Deadline: 28-Feb-21
The United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) has announced a call for proposals for the Demand Side Research on Migrant Remittances.
The overarching goal of the UNCDF remittances portfolio is to enable inclusive digital economies that support migrants and recipient families towards economic inclusion, financial resilience and health. At the customer level, this means migrants and their families would have better financial, digital and commerce capabilities, including access to jobs and markets.
The UNCDF data and research agenda aims to address two broad action research questions:
- To what degree can the shift from cash to digital remittances strengthen the financial inclusion, resilience and inclusive growth of migrants and their families?
- How can they improve policy and innovation to ensure digital remittances reach the last mile (low-income, women and youth)?
Objectives
The overall objectives of the demand research are:
- To address knowledge gaps in terms of the demand for and customer value propositions in access, usage and financial resilience of migrants and their families, in respect of both digital/formal and alternate remittance services;
- To enable Programme Partners with the capacity for human-centric design of digital remittance services and analytics support, so that they develop desirable, viable and feasible remittance solutions;
- To assess project-level migrant and beneficiaries’ outreach, profiles and impact in increasing access and usage of digital remittance services, and in creating financial resilience of the target customers;
- To support Programme Partners in using the assessment and capacity building to further refine their product innovation through HCD and digital financial literacy.
Funding Information
- Budget: Up to US$600,000 for one applicant/organization.
- Period: March 2021 – January 2022.
UNCDF is seeking applications from customer research-focused consulting firms to:
- Conduct comprehensive demand research on migrant remittances using data analytics from institutional databases,
- Carry out a Lean Data Survey,
- Conduct qualitative behavioural research using HCD techniques
- Develop a HCD toolkit on inclusive digital remittances and financial service innovation and
- Develop a remittance focused digital financial literacy toolkit to be used by Remittance Service Providers (RSPs) for migrants and their families.
Location: Institution/Home-based.
Scope: Bangladesh, Myanmar, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Republic of Korea, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Republic of the Congo.
Eligibility Criteria
Only applications that meet the eligibility requirements and minimum criteria for the submission will be considered by the Evaluation Committee of UNCDF’s Migration and Remittances Programme.
- The lead applicant must be a registered entity with at least three years of operations and must have statutory accounts and audited financial statements for at least three operating years.
- The applicant or the lead applicant must be an organization focused on customer research (commercial for-profit firms or non-profit organizations).
- Applicants may apply only once under this RFA, whether independently or in a consortium.
- Applicants may apply independently or in a consortium, provided that the consortium members have exclusively applied with only one lead applicant.
- Applicants shall not have been the subject of bankruptcy, liquidation, judicial settlement, safeguarding, cessation of activity or any other similar situation resulting from a similar procedure.
- Applicants and any of their staff or member of their board of directors shall not be included in the United Nations financial sanctions lists, particularly in the fight against the financing of terrorism and against attacks on international peace and security.
For more information, visit https://www.uncdf.org/article/6435/rfa-demand-side-research-on-migrant-remittances
