Call for Proposals for Supporting Women and Girls Multi-donor Trust Fund

Deadline: 23-Jul-21

The World Bank is pleased to launch a call for proposals for Supporting Women and Girls Multi-donor Trust Fund to support women’s social and economic empowerment through the World Bank-supported Nigeria For Women Project (NFWP).

In response to a request from the Government of Nigeria, the World Bank supported the design of the NFWP with the objective to support women’s improved livelihood opportunities in targeted communities of Nigeria.

The World Bank is seeking two separate grantees to implement two sets of activities to support the NFWP:

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Organization – The grantee for this activity will support and NFWP in the development of a comprehensive M&E framework, Iterative Beneficiary Monitoring (IBM) system, and Responsive Feedback Mechanism (RFM).
Umbrella Organization – The grantee for this activity will provide technical assistance to build NFWP staff capacity in key areas and will engage and supervise partners to:
- implement health and Gender Based Violence training and communications for select WAGs;
- coordinate a livelihoods pilot for select women beneficiaries of the NFWP; and
- implement social norms marketing at the community level in select LGAs.

Components

NFWP proposes to demonstrate the impact of a multi-dimensional, medium to long-term approach to overcome the main institutional and market failures limiting women’s economic outcomes in Nigeria. While the NFWP is a Federal Program, it is being implemented in five States (Abia, Kebbi, Niger, Ogun and Taraba) and three LGAs per State, based on agreed criteria. (A sixth State was included in the design and may be added in future.) The project is being implemented through the following components:

Component 1: Building Social Capital – This component aims to build social capital by galvanizing women to become members of Women Affinity Groups (WAGs) and strengthening both new and existing WAGs to serve as institutional platforms for women in Nigeria.
Component 2: Livelihoods Program – This component aims to support economically active women in WAGs through provision of livelihoods grants and holistic, as well as targeted, skills trainings in savings and loans, financial education, gender and life skills, and business skills.
Component 3: Innovations and Partnerships – This component supports innovations in social and economic spheres to further women’s livelihood outcomes. The identification of these innovations will be through a development marketplace approach which will invite proposals from individuals, CSOs, and private sector to propose interventions that would address particular binding constraints women face in their socio-economic empowerment and in particular access to livelihoods, which can then be scaled up.
Component 4: Project Management, Monitoring and Evaluation and Learning – The aim of this component is to support the advancement of policy dialogue; strengthen technical and implementation capacity; and foster better coordination among implementing partners at the Federal, State, and LGA levels through deployment of highly qualified technical professionals.

Target Beneficiaries

The Project targets women who are economically active as well as poor, vulnerable and marginalized women for mobilization and participation in WAGs. The Project works with existing groups and other women above 18 years of age in the participating communities to support their mobilization into WAGs. The Project will target 54,000 individual beneficiary women per state, benefitting a total of 324,000 women as part of about 21,600 WAGs across the various States by May 2023. All WAG members will be eligible to benefit from livelihoods grants. Livelihoods support will target women who are currently economically active including women engaged in informal, unipersonal, small-scale businesses and small-scale farming as they are underserved by current programming and have better readiness for upward socio-economic mobility.

Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility requirements for the grantees are as follows:

Have legal status in Nigeria. The applicant is required to provide a copy of its legal status, including type of organization and year of establishment.
Use the organization’s annual audited financial statements corresponding to such organization as the basis for preparing the Proposal Budget.
Have a bank account in Nigeria and be authorized to receive grant funding directly from the World Bank, should the proposal be selected.
Be able to have a representative from the organization sign a grant agreement with the World Bank, should the proposal be selected.
Proven track record: applicant must provide evidence of its experience (at least 3-5 years) in the area of the call for proposals, and a vision matching the goals of the NFWP. To this end, applicant must provide:
- references about previous or ongoing projects related to the field (e.g. women’s economic empowerment, women’s collectives, M&E, behavior change communications in health/GBV), and
- names of three persons that can provide references about the organization’s performance. weed out proposals that don’t meet basic eligibility criteria.

Any firm which does not meet these eligibly requirements will be disqualified.

For more information, visit https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/nigeria/brief/call-for-proposals-for-the-supporting-women-and-girls-multi-donor-trust-fund