AGA KHAN FOUNDATION
An agency of the Aga Khan Development Network
Youth Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support
Call for Expression of Interest
About the Aga Khan Foundation
The Aga Khan Foundation (AKF), an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), was established by His Highness the Aga Khan in 1967. AKF is a private, not-for-profit international developrnent agency that seeks to provide long-term solutions to society’s problems. AKF has a special focus on investing in human potential, expanding opportunity, and improving the overall quality of life, especially for women and girls. AKF works closely with civil society groups in programme levels in all its thematic areas, with a range of synergistic initiatives that both support civil society actors and benefit from their reach and experience. AKF’s primary areas of focus are Education, Early Childhood Developrnent (ECD); Health and Nutrition; Civil Society; Agriculture and Food Security; and Economic Inclusion.
Project Description
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) and its agencies have launched a new programme in Eastern Africa. The prograrmme focuses on strengthening community responses across four countries – Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda – to overcome ongoing economic and social issues. With
multi-layered health and economic crises accelerating in recent months across the world, many countries’ existing systems have been stretched and tested in their ability to effectively keep up with negative impacts. The combined challenges expose underlying socio-economic fragilities. Collectively, the negative impacts could have devastating long-term social and economic effects on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities.
In Tanzania, this includes high levels of economic and employment insecurity for large sections of the population and limited reach of social protection systems over the last 12 months. Vulnerable communities still depend on ad-hoc and unsustainable coping strategies in response to negative impacts.
Youth are known to face disproportionate challenges, due to barriers in accessing life and employability skills developrnent opportunities among other services. Furthermore, innovative small and medium enterprises have limited business development support to present solutions to emerging local needs.
Across all contexts, there is an urgent need to rapidly strengthen communities’ abilities to cope with socio-economic shocks, to mitigate negative impacts on their development efforts. In Tanzania, the 30-month, multi-sectoral prograrnme aims to minimize the emerging negative impacts of socio-economic shocks such as the current global and regional economic downturn due to various pandemics since 2020, particularly for vulnerable cormmunities and young people. Funded by the European Commission, the programme will be partially implernented by the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF), alongside local government authorities, private sector partners such as Selcom, and other local technical partners and civil society organizations. It is anticipated that 11,100 women, men, and youth will be supported with a variety of coping and resilience strategies to help them develop and sustain their economic activities and well-being.
The project anticipates the following intermediary Outcomes.
- Strengthen coping strategies against socio-economic shocks for vulnerable men, women, and youth.
- Increase access to youth-friendly employability and entrepreneurship development opportunities.
Opportunity Description
AKF is seeking Expressions of Interest (Eol) from Business Development Service (BDS) providers with the expertise and experience in enterprise development focusing on grass root innovation and working with young entrepreneurs (aged 18 to 35 years). AKF and BDS partners will support young innovators whose ideas bring solutions to identified community problems in various sectors including health, education, water and sanitation, agriculture and other income generating sectors. AKF will solicit the expertise of BDS partners to accompany promising innovations in response to region specific community needs as they develop their business ideas and sharpen their business intelligence. Selected young innovators may receive small grants to support the scaling of their solutions with continued guidance from BDS
partners. AKF and BDS partners will jointly monitor young innovators’ progress and use of the sub-grants throughout the project. It is anticipated that this strategy will enable the target youth to have opportunities to scale their business ideas in service to their communities. This approach will not only support youth who may have lost their livelihoods due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but many other unemployed youths will acquire valuable skills for micro-entrepreneurship, further enhancing resilience during and post the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shortlisted EOI will be reviewed by an external partner of multisector BDS experts in November 2021. Following this review, finalists will be invited to co-create and develop a full proposal for a tentative start in implementation from January 2022. The selected Organization will receive sub grants to implement the BDS support activities to the selected youth over a period of 12 to 15 months.
Scope of Work
BDS Providers (e.g., innovation/business accelerator) will identify and provide technical training and mentoring 40 to 60 young male and female entrepreneurs in the target regions of Dar Es Salaam, Mwanza, Lindi and Mtwara. The partner will deliver intensive business and innovation development training and advisory services to build the entrepreneurial capacity of youth. This may include strategic one-on-one consulting, mentoring, market linkages and business coaching. Under this intervention and after training, AKF and BDS organization will identify at least 13 innovative entrepreneurs to access the programs flexible response fund. The BDS partners will be expected to continue providing advisory services and monitor recipients for at least 6 months following the award. Their ideas should be locally relevant to their communities’ challenges, have a social impact focus, a viable business model and delivery modality, the ability to generate employment and be rapidly deployed.
Specifically, this includes providing business development services in the following areas of interest:
- Personalized or tailored business management and acceleration trainings; include assigning staff with adequate capacity and experience to provide entrepreneurial and innovation support.
- Product /innovation development; this includes supporting the selected youth innovators in improving their innovation to enable there to scale.
- Technical support to youth groups in developing short- and long-term business plans of 6-12 months.
- Business coaching, mentoring, and advisory services to the selected young entrepreneurs.
- Access to opportunities for networking, fundraising, and market linkages, etc.
- Identification and participation in the selection panel for recipients of the
- Flexible Rapid Innovative Funds (FRIF) sub-grants from AKF (Selection of at least 13 awardees).
- Regular monitoring and reporting on the progress of trained and awarded entrepreneurs to document their development and challenges.
- Develop and share story telling contents of success stories
Requirements and Competencies
Organizations wishing to apply should meet the following requirements and competencies:
- Legal registrations from the relevant authorities
- Experience in providing Business Development Service (BDS), training on Micro Small and Medium Enterprises plus knowledge on innovation/product development.
- Experience in mobilizing and working with young entrepreneurs for similar programs especially young women entrepreneurs,
- Experience managing entrepreneurship awards with young applicants
- Private sector services product management experience with the technical team
- Experience developing youth appropriate training tools and materials, considering level of education.
- Previous and/or current interventions of the last 3 years in the target areas and regions is an advantage.
- Provide evidence/contact details of successful businesses that have graduated from their programs.
- Institutional capacity for the delivery of the technical support.
- The organization has been operating for at least 5 years in the provision of BDS services
Expression of Interest Instructions
Please submit your organization’s Eol following the content structure provided below.
Maximum five (5) pages will be reviewed and accepted. Applicants can submit no more than one Eol as Lead applicant.
Organization Profile(s) (max 0.5 page)
- Address, locations, and point of contact information; including the specific location of operations and how they relate to target areas.
- Ownership/Type of Entity
- Description of the organization and its main activities (history of operation, milestones)
- Management Team — brief on key staff and core competencies for the proposed
- Targeted geography/ies
Description of Context, Challenges and Justification (max 2 page)
- Please use this section to explain the concept of the call topic and the rationale for proposing the plan. How do you understand the context and the local challenges in three regions of Dar Es Salaam, Lindi and Mtwara?
- Explain how your organization defines innovation, especially at the grass root level.
- Please also describe the overall implementation approaches and methodologies intended to be used to achieve the key objectives of the Call topic and to meet what is expected.
- This should include youth appropriate and gender responsive approaches that will be used during the implementation
- Summary time frame for implementation with key milestones
- A brief description of the proposed targets and groups to be reached by your organization.
- What will be the selection criteria for the youth to be engaged in the program?
- How coaching and mentoring will be conducted.
- Indicate the current infrastructure, and expertise in the organization that will be deployed in delivery of the BDS and Innovation support.
- Description of evidence on why the proposed methods and approaches will be successful and sustainable beyond the project period including examples
- Description of how the target entrepreneurs will be tracked to monitor their progress during and after the training and support.
High Level Budget (max 0.5 page)
A tentative summary budget clearly differentiating Core Costs (running costs for the partner organizations including full/partial salaries, rent, travel, or other operational costs required for day-to-day operations) and Implementation Costs (cost of delivery of proposed interventions). The proposed budget should be ranging between TZS 149,924,163 to TZS 199,898,885.
Additional Information (annexed)
- Proof of Legal Registration
- Experience on previous grants, innovation, and youth focus program, including award programs.
- Capacity Statement (including size of previous and current grants)
- Organizational chart
- CVs of CEO/Director and BDS Technical Lead
- Sample of a recent donor / partner report or Links to recent publications / examples of recent BDS and Product development skills related publications or Links to recent communications.
Expressions of Interest must be electronically submitted by 6pm on Friday 12th November 2021.
Copying: [email protected] with
Subject line: “EC – AKDN COVID -19 Response partnership BDS Partner EOI”
Only shortlisted organizations will be contacted.,
AKF believe in Equal Opportunity and is Committed Safeguarding and promoting the Welfare of Children and Vulnerable Adults and Expects all staff and partners to share this Commitment
