| Title: | Policy Reform for Private Sector Investment Mobilization (PR4I) Small Grants Program |
| Location: | Kenya, Tanzania & (Senegal Coming Soon) |
| Period of Performance: | February – June , 2019 |
Background:
Africa Lead — Feed the Future’s Building Capacity for African Agricultural Transformation Program — supports the advancement of agricultural transformation in Africa as proposed by the African Union Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP). Africa Lead also contributes to the Feed the Future (FTF) goals of reduced hunger and poverty by building the capacity of Champions — i.e., men and women leaders in agriculture — and the institutions in which they operate to develop, lead, and manage the policies, structures, and processes needed for transformation.
In signing the 2014 Malabo Declaration, Africa’s Heads of State committed to 6% annual agricultural sector growth, doubling productivity, halving post-harvest losses, jobs for 30% of youth, reducing poverty, and eliminating child under-nutrition[1] and recommitted themselves to the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP). In order for these Malabo targets to be met, businesses need to grow and invest in agriculture. In order for businesses to invest, they want a stable, transparent and conducive enabling environment with sound and predictable policies and costs.
In response to agricultural development needs and the Malabo Declaration, African governments are renewing their National Agricultural Investment Plans (NAIPs) as well as their Agricultural development strategies. These set national sectoral priorities for investment and policy reform. They will determine priority value chains which offer both compelling commercial and development returns.
The desired impact of the NEPAD Country Agribusiness Partnership Framework (CAP-F) is to unlock the private sector investment necessary to achieve national and continental goals for the agriculture sector. Ideally, governments will receive feedback from the private sector that will push them to pass and implement more business-friendly policies. Meanwhile, the implementation of better policies will lead to greater private sector investments.
A series of lessons learned were developed by an assessment of the predecessor program to CAP-F, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. To complement this, there is also a series of lessons learned from the last 20 years of USAID and other donor-led private sector development programming that had similar aims of increasing investment and creating jobs and income through economic growth. This Activity will attempt to build off of those lessons learned and pilot a way forward on a micro level operating within the CAP-F parameters.
Overall Activity Objectives
There are two main objectives of the Africa Lead Policy Reform for Private Investment Mobilization (PR4I) Activity:
- Expose private sector actors, such as representative associations, to CAADP and CAP-F objectives and encourage public-private collaboration and feedback loops to carry out reforms to the business enabling environment, thereby fostering increased private investment mobilization.
- Generate learning on the building blocks of effective multi-stakeholder collaboration to help inform CAP-F. This includes government gaining experience eliciting and adapting to private sector feedback on policies and allowing the private sector and their unique understanding of value chains to drive initiatives aimed at increasing investments. Lastly, the activity will provide some lessons learned that inform effective approaches to CAP-F implementation
Award Information
Africa Lead may choose to fully or partially fund the selected applicants. Africa Lead expects to award grants ranging from $10,000 to $ 40,000 without exceeding $ 40,000. The number of grants and the amount of funding available are subject to change and Africa Lead reserves the right to grant no grants as a result of this tender.
Africa Lead anticipates an implementation period of up to 6 months. The implementation phase of all grants must conclude by 30 June 2019.
CLICK THE LINKS BELOW TO APPLY FOR THE RESPECTIVE COUNTRIES