About Mercy Corps AgriFin
AgriFin, a Mercy Corps innovative program currently represents a $12 million, four-year program working in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Nigeria, with potential to expand to other markets (Uganda+). In partnership with Bayer Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, AgriFin seeks to support the expansion of digitally enabled services to 5 million smallholder farmers, delivered by growing ecosystems of diverse service providers and building farmer income, productivity and resilience by 50% while reaching 40% women.
The program’s core innovations are: 1) a rapid iteration engagement model to drive innovative, client-centric product development; and 2) our work with partners to develop “bundles” of mobile-enabled services offering farmers affordable access to digital financial and market informational services. Our support programming is focused on enabling the following critical areas of innovation, that will follow an ecosystem and market facilitation approach supported through partnership activities and dissemination of evidence-based learning to ecosystem actors following a Market Systems Development (MSD) approach, with a strong gender focus**:**
•Agricultural Advisory and Smart Farming Solutions, drawing on Climate Smart Agriculture (dCSA)
•Appropriate Digitally Enabled Financial Services for SHF
•Digital Platform Models Providing Market Access, Financing, Information and Resources
•Digital Channels, Logistics and Mechanization•Use of Digital Data for Decisioning, Product Development & Risk Management.*
Scope of Work
The consultant shall on a regular basis provide a series of services and deliverables to Mercy Corps Agrifin on an ongoing basis within the overall scope of work, supported by more detailed specific agreements and budgets for each individual assignment. AgriFin Program will provide specific scopes of work for each engagement with specific required combinations of technical services under subcontracts to the consultant, governed by this umbrella scope of work. The overall technical support services will include:
● Support implementation of quantitative and qualitative surveys of smallholder farmer behavior to measure market size and characteristics, access to markets, effective demand and preferences of farmers in different agricultural value chains, crop mixing, farm characteristics, use of traders, cooperatives and other aggregators and processors, including the segmentation of various actors in the agricultural value chain.
● Support partners in developing protocols for conducting surveys, that include face to face using paper and digital tools, phone-based surveys and SMS surveys.
● Conduct financial behavior research of smallholder farmers and assess usage of formal and informal savings, credit, investment and micro-insurance instruments.
● Conduct behavior change research based on farmer capability engagements that seeks to increase access and use of digital information services to smallholder farmers.
● Study e-payments behavior of small holder farmers using various payments methods such as mobile money, agent banking services and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFTs) for various purposes, e.g. purchase of input supplies
● Assess the social economic levels, employment, household cash flow to inform income sources; familiarity with Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) and Pan Africa Media Research Organization (PAMRO) Social Economic indicators is preferable.
● Research the technology behaviors and preferences of smallholder farmers and assess usage of technology including mobile phones, computers and ATMs to conduct agri-business
● Conduct surveys of the agricultural sector actors, to document the existing structure, conduct and performance of the sector.
● Study the business support services, technical capacities and advisory services supporting the agricultural sector. This includes use of the world wide web and social platforms like Facebook, Google and other channels by smallholder farmers.
● Incorporate GIS (Geographic Information Systems) analysis to AgriFin work at the intersection of data analysis, programming and cartography. This includes analyzing spatial data through mapping software and designing digital maps with geographic data and various other data sets.
● Organize and participate in dissemination exercises that may include development of learning outputs like blogs, case studies and digital media
**
This project implementation shall be fully consultative with the AgriFin Program and its partners, and all workshops, research results, and recommended strategies will be developed in conjunction with partners so that strategic alignment is built within the program.
Deliverables
Consultant will provide AgriFin Program with services based on deliverables from specific Task Order tied to detailed scopes of work for each tailored engagement to support AgriFin Program partners over the life of this program.
How to apply
All interested firms should refer to the Scope of Work and Request for Proposals. Please submit your applications by Monday 21st February 2022 COB EAT.
