IFAD Grant Agri Connect: Enabling Private Sector Investment and Access to Services for Smallholder Farmers

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The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has announced a call for proposals IFAD Grant Agri Connect: Enabling Private Sector Investment and Access to Services for Smallholder Farmers through Digital Farmer Registry.

IFAD Grant Agri Connect Goal and Objectives

The main goal is to contribute to transition agriculture in the countries from informal, disconnected, subsistence-based models to become data-integrated, entrepreneurial, and commercially oriented.
Objective: Facilitate development and implementation of Digital Farmer Registry to create network effects and enable digital services delivery to smallholder farmers to enhance productivity and postharvest activities leveraging data.
Sub-Objective: Support creation of enabling policies to act as an incentive for private sector to develop and deliver innovative services for the agriculture sector.

IFAD Grant Agri Connect Funding Information

Project total costs will be USD 1.5 million, divided as follows per component. IFAD will also seek some potential additional co-financing including (technology subsidisation) from the grantee, selected country counterparts or other donors while developing the proposal.
Component 1: Design and pilot implementation of digital farmer registry – USD 1.25 Million (Pilots in 2 selected countries)
Component 2: Building capacity and strengthen data governance – USD 0.25 Million

Expected Outcomes

Improved access by smallholder producers to information and digital enabled services for improved agronomic practices and yields.
Enhanced access to farmer registry data driving private sector digital innovation and expansion in the agriculture sector.
Increased number of use cases supporting last-mile delivery of digital enabled services to small holders for improved production and productivity

Expected Outputs

Situational & gap analysis and validation is completed for the identified countries.
Operational mechanism for development of the farm registries is setup.
Unified Farmer Services Interface developed to support API integration.
Functioning pilots of farmer registries ready to scale
Defined use cases with private sector to ensure sustainability and last mile delivery of digital services.
Data governance and usage guidelines are developed.
Technical assistance for technology infrastructure deployment

Key Activities

Specifically, the grant will support the delivery of the following activities:

Component 1: Design and pilot implementation of digital farmer registry The grant will support design and implementation of digital farmer registry based on key features and principles of DPI (including interoperability, efficient and cost effectiveness, scalability, citizen centric design, flexible and adoptive features, promote positive governance and cross sector collaboration) (Deloitte, DPI approach 2023). The following activities will be undertaken to support the implementation in the two countries:
- Needs assessment of public and private sector, existing data sources/farmer registries
- Define the overall data needs i.e. granularity, coverage, governance, accessibility, and interoperability.
- Create a network effect by unlocking partnerships with private sector to define key use cases (i.e. digitising existing transactions to capture efficiencies, scaling, data needs for financing institutions) and collaboration with FOs as key stakeholders.
- Develop/customise existing technology solutions for farmer registry.
- Validation of farmer data based on agreed data points and protocols based on existing databases.
- Selection of pilot areas for usability and gradual scale up
- Operational mechanism for data collection storage and management of data
Component 2: Building capacity and strengthening data governance and knowledge.

This component will focus on building capacity of in country counterparts to manage and scale-up the implementation of the farmer registry platform and build partnerships and cross sector collaborations for sustainability of operations. The following activities will be undertaken:

Building capacity for data collection and simplification of data collection and access mechanisms.
Data governance process for sharing data, privacy and protection with other stakeholders such as private service providers- middlemen, enterprises, AgriTech, Fintech, financial institutions among others.
Technical assistance towards development/adoption of data policies and regulatory frameworks to enable data sharing and interoperability.
Document and disseminate key lessons from implementation to support scale up into other countries including through collaboration with UN and development agency networks, UN2.0 community and targeted knowledge sharing events.

Direct and Indirect Target Group

Direct target groups are country implementing and strategic partners including Ministries of Agriculture, Information and Communication as well as Project Management Units. The grant will also enable smallholder farmers with a focus on youth and women in accessing productive inputs through subsidies, market linkages and access to financial services etc, leveraging digital solutions. Indirectly the grant will support digital technology providers tailor solutions to support farmers’ access to inputs enabled by digital vouchers, digital wallets for payments, access to financial services and aggregation for markets through farmer organisations and policy strengthening.

Eligible Countries

Nigeria and Rwanda

Eligibility Criteria for IFAD Grant Agri Connect

The competitively selected recipient can be a consulting organization, private sector, alliance of partner service providers, specialized NGO, or an inter-governmental organization (including UN agencies).
The applicant should propose some level of cash and in-kind co-financing. The recipient’s contribution must be at least 25% for private sector applicants. For other applicants, it is recommended that the recipient’s contribution is at least 20%.
This call for proposals is not-binding: IFAD retains the right to not fund any proposal under this call depending upon quality of the proposals received as well as potential other factors that may require IFAD to shift priorities for funding.

Sub-Criteria

Technical Experience:
- Demonstrated experience designing and deploying large scale public digital databases and complex infrastructure systems projects
- Experience in deployment, management of integrated systems with unified databases, application programming interfaces, user interfaces, data exchanges and legacy systems
- Evidence of application of Data Governance and Cybersecurity, consent frameworks: Strong knowledge and experience in implementing robust cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive data.
- Proven track record of developing scalable systems with increasing demand and data volume.
- Experience of working with government institutions globally,
- Demonstrated experience of self or partners in training and capacity building, knowledge related activities
- Demonstrated experience working with international donors and UN Agencies
Staff Allocation and Expertise:
- Understanding of agricultural policies, processes, solutions targeting farmer needs, and the agricultural value chains.
- Team leader experience Rural Development: 5- 8 years’ experience working on large scale projects that impact rural communities
- 5-8 years combined experience in data management (including collection and processing, analytics), with a focus on handling large datasets
- UI/UX designers
- ICT4D experience
Quality and coherence of proposal:
- Relevance of the proposal (i.e. extent to which it meets Agriconnect requirements), including logic and clarity
- Strength and feasibility of the proposed approach for the implementation and deployment within the timeframe available
- Strength and feasibility of the proposed approach for the delivery of activities, including speed of execution, cost efficiency etc.
- Strength and feasibility of the proposed management structure and approach for the coordination of Agri connect activities
- Innovativeness of activities and approach proposed
- Quality of plan of activities of capacity building and KM proposed