Request for Proposal (RFP) - Consultancy for Assessment of Agricultural Policy and Regulatory Status at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)

Posted by Future on Wed 16th Feb, 2022 - nigeriantenders.com

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) invites interested and competent firms(s) to indicate interest by tendering RFP documents for the following works:

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is an organisation that seeks to transform African agriculture from a subsistence model to strong businesses that improve the livelihoods of the continent’s farming households.

AGRA is an alliance led by Africans with roots in farming communities across the continent. We understand that African farmers need uniquely African solutions designed to meet their specific environmental and agricultural needs so they can sustainably boost production and gain access to rapidly growing agriculture markets.

Applications are invited for:

Title: Request for Proposal (RFP) - Consultancy for Assessment of Agricultural Policy and Regulatory Status and Gaps for Agribusiness Investments iin Targeted Africa Countries

Background

Agricultural policies in sub-Saharan Africa are generally characterized by outdated policies, missing legislation and gaps in regulation and over-regulation, among other issues. Due to lack of data and analytics, several policies and regulations are not evidence-based, and hence tends to yield unintended consequences and limited impact at scale.

There are also challenges in terms of implementation capacity. In instances where policies and regulations are in place, governments have struggled to enforce and implement reforms due to inadequate inter-agency coordination, lack of adequate knowledge, lack of technical and human capacity of mandated institutions, among other factors. Overall, agricultural policies are not providing the much needed enabling business environment that can make businesses flourish and service smallholder farmers. As a result, many well-intentioned policies have served to deter, rather than promote SME growth and participation in agricultural markets.

Against this background, AGRA has been guided by a systems approach to drive change and transformation and clearly understood that there are regulatory and policy gaps under these systems and so the Policy and regulatory interventions have been guided by that understanding and are key to unlocking the optimal functioning of input and output market systems. AGRA’s policy work was informed by regional and continental policy frameworks (such as CAADP), GrowAfrica, private sector and insights drawn from our AGRA’s in-country implementation work. These insights have guided transformation and systems development interventions, which were designed to address policy and regulatory failures which compromised the pace of agricultural change and system functioning. Thus, initial policy identification choices drew from a combination of:

AGRA’s on-going investments including consortia investments across priority countries, such as Tanzania, , Mozambique, Ghana, Nigeria etc.
Independent external evaluations of MIRA and AGRA’s Strategy 2.0
Flagship design work of National Agricultural Investment Plans (NAIPs) in Kenya, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Mozambique,
Policy Prioritization through Value Chain Analysis (PPVC) work by BFAP, IFPRI, Tegemeo, Sokoine, and MAFAP in countries such as Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Malawi.
The agricultural regulatory assessments by the World Bank

The above assessments informed by AGRA’s own in-house assessments, led to a set of priority areas that focused on specific interventions that were critical in unlocking the optimal functioning of systems. AGRA’s investments in the last strategy did not cover all policy failures that existed in the agricultural space. There was prioritization on what needed to be done along key systems such as seed, fertilizer, markets and extension. Some of the areas were not prioritized but remain critical – and these include areas such as extension, nutrition, gender, resilience to climate change.

Overall Objectives and Scope of the Assignment

The overall objective of AGRA’s policy assessment is to obtain a better understanding of the regulatory and operational environment shaping the function and efficiency of key agricultural systems such as input market systems (e.g., seed, fertilizer, machinery etc.), output market systems, as well as market enablers (e.g., finance, extension, storage and logistics etc.), among others. To this end, AGRA seeks to conduct policy and regulatory gaps assessments along each of the systems and come up with a key prioritize set of investments in the target countries.

The specific objectives of the work are:

To assess the status of the enabling environment for agricultural market systems, aforementioned.
To attain a better understanding of the gaps that require further attention for policy and regulatory reform for systems to function optimally.
To come up with a country by prioritized policy reforms by system that will guide AGRA’s policy investment in the new strategy
To examine opportunities for AGRA to strategically position itself and bolster its capacity to carry on with regulatory diagnostics work, including the management of regulatory data collection in AGRA countries, engagement of technical partners, as well as engaging governments in the use of the regulatory data for policy reform and prioritization.

The gap analysis and policy investment prioritization will be done through the following ways:

Rigorous and independent data collection that ensures clear lines of separation between implementers and evaluators, to avoid any conflict of interest.
Facilitation of robust grassroots public-private dialogues that are centered on identifying gaps and crafting home-grown interventions.
Supporting the identification and prioritization of micro-reforms through targeted approaches that focus on operational bottlenecks.
In-depth scoping study to explore options for AGRA’s role in regulatory reform in Africa, assess technical capacity of potential data collection partners, and exploring options for the future branding of regulatory reform work, including coming up with a robust communications strategy.

Scope of Work

To comprehensively address the objectives above mentioned, AGRA will hire firm that will do data collection, data processing and analysis, as well as report writing, synthesis and dissemination. More specifically, the firm will:

Work in close consultation with AGRA and (where possible with World Bank Country Teams) to do a needs assessment that defines the data collection methodology and approach.
AGRA will support the expert firm and their affiliate experts and data collection agents, as well as administering, training, and executing requirements for data collection.
Develop and/or update comprehensive survey instruments that are targeted for specific stakeholders such as Government, Private Sector, non-governmental organizations/development partners, etc. including pre-testing innovations that emerge from the co-creation processes.
Learn to implement the designed and developed data capturing system, with a clearly defined set of privileges and access rights for data entry and analysis.
Develop a comprehensive implementation plan for the surveys and risk mitigation measures, as well as quality control initiatives to attenuate any data discrepancies.
Execute data cleaning, verification, and analysis - and ensuring that quality checks and consistencies are maintained.
Presenting the raw data and analysis, and the consolidated findings, which are to also be submitted in the form of a comprehensive report, as well as a synthesis report for dissemination.
Undertake a prioritization approach to identify key policies to be reformed by each country during the next AGRA strategy.

Deliverables

A comprehensive inception report detailing the methodological approach to data collection, and link how this links to the Agribusiness-Enabling diagnostic tool, and the operationalization of regulatory reform.
A comprehensive set of high quality, verified and validated data on:
- Input systems - e.g. supplying seed, registering fertilizer, securing water, registering machinery, sustaining livestock, protecting plant health, etc.
- Output systems - e.g. local, national and regional commodity markets (i.e., domestic and cross-border trade),
- System enablers - e.g., accessing finance, delivering agricultural extension and post-harvest loss.
- Policy and State Capability System - e.g. policies, regulations, mandated institutions, inter-agency coordination, human and technical capacity, institutional capacity etc.
A design of a dynamic and effective public-private dialogue platform, which recasts the interaction of government and private sector through an effective public-private dialogue platform.
A country by country prioritization of regulatory reforms emanating from the themes discussed in the public-private dialogue platform, as a viable mechanism to assess policy failures, identify regulatory needs, and the prioritization of regulatory reforms.
A comprehensive strategy document detailing AGRA’s future role in regulatory and policy reform diagnostics that was led by the World Bank in Africa, including managing the data collection engaging governments, as well as overall management and communications of an regulatory performance indicators. The report should also clearly articulate the requisite technical capacities of potential data collection partners and sub-grantees AGRA could work with in PIATA 2.0, critically evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of those partners, as well as providing guidance on how to procure and quality assure the work of those partners.

Location and Nature of the Assignment

During the grant period, AGRA aims to cover all fourteen (14) AGRA priority countries namely, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Cotê d’Ivore, Mali, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Togo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia) at least four in each quarter - excluding the first quarter which will be set aside for planning, recruitment and training.

Application Closing Date

5:00pm (EAT), 9th March, 2022.

Submission of Documents

The proposals SHALL be submitted to: procurement@agra.org by the deadline indicated in the synopsis. Please include the subject line “RFP-021-POLICY-2022” of the email.

Note

The Proposals shall be prepared in English Language:

The proposals SHALL be submitted to procurement@agra.org by the deadline indicated in the synopsis.
The technical proposal shall not exceed 20 pages.
The proposal and ALL Attachments submitted via email SHALL NOT exceed 10MB.
VALIDITY of the proposal shall be for a period of 90 days from the date of bid closure.
Financial proposal shall be sent as a separate attachment and MUST be password protected. The password shall be requested from the firm that meet the best technical score above 75%.

Click Here (MS WORD) for a detailed description of the RFP.