REQUEST FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST

AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK

Agriculture and Agro-Industry Department (AHAI)

Rue Joseph Anoma, 01 BP 1387 Abidjan 01, Cote d’Ivoire

E-mail : M.FREGENE@AFDB.ORG & D.BENNIRAN@AFDB.ORG

INDIVIDUAL CONSULTANCY

CONSULTANT ON EMPOWERMENT OF YOUTH IN AGRICUTURE AND AGRIBUSINESS

Brief Description of the Assignment :

The African Development Bank (AfDB) is seeking the services of a consultant on empowerment of youth in agriculture and agribusiness to review the design and implementation of the Bank’s Youth in Agriculture and Youth in TAAT Programs.

The broad objective of the assignment is for the individual consultant to review the design and implementation of the Bank’s Youth in Agriculture and Youth in TAAT programs of the Bank using the available literature, documents and reports with a view to assessing the strength, weaknesses and opportunities of the Four initiatives that have been rolled out at the Bank as part of ENABLE Youth Program. Based on the major findings of the review, recommend a new strategy to develop a new African Development Banks Youth in Agriculture program with a workplan and deliverables.

Department Issuing the Request : Agriculture and Agro-Industry Department — AHAI (Division AHAI.0)

Place of Assignment : The Consultant will be based at the Bank’s Headquarters in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire for the duration of the contract.

Duration of the Assignment : 06 Months

Tentative Date of Commencement : 01 June 2020

Detailed Terms of Reference for the Assignment : [TORs below Annex 1]

Deadline for Applications : 30 April 2020

Applications to be submitted to : Mr. Martin Fregene (M.FREGENE@AFDB.ORG) & Ms. Dorra Ben Nirane (D.BENNIRAN@AFDB.ORG).

ANNEX1 :

TERMS OF REFERENCE (TOR) FOR THE RECRUITMENT OF A CONSULTANT ON EMPOWERMENT OF YOUTH IN AGRICUTURE AND AGRIBUSINESS

1.0 Background :

1.1 Youth unemployment and underemployment are serious development challenges in Africa. The continent is on the verge of a demographic transition and is experiencing a “youth bulge”. About 60% of Africans are under the age of 30 and 50% of the world’s youth will be African over the next three decades Unfortunately, the majority of these youth are unemployed and underemployed and given the recent demographic trends, the pressure to create new jobs and to manage the huge informal sector which houses the working poor will only increase over the coming decades. Youth are two to three times more likely than adults to be unemployed and most of the working youth are poor and employed in vulnerable, low quality jobs, in the informal sector.

1.2  There are approximately 12 million youth entering the labour force every year on the continent – whereas only roughly 3 million jobs are created annually, leaving a shortfall of 9 million youth without formal jobs. These young people are mainly engaged in informal employment and entrepreneurship, with low productivity, insecure incomes and low pay – three-quarters of them live below the poverty line.

1.3 Fuelled by rapid urbanization, rising incomes and vast agricultural potential, there is phenomenal growth in regional agri-food markets and agro-based industries in Africa; the African agriculture and agribusiness sectors are projected to become a US$ 1 trillion industry in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by 2030; meeting this demand can create a thriving agriculture and agribusiness sector and absorb a significant percentage of the unemployed youth. Nobody is better placed than young Africans to take advantage of these opportunities.

1.4 But Africa’s young people lack the Agribusiness know-how to take advantage of the opportunity of the huge demand for food, feed and fiber. There is a need for a new generation of young commercial farmers and agribusiness entrepreneurs. With the right entrepreneurship ecosystem, skills, technologies and improved access to finance, markets and land, and applying a value chain approach, young African men and women can approach agriculture as a business and can become the proud owners of viable and profitable agribusiness enterprises.

1.5  There is an urgent need to create a comprehensive plan to build know-how in young Africans for modern production of crop, livestock, fish, and provision of agribusiness services to African farmers. The result of investing in youth will be more jobs created, increased food production for a growing population, less reliance on food imports and a healthier trade balance for African countries.

2. The Bank’s Youth in Agriculture Program

2.1 Under the African Development Bank’s High 5s, agriculture is one of the strategic priorities of the African Development Bank. Feed Africa, the Bank’s strategy to transform African agriculture is focused on transforming key agricultural commodity value chains with the following objectives:

• Achieve self-sufficiency in key staples. rice, maize, and wheat are key priorities.
• Move African agriculture up the value chain to gain a ‘fair share’ of export-oriented commodity value chains and imported food/ingredients. Value addition to cocoa, coffee, cashew, and cotton, and the milling of rice, wheat and feed are key priorities.
• Build integrated industrial platforms that combine supply chain, logistics and infrastructure to transform cotton into textile; soy and maize into poultry, beef, and dairy; cassava to starch, sweeteners, and other food ingredients, etc.
• Leverage the potential of untapped and under-tapped regions, including the Sahel and Guinea Savannah-two large and important African agricultural eco-regions.

2.2 One of the enablers of Feed Africa is inclusivity or providing opportunities for young people and women in agriculture and agribusiness. The specific objective of the Bank’s youth in agriculture program is to create business opportunities and decent employment for young women and men along priority agricultural value chains. Key expected impacts of the project are the real agricultural GDP growth from the present 3.09% to at least 7% per year and reduce unemployed youth to 10% by 2021 from the present 21.50%. Expected outcomes of the Program are: i) increase youth income by 40%, ii) generate 25 million additional jobs by 2030, iii) increase food insecure youths & women by 50% and increase access to finance by 50%.

2.3  Another flagship of Feed Africa is the Bank’s Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT), a bold initiative to get modern food production technologies into the hands of 40 million farmers by 2025. At the core of TAAT are Compacts or the entire ecosystem of the technology providers (CGIAR centres), private sector agro-input companies, agribusinesses, National Agriculture and Research Systems (NARs), farmer groups, etc. TAAT Compacts are organized by commodities or thematic areas. One Compact is the ENABLE Youth Compact where young people are supported to take advantage of opportunities along the entire value chains

2.4  Four initiatives have been rolled out at the Bank as part of ENABLE Youth; the include :

1. Empowerment of Novel Agribusiness Employment for Youth (ENABLE Youth): An initiative started by IITA under its Youth Agripreneur program; it entails a 6-18month incubation program, mentoring and financing – via a Risk Sharing Facility (RSF) to reduce the risks of financial institutions of lending to young people, of young entrepreneurs in agriculture and agribusiness. This is Bank’s first youth in agriculture initiative at the Bank’ it has been implemented, as part of country loans, in 12 African countries ;
2. Technology, Innovation and Enterprise Initiative (TIE): A new initiative with Purdue University. The primary objective of the TIE initiative is to promote the culture of youth entrepreneurship in the agribusiness sector at several African universities that would become centres of excellence in this area. The initiative would encourage dialogue and collaboration between the policy drivers in government, stakeholders in the private sector, and those in education and training institutions to initiate more business-led entrepreneurship curricula reforms, whereby young people will be exposed to innovation and entrepreneurship knowledge, to identify potential agribusiness opportunities and to develop competitive businesses within the agriculture sector ;
3. The Homegrown Youth in Agribusiness Incubator Platform: a new initiative modelled on the Alaba International Market Apprenticeship System where new apprentices gain entrance into global trade work via the established business leader by serving for 1-2 years. The business leader “settles” them by paying for location fees, providing them finance to purchase goods, and introducing them to his contacts. The business incubator platform is so successful that it drives commerce in Nigeria, West Africa, East Africa, and in “Africa enclaves” in Guangzhou and other large Chinese cities ;
4. Vocational Training of young people: Another new initiative to help young people acquire practical skills for lower level agriculture and agribusiness jobs from operation of farm equipment to more complex tasks, for example managing a Dairy farm. This is a new initiative of TAAT that targets young people as “village champions” of new food production technologies. Two organizations: SENAR- Brazil, an organization made up of producers in Brazil that supports vocational training in commercial farming, especially skills acquisition in mechanization and best agricultural practices; and Skill-G, an Israeli outfit that builds and manages vocational training centers for young people are willing to provide capacity building services to actors in the Bank’s Feed Africa initiative, either on-site in Africa or “train the trainers” sessions in Brazil or Israel.

3. Achievements :

3.1  Through the ENABLE Youth Program, the Bank has invested US$ 374 million in ENABLE Youth projects in 12 countries, directly impacting 22,000 young people and indirectly impacting another 110,000 youth.

3.2 TIE was launched in October 2018 and the proposed approach for Regional Member Countries to take loans to finance their local universities to assess their current curriculum and infrastructure, and upgrade it to provide the required training, innovation and entrepreneurship (TIE) required for thriving agribusinesses. One TIE loan is currently being processed for Rwanda. This approach has been successfully used by various universities and institutions such as Purdue University’s Centre for Food and Agricultural Business (CFAB), the Raymond Ackerman Academy of Entrepreneurial Development at the University of Cape Town, and the University of Florida , Gainsville. For example, the CFAB’s mission is to support the Purdue community engaged in the food and agribusiness sectors to improve their management competencies in order to take on the challenges and opportunities of the complex agri-food system. CFAB provides students with advanced degree programs, applied research, and innovative and relevant professional development training. In addition, Purdue University runs the Purdue Foundry (an incubation centre), which helps its students, faculty and local alumni quickly move ideas to the marketplace. The Foundry transforms innovators into entrepreneurs by providing advice on entity formation, ideation, market analysis and business model development.

3.3         The Homegrown Youth in Agribusiness Incubator Platform objective, and vocational training program are new and financing is still being sought from Trust funds or country loans.

4.0         Statement of Objective of the Assignment :

4.1         To review the design and implementation of the Bank’s Youth in Agriculture and Youth in TAAT Programs.

Specific Assignments : 

Review the design and implementation of the Bank’s Youth in Agriculture and Youth in TAAT programs of the Bank using the available literature, documents and reports with a view to assessing the strength, weaknesses and opportunities of the Four initiatives that have been rolled out at the Bank as part of ENABLE Youth Program

5.2         Based on the major findings of the review, recommend a new strategy to develop a new African Development Banks Youth in Agriculture program with a workplan and deliverables. The new Strategy should include the following essential elements:

1. An implementation strategy, including but not limited to, financial, technical, and human resources to implement the program ;
2. An effective tracking Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system to provide on a regular basis and in a quantitative fashion, updates on the Youth in Agriculture program.

5.2         Perform any other related assignment as determined by the Director of Agriculture and Agro-Industry at the Bank.

6- Qualification and Experience :

1. The consultant should have at least a Master’s Degree or Ph.D. degree in agriculture with considerable experience in the areas of capacity building of young people ;
2. The candidate must have at least 20 years’ experience working in his/her area of specialty ;
3. The consultant should have had previous experience working with multi-lateral development institutions in implementing donor funded projects with a sound understanding development projects ;
4. Proven capability, capacity and experience in crafting high level strategy documents, reports and book projects on youth capacity building written within a development and research, economic policy institutions national African government or university environment ;
5. Working experience within multicultural teams and international organizations or companies and highly knowledgeable of Africa’s social, agricultural and rural development and economic development issues, questions and challenges ;
6. Ability to synthesize, weave and link complex propositions, theories and model outputs into a coherent message and document that can be published as a sourcebook to guide policy dialogue, negotiation and advocacy missions to RMCs on training of a new generation of agribusinesses and farmers ;
7. S/he must have extensive knowledge and experience in working in Africa ;
8. The consultant must be conversant with the Bank’s project cycle activities ;
9. S/he must be computer literate ;
10. S/he should have excellent communication skills and be proficient in both written and spoken English.

7. Duration :

The duration of the assignment will be six months commencing on June 1, 2020.

8. Location :

The Consultant will be based at the Bank’s Headquarters in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire for the duration of the contract but has the option to work from home as an International consultant.

9. Schedule of Payment :

The recruited Consultant shall be remunerated based on AfDB’s remuneration guideline for consultants that depends on number of years of experience and availability of resources.

10. Selection Method :

The individual Consultant shall be selected using the Consultant Qualification (CQ) through the provision of his/her Curriculum Vitae (CV).

11. Reporting Requirements :

The Consultant will report to the Director of the Agriculture and Agro-Industries Department (AHAI) S/he will be directly supervised by the Lead Adviser on Special Initiatives (AHAI.0)

ANNEX II :

Please attach an updated Curriculum Vitae using the template below :

MODEL CURRICULUM VITAE – AFDB BAD PDF