Deadline: 8 June 2020
United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) is seeking partners to respond to the increased challenges faced by migrants and their families to send and receive remittances. The goal of this initiative is to ensure that migrants and their families are supported, through continued access to affordable and accessible remittance channels.
UNCDF will support partners in the development or expansion of digital remittance channels, strengthening digital use-cases, and developing products or services that strengthen the financial resilience of migrants and their families.
Focus Areas
- ACCESS: Promoting the access to and the adoption of digital remittance channels;
- USAGE: Strengthening digital use-cases for migrant workers and families;
- RESILIENCE: Linking remittances with value-added services for migrant workers and families.
Benefits
- Financial support that can range from USD$ 50,000 to 250,000;
- Technical assistance;
- Strategic partnerships;
- A chance to pilot or scale your solution.
How UNCDF works with partners
UNCDF takes a tailored approach to engagement with partners, working with each throughout to identify business and customer needs, and helping to design, pilot and scale up the solution along the way. Some examples of the ways in which UNCDF works with partners include:
- Product Research: Sharing market research and knowledge to deepen partners’ understanding of migrants’ behaviours, needs, constraints and aspirations. This also includes providing transaction data analysis and training to the business teams.
- Product design: Providing human-centred design expertise to better understand the customer journey – physical and financial – for better product design and use-case development tailored to the needs of migrants and their families. The efforts may also involve analysing the transaction data from a migrant lens.
- Provisioning: Providing technical assistance to help design, pilot, deploy, and scale up solutions for impact. Technical assistance is provided by digital finance and remittance experts who are experienced in product design, business model development and go-to-market strategies in some of the most challenging markets in Africa and Asia.
- Partnerships: Facilitating strategic partnerships with stakeholders – including cross-border payment hubs, mobile network operators, financial institutions, and non-bank financial institutions – to enable partners to reach last-mile customers, and to grow sustainably. UNCDF is uniquely positioned to be a neutral broker of partnerships and has a record of building strong relationships with private and public organizations across Africa, Asia, and Pacific.
- Policy and Advocacy: Convening efforts to support an enabling environment and build policy and advocacy capacity for migrant-centric products and services to be piloted and potentially scaled.
Eligibility Criteria
- The applicant/ lead applicant must be a registered entity (i.e., a bank, microfinance institutions, insurance company, money transfer operator, payment service provider, agent banking aggregator, mobile network operator, technology provider, fin-tech company);
- The lead applicant must be licensed to provide remittance services;
- The applicant can be based anywhere globally, however the interventions – irrespective of the sending country- should impact migrants from the following countries: Senegal, Ethiopia, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Regional interventions that will facilitate digital solutions for migrants within Central Africa, East Africa and West Africa can also be submitted;
- Applicants may apply only once under this RFA, whether independently or in a consortium;
- Joint applications between market players (including those examples of registered entities given above and non-governmental organizations) in the target country or countries are encouraged if the solution proposed will expand delivery networks and promote rural and/or other last-mile access to remittances and financial services;
- Applications from consortiums of organizations must show that the partnership was established prior to this call for applications;
- The applicant must partner with a financial service provider in the target recipient country or countries for delivery of the innovative solution if the digital solution/product requires piloting with a regulated financial institution and requires regulatory approval before piloting;
- The lead applicant and their financial service provider partner must be registered entities with at least one year of operations, and must have statutory accounts and audited financial statements for at least one operating year;
- Applicants must have an existing solution having tested a proof of concept that is ready to undergo pilot testing for a duration of 6 to 12 months;
- The solution proposed must be implementable in 2020, with a project duration of between 9 and 12 months and ending by July 2021;
- Applicants must contribute at least 30 percent of the project’s cash costs (costs may include technical infrastructure, resources, and operations);
- 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; and
- Applicants must not be involved in any of the following activities;
- Manufacture, sale or distribution of controversial weapons or their components, including cluster bombs, anti-personnel mines, biological or chemical weapons or nuclear weapons;
- Manufacture, sale or distribution of armaments and/or weapons or their components, including military supplies and equipment;
- Replica weapons marketed to children;
- Manufacture, sale or distribution of tobacco or tobacco products;
- Involvement in the manufacture, sale and distribution of pornography;
- Manufacture, sale or distribution of substances subject to international bans or phase-outs, and wildlife or products regulated under the CITES;
- Gambling including casinos, betting etc. (excluding lotteries with charitable objectives);
- Violation of human rights or complicity in human rights violations;
- Use or toleration of forced or compulsory labor;
- Use or toleration of child labor.
For more information, visit https://www.uncdf.org/article/5660/request-for-applications-inclusive-digital-solutions-to-support-migrants-and-remittances