Institutional and Credit Assessment of Agricultural Producer Organizations
Location of Assignment: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with possible travel to Morogoro, Iringa, and/or Mbeya.
Proposed Level of Effort: 25 days
Anticipated Start Date: September 2018
Anticipated End Date: October 2018
Background
This assignment will support a joint-initiative between the Tanzania Enabling Growth through Investment and Enterprise (ENGINE) program and NAFAKA II—both of which are four-year USAID-funded Feed the Future programs operating in Tanzania since 2016.
The ENGINE Program, implemented by the international Executive Service Corps (IESC) —aims to streamline and enhance many of the regulatory, informational and financial channels that encourage domestic and foreign investment in the mainland agricultural regions of Mbeya, Morogoro, and Iringa, as well as in Zanzibar. ENGINE’s activities are divided into three main components: improving the business enabling environment, building the capacity of businesses through business advisors, and improving access to financial services for small businesses.
NAFAKA II, implemented by ACDI/VOCA, is a follow-on to NAFAKA I, a five-year staple value chain program which ended in September 2016. The transition between the two programs focused on shifting from a production-based agricultural program to a market facilitation approach serving over 80,000 rice and/or maize producing households. NAFAKA II interventions are based on the following components: facilitating access to improved agricultural inputs; producer organizations (PO) facilitating business development services; and, improving milling/processing market facilitation.
Problem StatementNAFAKA and ENGINE have developed a joint activity in which a sub-set of ENGINE-trained business development service providers (BDSPs) will conduct credit and institutional capacity assessments of approximately 10 to 15 of NAFAKA’s producer organizations (POs).
As NAFAKA enters the last two years of its ten years of programming, it is undertaking a formalized credit-readiness and leadership assessment to understand how its network of supported producer organizations (POs) have used or leveraged NAFAKA’s resources to provide services to their members. These resources include trainings, extension services to farmers (through grants), executing structured trade engagements, and utilizing an increase in access to markets.
Under ENGINE’s access to credit objective, it trained a cadre of 22 BDSPs earlier in 2018 in a structured credit-readiness process. In this process BDSPs provide guidance and support to small businesses in the areas of financial literacy, credit assessment, and loan origination.
Since the credit assessment process is still relatively new for the ENGINE-trained BDSPs, ENGINE is seeking an experienced expert volunteer to work alongside these BDSPs to support them as they conduct assessments of NAFAKA’s POs.
Objectives of the AssignmentThe objective of this assignment is to support 3-5 BDSPs trained by ENGINE and selected by NAFAKA as they conduct credit and institutional assessments of approximately 10 NAFAKA-supported producer organizations. The expert volunteer will work closely with the selected ENGINE BDSPs —at first as a group, then later individually — and provide mentoring, quality assurance, guidance and ad-hoc training throughout their work to ensure that they are able to successfully accomplish the objectives of their assignment with NAFAKA.
Assignment Tasks
Deliverables
The expert volunteer will be responsible for the quality and timely delivery of the BDSPs’ deliverables to NAFAKA. These include:
In addition, the expert volunteer will be responsible for the following:
The International Executive Service Corps is a Washington, DC based not-for-profit that focuses on private sector growth. We support and catalyze the development of private enterprises, business support organizations, financial institutions, and public institutions around the world. Utilizing skilled consultants and expert volunteers, we’ve implemented over 25,000 short-term projects and 200 programs in 130 countries. True to our mission — Promoting Prosperity and Stability through Private Enterprise — we’re proud to have created over one million jobs across the globe