Consultancy Service for Project Midline Survey at Nuru Nigeria

Background

Nuru Nigeria (NN) is a local NGO with affiliates in the US, Kenya, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. Our mission is to build resilience corridors of strong, locally owned farmer cooperatives driving profitable livelihoods in vulnerable communities of the Northeast. Nuru Nigeria prioritizes the smallholder farmers it serves and works to cultivate lasting meaningful choices through community-led, community-driven, and community-sustained livelihood programs across the agriculture value chain. Nuru equips local leaders with the tools and knowledge to lead their communities out of extreme poverty by integrating impact programs that address the most prevalent and fundamental challenges of extreme poverty. We design training-based poverty solutions that promote self-reliance and service-mindedness to enable local leaders to continue scaling impact, long after
Nuru Nigeria staff has exited the project community. The Nuru Nigeria model focuses on growing community-led, community-driven and community-sustained profitable Farmer Associations and multipurpose Farmer Organizations through
agricultural production and productivity, livelihood diversification activities, income-generating activities and financial inclusion activities. Each of these activities is targeted at building the resilience of the communities affected by the activities of Boko Haram. Through women representation, resources and rights lenses, Nuru Nigeria deliberately targets women and youths in its engagement to ensure a holistic household inclusion, and a deliberate increase in income and nutrition.

Hence, Nuru Nigeria is partnering with GIZ to implement the building community resilience through agribusiness development (BC-RAD) project in Gombi, Hong and Michika LGAs aimed towards the economic development of rural households and building resilience corridors of smallholder farmers, with the establishment of systems designed to support local solutions to community problems. The program targets enhancing the production capacity of farmers in knowledge, resources and skills as a way of increasing the profitability and efficiency of their farms and business enterprises.

Halfway through the implementation of the BC-RAD project, NN wishes to conduct a midline assessment to provide a snapshot of progress, inform decision-making, and contribute to the overall success and sustainability of development initiatives while comparing with the baseline achievements recorded at the commencement of the BC-RAD project that provided a comprehensive assessment of the status quo of target beneficiaries before program implementation.

Objectives

The objectives of the BC-RAD project are:

• Objective I: Increasing household income through agricultural production and productivity
• Objective II: Enhancing profitability through livelihood diversification and market systems approach
• Objective III: Increasing access to financial services through digital financial inclusion activities

Scope of work

The scope of work for the Midline assessment covers the key results and the indicators for the

BC-RAD project:

BC-RAD Result 1: Improved household incomes, food security, and resilience through sustainable, nutrition-sensitive agribusiness-led economic growth Adoption of sustainable agriculture practices by smallholder farmers

• Number of individuals in the livelihood program disaggregated by gender, IDPs, Returnee and Host communities.
• Number of farmer organizations established through livelihood program
• Average percentage increase of crop yield per hectares compared to baseline
• Average percentage increase in household income compared to baseline
• Percentage of individuals in the agriculture system who have applied improved management practices or technologies through livelihood program
• Percentage of men and women reporting receiving climate and weather information through livelihood program
• Number of beneficiaries benefiting from income-generating equipment through livelihood program
• Percentage of beneficiaries that used market linkage support through livelihood program
• Percentage improvement in beneficiaries’ household income through the utilization of post- harvest and processing equipment for value addition

BC-RAD Result 2: Increased community financial resilience through enhanced private sector investment in the agriculture and public-private partnership in the provision of financial services

• Number of individuals participating in group-based savings through livelihood program
• Number of individuals with access to loan services
• Average total savings deposits per saving cycle per member (USD)
• Total savings deposits (USD) for the saving cycle for all members

BC-RAD Result 3: Increased social cohesion among recovery communities in central and northern Adamawa State leading to economic resilience

• Increase in adaptive resilience capacity index score compared to the benchmark
• Percentage of individuals participating in livelihood program who agree that they have a sense of belonging in the community compared to the benchmark
• Percentage of beneficiaries who believe their relationships with other members in the groups have improved compared to the benchmark
• Percentage of beneficiaries with an increased level of participation in the farmer groups compared to the benchmark

Deliverables/Expected output

The major deliverables from the Midline assessment are:

• Inception Report: The consulting firm will prepare and submit an inception report detailing how the evaluation will be carried out from his/her point of view. The report will outline the study design, tools and detailed work plan for the entire exercise. Draft interview guide and other data collection tools will be submitted to the NN M&E Team for review and approval before data collection starts. As part of the inception report, the consulting firm must provide a data analysis plan showing the questions and analysis for each of the activity indicators to be investigated.
• Draft Final Assessment Report: The consulting firm will deliver a preliminary report for revision and comments by the NN M&E and Management Team. This report should include the main draft results and findings of the assessment, lessons learned, and recommendations, including its sustainability, and potential improvements in project management and coordination of similar BC-RAD projects;
• Final Report: The consulting firm will submit the final evaluation report, which should include the revised version of the preliminary version after making sure all the comments, observations, and recommendations from the NN M&E Team and the Management Team have been included. The final report must outline the evaluation methodology, findings, lessons learned, and recommendations. The report shall incorporate specific simple and achievable recommendations, including the most appropriate strategies that can be undertaken and/or
• incorporated by NN and partners to attempt to address the issues identified. The final report should address the indicators and key result areas outlined above. A final report in both hard and electronic copies shall be made available to NN after the assessment period.

The annexes of the report should contain (but not be limited to):

• The Evaluation Terms of Reference
• List of reference documents
• Copies of tools used
• List of people interviewed
• Cleaned quantitative and qualitative datasets with the memo of the data cleaning process
• Code book and Data dictionary

OPENING, EVALUATION OF TENDERS AND SELECTION CRITERIA

The opening and examination of tenders is for the purpose of checking whether the tenders are complete and whether the tenders are generally in order. Tender Process; The following processes will be applied to this Tender:

• Tender Period
• Tender Closing
• Tender Opening
• Administrative Evaluation
• Technical Evaluation
• Financial Evaluation
• Contract Award
• Notification of Contract Award

The subsequent evaluation of the tenders shall be carried out in Yola by an Evaluation Committee made up of representatives of Nuru Nigeria. Tenders will be evaluated on the criteria listed below:

• Compliance with Nuru Nigeria Procurement terms and conditions. (Administrative)
• Being a certified consulting firm
• Financial Proposals based on best value for money. (Financials)
• Must be a certified Audit firm
• Adherence with work methodology or scope of work requested. (Technical)
• A Comprehensive draft of Proposal. (Technical)
• Work Plan showing time of completion and stages of work progress. (Technical)
• Similar past experiences with NGO/UN agencies. (Administrative)
• Physical Operational Status of the company. (Technical)
• Compliance with Payment Terms and Conditions. (Technical)
• Provision of a CV of consultant(s)/technical staff in relevant field. (Administrative)