BACKGROUND

Financial education is a fundamental tool in reducing the challenge through enhancing youths and MSMEs’ level of financial literacy. It increases the access and utilization of financial services, which allow enterprises to innovate and exploit their capacity. It also improves MSMEs’ competency and enables to survive in an increasingly turbulent environment. As financial education for entrepreneurs’ spreads throughout MSMEs, it can create a self‐reinforcing mechanism.

On the other hand, financial institutions need to come out from the vicious circle. They need to create awareness to MSMEs the new joining labor force about the various types of financial products and available services. This would help FIs to broaden their customer bases and mobilize more resources. Likely, MSMEs and particularly youths ease the intention of feeling precarious unemployment and financial insecurity.

Through BRIDGES engagement for a year and half in the financial market, it was found out that the unemployed young men and women lack awareness about the various financial service offerings that would enable them access credit to realize their vision. Hence, this intervention was implemented in Addis Ababa which resulted in training more than 15,000 youths leading to more than 2,000 youth to access credit so far. The training encompasses on mid sets, basic entrepreneurship, financial institutions awareness and product offerings as well as credit.

The financial education will be provided using different delivery channels ranging from financial literacy campaigns to more structured seminars and workshops. BRIDGEs will be engaged in supporting the intervention through creating the working platform, which will help the main actors to pay their own part in closer coordination.

The Financial Education interventions mainly target unemployed youths and MSMEs in Amhara Region. These target groups can easily reach and communicate through the concerned public administration. In general, the initiative will be operational in partnership with the Region Job Creation and enterprise Development Bureau, TVET’s Tana Union, Walia Capital Goods Financing, SACCO’s, other MFIs and the consultants. For the awareness creation program, it was envisaged to reach to 15,000 unemployed youth in which at least 10,000 will be accessing credit from various financial institutions.

On the other hand, TATARI for Students program is designed for higher education institutes’ (university and TVET) students as well as young graduates aspiring to become entrepreneurs. It provides training, mentoring, matching grant and credit facility to eligible members. It works in partnership with selected financial institutions for favorable saving and credit facilities.

It also provides continuous business development service, coaching and mentoring services between 6–12 months. Each member of the TATARI program will contribute a minimum fixed amount on a monthly basis in account to be opened in the partner financial institution. The BRIDGES program will match certain amount of money upon graduation depending on the number of years they have been saving and availability of fund. Upon the students’ graduation, the partnering financial institutions will provide a credit of up to 5 to 6 folds of the saved amount with favorable credit terms to TATARI members.                         

BRIDGES PROGRAMME

 First Consult (FC)/Development Alternative Inc (DAI) is contracted to provide management and technical support services to Mastercard Foundation under the BRIDGES program to support the creation of close to 600,000 youth jobs (80% women) and 15,000 MSMEs, with 300,000 unemployed youth trained through supporting IP job creation initiative and market linkage between IPs and MSMEs.

 The BRIDGES Program will address two fundamental, immediate and complementary challenges to unlock the potential for job creation within IPs and their surrounding ecosystem. (1) Making the

industrial workforce markets work, which through the Enterprise Partners Program, First Consult/DAI have successfully piloted in a few industrial parks and is now ripe for scale-up. (2) Making the IP business linkages (MSME) markets work to enhance domestic manufacturing value-added (MVA) for every given dollar of export. This will be done by substituting the currently-heavy import-dependent operations – itself a constraint on the factories - via local suppliers (MSMEs) in a number of ways.

 The Government of Ethiopia recognizes the critical role played by Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in creating job opportunities especially for young people and women, as well as for boosting national income and wealth that is important in igniting industrial transformation and private sector development. This is also well articulated in the Growth and Transformation Plan which prioritizes and identifies the development of micro and small businesses as catalyst for promoting industrial development. However, issues such as A2F, premises, market and linkage issues remain a challenge. To address the aforementioned, the A2F issue, BRIDGES Program partners with many Financial Institutions (FIs) to ensure that FIs received the necessary Technical Assistances that will enable the FIs to cater the wider group of MSMEs that are youth focused.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this assignment is to provide financial awareness training to more than 15,000 unemployed youths and MSMEs in Amhara Region and enable minimum of 10,000 of them to access credit from financial institutions through strong follow-ups, supervision, and mentorship.

Moreover, for TATARI, the Coordinator will be responsible for selecting and registering 3,000 interested students, coordinating, consolidating, and ensuring smooth implementation of TATARI program and will work closely with academic institutions, training and BDS service providers, partnering financial institutions, students/graduates and other concerned stakeholders as intended.

The firm must be based or have branch office in Bahir Dar 

You can get the full detail of the ToR from the link below

TOR - Providing Financial Awareness- Amhara Region V1.docx

Job Requirements

QUALIFICATION AND EXPERIENCE:

Applicant Firm must have qualified trainers who has experience in managing such training programs, delivering trainings and good understanding of the regional stakeholders such as financial institutions, Job creation agencies, TVET’s etc that are part of the youth eco-system.

• Experience working in a multi-stakeholder environment delivering similar assignments
• Prior experience implementing coordination assignment
• Strong track record of project management and reporting
• Demonstrated ability to network with various stakeholders
• Good understanding of MSMEs development/ sector and related work experience
• Excellent analytical, technical and conceptual knowledge about management and grasp of business management principles and practices
• Strong verbal and written communication skills in English and Amharic
• Experience related to youth job creation and connection to financial institutions, higher education institutes including TVET is an asset

How to Apply

In response to this TOR, qualified companies should submit both technical (maximum 10 pages, CVs could be annexed) and financial proposals (Maximum 4 pages) in the following structure:

• Technical Proposal; Relevant Experience of the experts, Description of Technical Approach, Methodology, and Work Plan for Performing the Assignment & Team Composition, Assignment, and Key Experts CV’s
• Financial Proposal - The firm should submit the total budget in the proposal with detail breakdown including applicable government taxes. All costs should be stated in ETB. The financial proposal must include the fixed payments for providing the trainings of 15,000 youth (on average it will have 300 sessions assuming that there are 50 youth per session) and success fee rates for each loan files or membership to SACCOs (minimum 10,000 youth)

For TATARI the firm should list down all costs it will incur in the financial proposal. The payment milestone should be:

• Based on number of TATARI students registering, attending trainings, opening saving accounts with fixed payment and
• Accessing matching fund/credit on a success fee basis

Clarification/Contact person

For any clarification, please contact Kalkidan Alemseged at kalemseged@firstconsultet.com no later than 5 PM on August 11, 2021.

Submission of the proposal

The Offer shall include both the “Technical” and “Financial” Proposal and submit to the following email address bids4@firstconsultet.com

Deadline for submission of proposals

Applicants should email their proposal (technical and financial) to bids4@firstconsultet.com with the relevant information detailed in the technical and financial section of a proposal. The subject of the email should say Financial Education for youths, BRIDGES Project. Proposals must be received no later than 5 PM on 16^th August 2021.