Who We Are

Girl Effect is an international non-profit that builds media that girls want, trust and need. 

From chatbots to chat shows and TV dramas to tech, our content helps adolescent girls in Africa and Asia make choices and changes in their lives, igniting their confidence to act differently at a time that can define their future. 

We create safe spaces for girls, sharing facts, and answering questions about health, nutrition, education, relationships, and so much more. To arm girls with the skills to negotiate and redefine what they are told is possible “for a girl”.

Our reach is 50 million and counting. And we’re using technology to reach girls at scale so every girl can choose to be in control of her body, health, learning and livelihood.

Because when a girl unlocks her power to make different choices that change her life, it inspires others to do so too. She starts a ripple effect that impacts her family, community, and country.

That’s the Girl Effect. 

Background

Over the past five years, Girl Effect has pioneered the development of digital products using conversational technologies to connect girls with critical health information. In particular, we have made significant strides in our South Africa-based chatbot, Big Sis, building new AI and GenAI capabilities, providing essential information on sensitive topics more seamlessly than ever before. We are now entering our most ambitious stage: Mental Health Anytime Anywhere. This initiative moves beyond simple generative AI to predictive, agentic systems capable of anticipating a user’s readiness to act and delivering personalized pathways for real behavior change.

This new phase involves two key components:

1. Mental Health Agent: A system capable of conducting single-session therapy and supporting users in need, developed in collaboration with clinical psychologists.
2. SBCC Agent: A Social and Behavior Change Communication agent that leverages reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) to proactively guide users through behavioral obstacles. This agent will identify barriers and dynamically select strategies to "nudge" users toward positive health outcomes, such as service uptake.

The Scope

The Consultant will bridge the gap between creative content, psychological safety, and technical implementation. You will ensure our AI agents speak with the right voice (especially for the South African context), adhere to safety protocols, and effectively guide users through complex health journeys.

• Data and Evaluation Curation: You will curate and refine datasets used to train and test our models. This includes generating and labeling sentences to ensure high-quality, culturally relevant inputs, and creating "gold standard" datasets for benchmarking performance.
• Prompt Engineering: You will design and optimize system prompts that control the persona, tone, and safety guardrails of the Mental Health and SBCC agents. This involves translating program needs into instructions that allow the LLM to act as an empathetic advisor and guide.
• Quality Assurance & System Analysis: Using tools like LangSmith, you will conduct system analysis to trace model reasoning and identify failure modes (e.g., safety degradation). You will monitor "out of topic" queries to refine how the bot handles unexpected inputs.
• Testing, Evaluation, and Writing: You will evaluate chatbot responses for subjective parameters like tone, empathy, and cultural relevance, as well as objective accuracy. You will conduct rigorous testing to ensure the agents meet safety metrics and document these findings to inform technical iterations. 

Requirements

The Chatbot Content writer should have experience creating content for and interacting with youth audiences in South Africa. The Chatbot Contentwriter will use their familiarity with this demographic and the way they use language, including slang, to inform our AI and ML language models for the purposes of safeguarding, imparting knowledge, and speaking in a tone and language that resonates with young people. They will also be central to creating and curating the content that shapes the large language models Girl Effect implements in its chatbots. This will include evaluating the responses of our generative AI chatbot and writing and curating prompts that produce tone and cultural relevance that our audience will resonate with.

Expected commitment 

• The consultant will be expected to be available for 1.5 days (12 hours) per week through the time period of February 2026 to June 2026.

Location

The consultant will be remote and must be conducive to working with teams in the UK, USA, Sub-Saharan Africa & India synchronously and asynchronously. 

Tentative Timelines

•       Terms of reference published: February 5, 2026 
•       Deadline for responses: February 18, 2026
•       Project commencement: March 2026

Specific tasks/Deliverables

Specific tasks and deliverables may vary, but example deliverables may include:

• Evaluation Reports: Detailed reports analyzing model performance against safety and behavioral goals.
• Prompts for Agentic Systems: A library of refined system prompts and dialogue frameworks designed to guide the LLM through specific behavioral barriers and mental health scenarios.
• Curated Datasets: Cleaned and labeled datasets used for fine-tuning or few-shot prompting.

Reporting

The consultant will report to Girl Effect’s Data Scientist. They will work closely with the Senior Director of Technology and our consultant machine learning agency.

Who You Are

Skills, Knowledge and Experience

• Native or near-native fluency in English and deep familiarity with South African slang and linguistic patterns. Familiarity with other South African languages is also desirable but not essential.
• Minimum of 2-3 years of experience in content creation, writing, or linguistic roles.
• An effective communicator and writer in English, with the ability to synthesize, communicate and simplify complex language concepts per the needs of girls and young women.
• Familiarity and ease with using Excel to manage content
• Someone who enjoys media & technology and exploring content through products like IVR, communities, blogs, etc.
• Familiarity with Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning datasets. Experience with LangSmith or similar LLM evaluation tools is highly desirable.
• Passionate about making a positive difference in the lives of young women and girls.
• Proven ability to be flexible within a fast-paced, changing environment.
• Experience in health-related content/Behavior change content production in the field of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and Economic Empowerment would be a massive bonus. 
• Basic safeguarding and digital safeguarding knowledge is a plus.

Proposal submission

Your proposal should be 5 pages max and cover the following:

• Cover letter explaining why you feel you are well-placed to advise us on this
• Credentials/Profile/CV - Please showcase any previous work that you consider relevant to what we are trying to achieve, how we approach our work, and the audience we cater to. Describe the qualifications, experience, and capabilities of the firm or consultant in providing the requested services.
• Reference- Provide at least three references for similar contracts with a description of the service provided, the value of the contract, and the contract periods of performance.
• Breakdown of Costs with applicable taxes and other charges clearly identified in ZAR. Consultants should provide their daily or hourly billing rate. Payment will be made by hours worked.
• All applicable taxes should be quoted separately.

In their proposal, the bidder must demonstrate an understanding of the requirements described in the RFP and demonstrate how the bidder will meet the requirements of the evaluation criteria.

GE is not liable for any cost incurred during the award/contract preparation, submission, or negotiation of the award/contract. All submitted documentation and/or materials shall become and remain the property of GE.

VALIDITY of the proposal shall be for 90 days from the date of bid closure

Evaluation Criteria

The criteria against which proposals will be evaluated are listed below.

Technical Evaluation

• Demonstrated experience in GenAI, AI-assisted content creation, or AI-driven narrative development-15%
• Cover letter showing understanding of the TOR and objectives-10%
• Showcases relevant experience in having done previous similar work with relevant agencies or organizations - 10 %
• Geographical experience  in South Africa-10%
• Evidence of a minimum of three contactable references - 10%
• Experience and Qualification, share your CV/Profile - 15%

Financial Evaluation

• Value for money/proposed budget breakdown - 30%

How to Apply

Please submit proposals, as described above, to [email protected] by 18th February 2026. Please clearly mark your email with the subject “GenAI Narrative, Content & Evaluation Specialist - South Africa”.

Copyright

All materials/documents arising from this consultancy work shall remain the property of Girl Effect.

Equal Opportunities

Girl Effect is committed to equal opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity, or expression. We are proud to be an equal-opportunity workplace.

We are committed to building an organization that is truly representative of the communities that we serve. To this end, due regard will be paid to procuring consultancy services of organizations and individuals with a deep understanding and experience of our programming markets and diverse professional, academic and cultural backgrounds.

Safeguarding

You may be required to undertake safeguarding checks. Shortlisted consultants will be assessed on our organizational values at the interview stage. The successful consultant will be expected to adhere to our safeguarding policy. We encourage you to read and understand our safeguarding policy, the executive summary of which can be found here. We have zero tolerance for all forms of violence against children, beneficiaries and staff. 

Tax

Applicants are advised to ensure that they have a clear understanding of their tax position regarding provisions of the South African tax legislation when developing their proposals

Disclaimer

GE reserves the right to determine the structure of the process, number of short-listed participants, the right to withdraw from the proposal process, the right to change this timetable at any time without notice and reserves the right to withdraw this tender at any time, without prior notice and without liability to compensate and/or reimburse any party. GE shall inform the ONLY successful applicant(s). The process of negotiation and signing of the contract with the successful applicant(s) will follow.

Please note: We will evaluate only proposals submitted following the application process outlined in the TOR and using our specified email address ([email protected]).