Safefutures: AI-powered child labour early warning digital solution (prototype) – Independent Academic Validation

**Terms OF REFERENCE FOR EXTERNAL EVALUATION**

**SAFEFUTURES: AI-powered Child labour early warning digital solution (prototype) – INDEPENDENT ACADEMIC VALIDATION**

1. **Présentation of Terre des hommes**

Terre des hommes Foundation (Tdh) is the leading Swiss organization dedicated to children’s rights. For over 60 years, Tdh has worked globally to protect children, support their wellbeing, and advocate for child rights in fragile, humanitarian, and development contexts. Through integrated programming approaches, Tdh collaborates with governments, civil society, research institutions, and the private sector to strengthen child protection systems and improve outcomes for vulnerable children and youth.

Within its Child Rights and Business (CRB) programming, Tdh works with private sector actors and supply chain stakeholders to promote responsible business conduct, strengthen child protection mechanisms, and prevent child labour and exploitation within agricultural and other commodity value chains.

One of the innovations under the CRB portfolio is **safe Futures**, an AI-powered predictive child protection and risk intelligence solution designed to identify and prevent child labour risks in agricultural communities and supply chains. safe Futures transforms existing operational, socio-economic, geographic, and community-level data into actionable predictive intelligence that supports early identification of child labour vulnerabilities, strengthens preventive interventions, and enables evidence-based decision-making among implementing partners, companies, and child protection stakeholders.

To strengthen the scientific credibility, technical rigor, ethical compliance, and global positioning of the SafeFutures prototype, Tdh seeks to engage an independent academic institution or qualified academic expert(s) to conduct a comprehensive validation of the SafeFutures predictive model and pilot implementation.

**Context**

The purpose of this assignment is to conduct an independent, rigorous, and academically grounded validation of the SafeFutures predictive model, analytical framework, ethical safeguards, and pilot implementation.

The assignment aims to:

- Strengthen the scientific and technical credibility of the SafeFutures solution
- Independently validate the predictive methodology and operational effectiveness of the model
- Assess ethical compliance, fairness, proportionality, and safeguarding considerations
- Generate evidence suitable for peer-reviewed academic publication
- Benchmark Safe Futures against comparable predictive and risk assessment systems

**Objective of the evaluation**

## *3.1 Technical and Analytical Validation*

The evaluator shall assess the technical integrity and analytical performance of the SafeFutures system, including:

- Review of the digital solution and data architecture and technical rigor, data pipeline, and analytical processes
- Assessment of data quality, completeness, consistency, and reliability
- Validation of predictive model methodology and performance, including accuracy, calibration, sensitivity, specificity, robustness, and reproducibility
- Assessment of fairness, bias, explainability, and interpretability of the model
- Evaluation of model resilience under varying operational and contextual conditions

## *3.2 Comparative and Benchmarking Assessment*

The evaluator shall:

- Review comparable predictive analytics, child protection intelligence, and risk assessment systems
- Benchmark SafeFutures against relevant international standards and emerging best practices
- Assess comparative strengths, limitations, and innovation potential
- Identify lessons and recommendations relevant for future improvement and deployment

## *3.3 Pilot Evaluation and Operational Assessment*

The evaluator shall:

- Assess the operational effectiveness and real-world applicability of the pilot
- Evaluate usability, stakeholder adoption, and workflow integration
- Identify implementation bottlenecks, operational challenges, and unintended outcomes
- Document lessons learned and assess institutional readiness for sustainability and expansion

1. Scope of the evaluation

The evaluator shall be responsible for producing the following deliverables throughout the assignment period. All deliverables shall be submitted in English and in editable electronic formats.

## *4.1 Inception Report and Validation Workshop (Weeks 1–2)*

The evaluator shall submit an inception report and lead a validation workshop detailing the overall evaluation approach and operational plan for the assignment.

The report and validation workshop shall include:

- Evaluation methodology for the technical and analytical review
- Pilot and academic publications definitions (as per 4.2 above)
- Scope (of comparable predictive and risk assessment models, as well as international standards and emerging best practices taken into account) and methodology for the comparative and benchmarking review
- Methodology for th