Requests for Proposal (RFP)
Engagement of an External Technical Agency for Development of a Quality Assurance
Framework for Crèches Across Diverse Settings
1. Background
Mobile Creches is a national-level non-profit organisation working to ensure holistic early childhood care, protection, and development for children aged 0–6 years from urban poor, migrant, and marginalised communities. Its crèche models operate across diverse contexts, including worksites, urban settlements, and rural/tribal settings—each requiring contextresponsive yet comparable quality standards.
The Government of India’s National Minimum Standards and Protocol for Crèches (2024) provides a baseline framework for infrastructure, staffing, operations, safety, and care standards. The Palna Scheme under Mission Shakti further emphasises provision of quality childcare services for children aged 6 months to 6 years, including safe care, nutrition, health support, growth monitoring, immunisation, and early stimulation. Additionally, the National ECCE Framework highlights quality standards, programme assessment, capacity strengthening, and monitoring systems as core pillars of early childhood service delivery.
Against this backdrop, Mobile Creches seeks to engage an external technical agency to develop a comprehensive Quality Assurance (QA) Framework for crèches across different operational settings, along with systems and tools for quality monitoring and continuous improvement.
2. Purpose of the Assignment
The purpose of this assignment is to develop and design a practical, evidence-based, and scalable Quality Assurance Framework for crèches across worksite, urban, and rural/tribal settings. The framework should define quality standards, establish measurable indicators, and enable systems for regular assessment, supportive supervision improvement planning, risk mitigation and institutionalisation.
3. Objectives
The agency will:
- Develop a standardised Quality Assurance Framework for crèches across different operational settings.
- Align the framework with national standards, including the National Minimum Standards and Protocol for Crèches (2024), the Palna Scheme, and relevant ECCE frameworks (National and International).
- Identify and define core quality domains, indicators, benchmarks, and assessment criteria for for Safe, inclusive, Child-friendly, developmental and appropriate creche services.
- Develop practical tools and systems for quality monitoring, scoring, reporting, feedback mechanism and improvement planning.
- Incorporate risk assessment and mitigation measures into quality assurance architecture.
- Recommend for strengthen pathways for institutionalising quality assurance across programme, HR, administrative, and financial systems.
- Build a capacity development plan as part of the role of creche staff and supervisory teams to implement and sustain quality standards.
- Support pilot testing and refinement of the framework.
- Develop a roadmap for scale-up planning for the framework.
4. Scope of Work
4.1 Situational Review and Framework Design
- Review existing Mobile Creches quality tools, indicators, monitoring formats, reports, processes, and standards.
- Analyse relevant national and sectoral frameworks and guidelines.
- Consult key internal stakeholders and field teams across project locations (Delhi-NCR, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Karnataka, Haryana and others) to understand programme model and contextuel variation accros worksite, urban, and rural or tribal settings.
- Define a contextual understanding of “quality” across diverse crèche settings.
- Develop a scoring-based QA Framework with defined domains, sub-domains, indicators, benchmarks, and quality standards.
Submission Details
Submission deadline: June 10, 2026
Subject:
Proposal for External Agency – Quality Assurance Framework for Crèches
For detailed information, please check the complete version of the RFP attached below.