Integrating some functions and features to attract the young people like chatting, posting status, sharing their personal expression...
  • Integrating some function and feature for advertising and linkage with others website/ application
  • Provide information for tourists and citizens about the safety of places, routes or means of transport
  • Language in Vietnamese, English, possible H’Mong and Tay, Khmer
  • Function for the people with impairment of mobility, vision or hearing to use
  • Can use app offline for emergency functions

3. Training and transferring

• Conduct at least 4 trainingsfor trainers and end users
• Hand over sources code of the application in full
• Provide maintenance services within 12 months after completing the application development
• Protection of data and confidentiality

IV. Proposal

The proposal must incorporate the following information:

• Company profile (Staff, working experiences on designing social application)
• Understanding of the TOR and the current S city Application
• Technical proposal
• Timeline
• Financial proposal (Fee should be quoted in VND including out of pocket expenses).

All proposals should be submitted by 07 March 2018 to [email protected] or to Human Resources & Organizational Development Department of ActionAid Vietnam, Hanoi Office address: 5th Floor, No.127 Lo Duc street, Hai Ba Trung, Hanoi with subject: Application for development of S-city application.