BACKGROUND

The Mastercard Foundation, under its Young Africa Works – Ethiopia strategy, is supporting the Government of Ethiopia through the BRIDGES Program, which envisages supporting the creation of close to 600,000 jobs for young people (80% women), and 15,000 micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). First Consult is the implementing partner of the program, in collaboration with the FDRE Jobs Creation Commission (JCC).

The BRIDGES Program is a five-year youth job creation initiative addressing fundamental, immediate, and complementary challenges to unlock the potential for job creation within industrial parks (IPs), as well as outside the IPs, including micro, small, and medium Enterprises (MSMEs). As such, BRIDGES also plans to train 300,000 unemployed young men and women through industrial park job creation initiatives, and market linkage between industrial parks and MSMEs.

Tourism is one of the major industries that contributes to economic development in many ways. The sector has huge potential in terms of forex earning, employment creation and business to business linkages. However, many factors hindered the sector’s contribution to the local economy; the major constraints are under development of the destinations, limited linkage between actors in the sector, poor coordination between stakeholders, limited products, lack of skilled manpower, limited access to finance and so on.

BRIDGES program in partnership with the Oromia Tourism Commission will be working on selected eight tourist destinations in order to develop the sites as well as creating income making activities for the local youth in each selected area. The project categorizes the destinations into two. (1) Destinations that require low investment to better serve tourists as well as sustain new businesses around (2) Destinations that require infrastructure investment in order to attract and serve tourists as well as sustain businesses around.

1. The sites that will be developed using the first approach are 1) Bishan Guracha, (2) Yerer/Erer mountain, (3) Menagesha Suba, (4) Arsi Mountains National Park- Dhera Dilfekar Block, (5) Sof Omar Cave and (6) Borana National Park.
2. Dembel Lake and Abijata & Shala lakes National Park will follow the second approach.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this assignment is to select a service provider with the capacity to support 91 existing and new Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) working in the eight selected tourist destinations. The support will be a mix of business development and entrepreneurship training, facilitating access to finance in partnership with financial service providers, providing Technical Assistance depending on the specific service SMEs are engaged in.

SMEs will highly likely be engaged in services such as boating service, fishing service, canteen service, camping service, equestrian Camp/horse riding, hiking guide, conservation related jobs, landscaping, cleaning, scouting, seedling nursery development, tour guide, and souvenir shops, hot spring water service and others as maybe appropriate for each site

Destinations: Eight Selected Destinations in Oromia Regional State

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

ToR Tourism B2B linkage - V1.doc

Job Requirements

The ideal firm applying needs:

• To have a strong understanding and experience in tourism sector
• Strong capability to provide Business Development Services
• To have strong experience working with both private sector and government
• Experience in working in partnership with other business in order to deliver on an assignment
• To have strong program coordination and communication skills
• Fluency in Afaan Oromo is required

How to Apply

Applicants should email their proposal (technical and financial) to bids1@firstconsultet.com with the relevant information detailed in technical and financial section of a proposal. The subject of the email should say “Implementing Partner for Tourism Business to Business Linkage”. Proposals must be received no later than 5:00 PM on September 9, 2021. For any queries relating to this assignment please contact Kalkidan Alemseged at kalemseged@firstconsultet.com