For the implementation of the Country Strategic Plan’s Activities in The Gambia in several regions across the country.
Introduction
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is seeking NGO partners to support the implementation of activities under its Country Strategic Plan (CSP) 2019-2021 in 6 regions across The Gambia. The CSP is in line with the Gambia’s National Development Plan (NDP) and the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF).
The CSP focuses on supporting the national social protection agenda, promoting solid and predictable safety nets for targeted/identified vulnerable groups while promoting gender-transformative approaches and advocating for the mainstreaming of gender in relevant policy instruments.
The CSP aims to achieve five outcomes (covers five activities), centered around resilience and capacity building of national government;
Strategic outcome 1 will focus on contingency plans for response to shocks.
Activity 1 “Provide food assistance and Social Behavioural Change Communication - SBCC training for crisisaffected populations and strengthen the capacity of national partners to respond to crises”: WFP will collaborate with government to increase the targeted beneficiaries and include transfer (Food, Cash Based Transfers).
Strategic outcomes 2, 3 and 4 will complement the work of the Government in building the resilience of vulnerable populations through nutrition-sensitive and gender-responsive social safety nets for children in primary and early childhood education, pregnant and nursing women and girls, children under 5 year olds; and smallholder farmers.
Activity 2 “Provide school meals for pre-school and primary school children located in vulnerable food insecurity locations during the school year and strengthen the capacity of local governments to manage school meals programmes as a national safety net”: This includes capacity strengthening to enable WFP adequately support Government through the handover process of school feeding programme.
Activity 3 “Provide comprehensive nutrition programming including nutritious foods for pregnant or lactating women and girls and children under 5 to prevent or treat acute and chronic malnutrition, complemented by support for the Government in the management of nutrition programmes”: This includes treatment and prevention of malnutrition programmes including People for Living with - HIV.
Activity 4 “Provide supply chain and market support (including for home-grown school feeding) – supporting smallholder farmers to increase productivity, and link them to school feeding programmes to improve markets. This will include implementation of community asset creation activities”.
Strategic outcome 5 involves capacity strengthening to facilitate the alignment of national policies through an integrated approach to food and nutrition security that includes the school meals programme, aimed at maintaining gender parity at schools, nutrition interventions, social protection, disaster risk reduction and early-warning systems.
Activity 5 “Provide technical support to the Government on coherence between relevant policy instruments under the NDP; implementation of the National Social Protection Policy - NSPP, with a focus on a gradual transition to government ownership of the home-grown school meals programme; national management of nutrition programmes; and disaster preparedness and shock response systems”.
COVID -19: Due consideration needs to be given to the current COVID-19 context in design and implementation of all programmes. Furthermore, for the projected crisis-affected populations focus will be on strengthening capacity of national partners to i) respond to the crises. (ii) provision of school meals, during the school year, or take-home rations, during crisis, to vulnerable children in early childhood development (ECD) and Lower Basic School (LBS). (iii) provision of supply chain and market support to farmers to increase productivity and access to markets. These strategic activities are in line with WFP’s commitment to support the government to reach the SDG2 by 2030. WFP works to uphold the basic principle of providing assistance to the right people with the right assistance at the right time.
WFP, invites organizations to submit project proposals for the implementation of activities including community mobilization and sensitization, beneficiary targeting and registration, mapping of distribution locations, facilitating distribution of food assistance, supervising asset creation, capacity building, project monitoring and collecting data for field activities as well as reporting. WFP may identify one or more cooperating partners per region and organizations are welcome to apply for multiple regions and activities based on their current implementation capacity in the location(s) preferred.
Programmatic Context Under the CSP;
1. WFP aims to support over 733,000 women, men and children across different WFP programmes country wide. In the COVID-19 in The Gambia, WFP assistance will cover the food needs of the suspected cases under quarantine, households with malnourished children 6-59 months, and pregnant and lactating women, women under the prevention of mother to mother transmission (PMTCT) programme, women who lost their jobs in the informal sector (linked to the decline in tourism) as well as persons with disabilities.
2. WFP will continue to support school children – with Take-Home Rations to reduce the burden of care, and to serve as an income transfer to families. WFP’s supported school feeding programme covers 312 schools and 150,001 learners (54% females) in (Region 1 - Kombo St Mary & Banjul, Region 3 - North River Region (NRR), Region 5 - Central River Region (CRR) and Region 6 - Upper River Region (URR). WFP is also progressively transitioning the transfer modality from in-kind to cash transfer modality with nearly 140,000 students under the cash-transfer modality. The school feeding programme covers 100% of ECD schools and about 45% LBS in all regions while the government implements the programme in 2 regions - West Coast Region (WCR) and Lower River Region (LRR). However, during the COVID-19 pandemic period, WFP, the government and partners plan to provide Take-Home Rations.
3. The Gambia relies on rain-fed agriculture and the 2019 rainy season was poor due to late and erratic rain which drastically affected the 2019/20 agricultural season. It is expected that greater disturbance of the agricultural food system and the overall food supply chain is to occur due to the consequences of the pandemic especially the business and border closures, restriction of movement. WFP will continue to focus on the promotion of local purchase of food for the school meal programme, offering a reliable market to smallholders and providing specific capacity strengthening activities to support the farmers to overcome their constraints for market access including through value addition and post-harvest management. In addition, WFP will support resilience building including through asset creation, promotion of access to financial services through savings groups and microfinance and microinsurance.
Areas of intervention
The support needed from NGOs will be required mostly in all regions in the country as outlined below:
- Lean Season and COVID-19 /Emergency Response, 733,000 people in all regions
- School Feeding, 116,756 children in 312 schools Banjul in NBR, CRR, URR
- Nutrition - Treatment and Prevention of Malnutrition, 88,609 Children, Pregnant and Lactating Women, PLHIV in all regions
- Resilience Building activities/DRR, 16,000 participants in NBR, CRR, URR, WCR & LRR
- Capacity Building of national government, partners in all regions
- Programme Monitoring of all programmes/region in all regions
Project Duration
WFP will sign an agreement with each successful NGO partner for 24 months August 2020 to July 2022, subject to funding availability and regular (quarterly and annual) performance review that will determine continuation of the partnership engagement between the project implementation cycles.
Specific Responsibilities
Since CSP aims to deliver a holistic/integration approach, the key requirement to this partnership is a demonstrated ability for the selected NGOs to implement any of the following priority interventions under the integrated approach. The selected NGOs will have a comparative advantage adding value to the core design of the CSP activities including a clear indication of additional resources/capacities the NGOs will bring to the partnership and programming.
The NGOs are expected to support the implementation and where possible complement the delivery of the prioritized activities under CSP strategic activities as outlined below:
Activity 1: Lean Season and COVID-19 Response – Provision of food assistance and SBCC trainings to crisisaffected populations, and strengthening capacity of national partners to respond to crises.
- Mapping, targeting, sensitization and registration of beneficiaries
- In-kind, cash or voucher distributions and activities implementation
- Training of participants and supervision of activities implementation
- Monitoring and reporting of implementation progress
- Food security assessment and data collection
- Support to call operators with complaints and feedback mechanisms
- Development of community base participatory plans
- Support regional and community level structure through training and skills transfer on disaster risk management such as early warning systems, preparedness and response planning
Activity 2: School Feeding – Provision of school meals, during the school year, or take-home rations, during COVID-19 crisis, to vulnerable children in ECD and LBS.
- Community mobilization and sensitization
- Monitoring and reporting of implementation progress
- Capacity building of school level actors and institutions in school feeding
- Promote gender mainstreaming, protection mainstreaming, accountability to affected populations ensuring sex disaggregated data is reported monthly
Activity 3: Nutrition – Provide comprehensive nutrition programming including nutritious food for pregnant or lactating women and girls and children under 5 to prevent or treat acute and chronic malnutrition, complemented by support for the Government in the management or nutrition programmes.
- Monitoring and reporting of implementation progress
- Provision of supplementary food rations (Blanket Supplementary Feeding)
Activities complementary to Ministry of Health:
- Screening and registration of beneficiaries
- Community mobilization and sensitization
- Data collection and assessments
Activity 4: Resilience Building Activities/DRR - Resilience Building Activities/DRR supply chain and market support to farmers to increase productivity and access to market.
- Community mobilization, sensitization, implementation and supervision of cash for work activities (commonly known in WFP as Food for Assets – FFA)
- Facilitation of registration and distribution of in-kind, cash or e-money
- Conduct training and capacity development
- Assessments and research towards smallholder farmers including market analysis, climate change impact, food security and climate services
- Monitoring and evaluation, and tracking of activities
- Survey and community consultations
- Facilitation of community-based participatory planning
- Facilitation of implementation of community action plans
- Financial inclusion/literacy training and capacity development
- Facilitating community access to microfinance (saving/credit) and capacity training
- Support to Farmer Organizations and capacity development
- Implementation and community engagement for development of smallholder farmer assets such as post-harvest storage structure, processing machines and market access
Submission of Proposals
Partnerships that do not achieve the agreed outcomes are a reputational risk for WFP, and undermine its ability to achieve set objectives, which are a commitment to its beneficiaries. Thus, WFP aims to encourage and attract high quality proposals which can produce high quality outcomes, including in cases where this might require extra support and effort from the Country Office. This will be done through a competitive and transparent process open to all interested parties, with a view to identify the most credible partners, encouraging new ones and retaining old ones that have proved their performance, including through Key Performance Indicators.
Invited organizations will be required to submit a complete application package that meets the following criteria: • Detailed proposal with the covering letter of Intent for partnering with WFP and clear statement of commitment to contribute resources to the partnership.
- The project narrative proposal and the budget will need to be completed using WFPs standard project proposal format, budget format and other reference materials which can be sent upon request.
- Each applicant is therefore requested to provide detailed justification for each budget line in a supporting Budget Narrative Annex to facilitate the review of each proposed budget line.
- In addition, a clear project proposal should demonstrate the following the added value of partnership including bringing complementary activities and resources which can be sent upon request.
- Therefore, please also include the budget plan components that will be paid by the Cooperating Partner as evidence of cost-sharing.
- Eligible organizations should submit their proposals electronically by 3 August 2020 at 23.59 hours local time to the following email address: gambia.office_of_the_cd@wfp.org. Any submission received after the deadline time will not be considered.
- The subject of the application email should be as follow: “Name of Organization – Partnership for Country Strategic Plan’s Activities in The Gambia – WFP 2020”.
- Many reading resources are available to help you develop your application package which can be sent upon request.
Process of selection
All proposals will be reviewed by WFP Cooperating Partners Committee (CPC).
The process of “Selection of NGOs” or Partner is aimed at ensuring a selection which respects the procurement principles of equity and transparency. It contains the following steps:
- Partner Orientation to the activity designs, implementation and partnership framework
- Submission of Project Proposals
- Appraisal of the Proposals
- Feedback sessions
- Capacity assessment
- Budget discussions/negotiation process, and
- Signing of the Field Level Agreements
Selection Criteria
The selection will be based on the following criteria:
Criteria of eligibility
- Legality to operate as an NGO in The Gambia (certificate of registration with the relevant authority)
- Field operational presence in the proposed project locations
- Demonstration of regularly audited accounts and strong financial account over an extended period of time
- Ability to establish or expand operations within a short period of time
Criteria and sub-criteria of preselection
Work experience
- Past or present competence to implement resilience, food, nutrition and livelihood security and climate adaptation interventions
- Experience in nutrition, resilience, food assistance programming and distribution, either for relief and/or development activities, in The Gambia
- Protection and gender mainstreaming experience
Required resources
- Existing human resources capacity
- Existing of office, facility and equipment capacity
- Demonstrated evidence of accountability and ability to produce audited financial reports from the last three years
- Established Country office with qualified staff, project equipment, and vehicles
- Demonstrated ability to contribute financial resources to the partnership/integrated programming
Capacity management
- Mandate and policies
- Existing reporting system
- Existing procurement system
- Existing Financial system
- Existing staff recruitment system
- Partnership - Cost efficiency and effectiveness, sustainability strategy
WFP reserves the right to cancel this Call for Proposals and add/delete conditions, and the right to accept or reject any proposal submission without incurring any obligation to inform or not the applying organization. Programme implementation is subject to fund availability and the food assistance entitlements may change accordingly. WFP will not reimburse any costs incurred in submission of the proposal documents. Submission development costs are expected to be borne by the prospective organization. Proposal submission from applicants without providing the requested information will be disqualified. Only eligible applicants after a desk review of the proposals will be invited to participate in the Field Level Agreement processes that will follow.