Deadline: 12 August 2019
Partnering for Innovation is seeking expressions of interest from business service providers who can deliver business capacity-building services to women-owned, operated, or managed agribusinesses in sub-Saharan Africa in preparation for an upcoming activity that will support female entrepreneurs.
The goal of this announcement is to identify business service providers that support women entrepreneurs and leaders with businesses-focused strategies that target smallholder farmers and suppliers, which complement the U.S Government Global Food Security Strategy by directly engaging with the private sector to contribute to the achievement of global food security.
Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation is supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Feed the Future initiative. The program develops innovative partnerships and provides technical assistance to private sector businesses to expand their commercial impact in smallholder markets and increase farmers’ access to products and services to improve long term agricultural productivity, smallholder livelihoods, and food security
Technical Assistance
The technical assistance can include, but is not limited to the following:
- Finance and Strategy
- Investment-readiness assessment: review of the enterprise’s corporate systems, a summary of key challenges, and overall readiness for external investment.
- Financial forecasting: provide assistance to companies entering the smallholder farmer market with products for sale with a forecast of revenues and costs over a three-year period.
- Business strategy support: assist companies in developing and co-designing five-year business strategies.
- Investor-readiness support: prepare an investor overview document and outreach materials including a pitch deck, a landscape review of potential investors, and matchmaking with fund managers and owners of commercial funds.
- Organization and Talent
- Human resources management and support: plan for growth demands, develop corporate culture, and deploy tools to identify, recruit, train, and incentivize the staff needed for companiesto scale.
- Market and Consumer Insights
- Market assessment: evaluate the size of the addressable market, consumers’ willingness to pay, competitors, and available distribution channels. Capacity building and recommendations for conducting future assessments.
- Marketing support: clearly define the value proposition and potential return on investment of the product to smallholder farmers. Conduct a cost-benefit analysis that helps analyze business decisions, provide recommendations for new marketing strategies to specifically target and better communicate with smallholder farmers, and develop implementation plans to roll out these strategies.
- Collecting and Analyzing Data: deliver tools and guidance for companies to cost effectively streamline their data collection processes. Provide training on how to analyze data to support business growth.
- Product Adaptation: inform product adaptation through technical assistance to ensure that consumer needs are met.
- Operations
- Distribution and supply chain management: includes an assessment of current packaging, inventory, warehousing, transportation, and other logistical activities and recommendations for improvement. Capacity building on best practices for distribution and supply chain management to keep customers satisfied and scale growth.
- Operational analysis: assess current operational systems, including an analysis of improvements needed to ensure a company’s facilities are streamlined and efficiently accounted for, a discussion of how these improvements can be addressed through operational systems, and plans for implementing the improved system(s) of choice.
Eligibility Criteria
- Companies providing business capacity building services to for-profit agribusinesses in sub-Saharan Africa will be considered. If the company does not provide these services in sub-Saharan Africa, the application will be immediately disqualified. Applicants will be required to identify the country or countries in which they have provided business capacity building services in the official application on the next page.
- All applicants must be legally recognized entities in the country of their residence and should demonstrate experience in the technical areas described above. The following activities are not eligible for funding:
- Pure academic research.
- Technologies that have not been market tested and require further research and development.
- Commodity procurement.
- Restricted goods from Cuba, Iran, Laos, Libya, North Korea, and Syria.
How to Apply
Applicants should submit their applications electronically at the address given on the website.
For more information, please visit https://www.partneringforinnovation.org/funding-opportunities-1