Embassy of Ireland - Technical support for Ireland Fellowship Programme 2023/2024 - 2022

Description of Project:

The Ireland Fellows Programme (IFP) Asia is fully funded by the Irish Government and is offered under the auspices of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). The IFP enables early to mid-career professionals from eligible countries with leadership potential to benefit from a prestigious, world-class, quality education. The main aim of the programme is to develop in-country capacity to achieve national SDG goals, and to build positive relationships between Ireland and Asian countries. The IFP-Asia is administered by the Embassy of Ireland in Vietnam.

For the 2023 – 2024 round of applications, the Embassy is to launch 2 separate calls, including an open call to the public in Vietnam and a closed call to targeted Embassy partners in Vietnam, Lao and Cambodia. For each call there is a corresponding course directory. An identical procedure for data entry and scoring will be applied for the open call and closed call.

The application process consists of three stages:

●      Stage 1 Preliminary Application

●      Stage 2 Detailed Application (only for the applicants shortlisted at Stage 1)

●      Stage 3 Interviews.

The purpose is to establish a database of the applications for the IFP 2023 – 2024 round, and to mark the applications following the Embassy’s standard scoring templates.

Description of actual services provided by your staff within the assignment:

As part of this project, Mekong Economics team have conducted the following services for both calls:

●      At Stage 1, enter data of all applications into a worksheet using the Embassy’s template and score the applications using Embassy criteria.

●      At Stage 2, enter data of all applications into a worksheet using the Embassy’s template and score the applications using Embassy criteria.

●      Hand over to the Embassy the 2 separate datasets for the open call and closed call. The dataset consists of:

○      Scoring sheets for all applications

○      A database of applications (following the Embassy’s standard template)