Research Management Consultant at Mercy Corps

Program: AgriFin Accelerate

Scope of Project: AFA Research Management

Country: Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Ethiopia, Nigeria

From: June 2020

To: November 2020

Task Manager: Collins Marita, Director (Research and Impact Assessment)

AgriFin Accelerate Program Overview: Mercy Corps’ mission is to alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities.

The AgriFin Accelerate (AFA) program is a six year, USD 24.7 million program of Mercy Corps, supported by The MasterCard Foundation.

The core problem AgriFin Accelerate seeks to address is the inclusion gap for smallholder farmers (SHF) who lack access to affordable, accessible, demand-driven financial products and services that drive higher productivity and income for farm families.

Drawing on Mercy Corps’ experience implementing the AgriFin Mobile program and years of work in the agriculture, finance and ICT sectors, AgriFin Accelerate will support the expansion of digital financial services (DFS) to one million farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over six years, delivered by growing ecosystems of diverse service providers.

AgriFin Accelerate’s primary target group is unbanked smallholder farmers living on less than $2.50 per day in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.

Three outcomes will contribute to the achievement of this goal:

Outcome 1: Market actors expand, improve and continue to offer high-impact DFS products and services that are tailored to address the expressed needs of SHFs;

Outcome 2: Farmers increase capability to access and utilize demand-driven, high impact technology-enabled financial products and services relevant to SHFs;

Outcome 3: Ecosystems around both supplier and farmers emerge supporting provision of digital financial and informational services to SHFs that are used at scale.

To address SHF’s challenges in using the mobile phone, the MasterCard Foundation funded a $25 million six-year program called the AgriFin Accelerate Program.

This program draws upon Mercy Corp’s experience in implementing the AgriFin Mobile Program coupled with their extensive work in the agricultural, financial, and ICT sectors.

The program will support the expansion of digital financial services (DFS) to one million farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over six years, delivered by growing ecosystems of diverse service providers.

AgriFin Accelerate’s primary target group is unbanked smallholder farmers living on less than $2.50 per day in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.

Purpose of Engagement: AgriFin program seeks to influence change at the client (farmer) level, institutional level and the ecosystem level, as represented in the below summary of its TOC (theory of change).

Through this consultancy, AFA seeks to engage a research manager (RM), who will work to manage selected and agreed research projects, ensuring research engagements are implemented to meet the agreed scopes of work and contracting arrangements, as well as donor requirements for proof of impact results across AgriFin activities.

AgriFin research engagements seek to answer the below learning questions:

• What impact have AFA partners had on SHF income, productivity and resilience to shocks?
• What financial and value-added products and services do SHFs, including women and youth, value most and why?
• How does bundling of products and services impact uptake and usage of digital financial services?
• What capacity building tools have the highest impact on SHFs willingness and ability to use digital financial services?
• What distribution channels are most effective for delivery of services to SHFs?
• How and to what extent have AFA partners have been successful to achieve scale and commercial sustainability?
• What are the main drivers of success and failure of different partnership and bundled approaches?

Scope of work

As part of this consultancy, the consultant will be part of the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning team and will conduct the below activities that will enable the finalization of AgriFin impact assessment work:

• Support in overall management of projects related to research and counsel in impact measurement, specifically areas around digital financial and information services;
• Lead management of selected research projects as agreed with Director of Research and Impact Evaluations;
• Developing and implementing contextually adapted and rigorous research methodologies.
• Participate in the designing and delivering qualitative and quantitative research tools, analysis and reporting.
• Managing teams of researchers conducting qualitative and/or quantitative field research across AgriFin countries.
• Ensure research vendors operate efficiently in compliance to AgriFin timelines.
• Review research outputs and related documentation and study plans/protocols, auditing critical phases recommending and implementing amendments.
• As required, manage project-specific communications with and partners and vendors.
• Contribute to program learning through production and technical inputs to agreed learning outputs and facilitate sharing through AgriFin’s dissemination channels;
• Any other tasks, as agreed with Director of Research and Impact Evaluation.

Deliverables

The consultant will work to produce the following deliverables, in close collaboration with the Research partner and AgriFin teams:

• Weekly status update on work in progress: in the form of a short email with relevant bulleted information and any related attachments for work products, key findings, red flags on existing and potential implementation issues and recommendations on next steps with projects and partnerships;
• Any work product: a document (to be agreed with research director) setting out project planning, outputs, reports and other materials.

The consultant will be asked to join in relevant AgriFin team coordination meetings to update on progress, coordinate program implementation, and flag any issues to be addressed.

The consultants will also submit periodic invoices to AgriFin detailing progress against the scope of work and towards completion of the deliverables.

Required Qualifications

• Advanced degree in demography, statistics, social sciences or related field or equivalent experience
• Minimum 5 years of work experience in monitoring and evaluating large, multi-year international Agricultural and financial sector development projects.
• Significant experience in impact evaluation and research related to digital financial services and agriculture in East Africa.
• Proven expertise in quantitative and qualitative methodologies, operations research, reporting, quality assessments, data analysis and presentation. This includes expertise in research to practice—identifying and adapting best practices to specific project context.
• Demonstrated strong management, coordination, teamwork and planning skills.
• Strong analytical and technical skills.
• Excellent communication skills and a proven ability to establish and maintain interpersonal and professional relationships.
• Excellent verbal, written interpersonal and presentation skills in English.

Ownership / Control of Work Product / Publication: Matters relating to ownership and control of work product and publication of materials produced during course of this engagement are addressed in the main contract agreement entered into between Mercy Corps.

Authorship and Acknowledgement: Matters relating to authorship and acknowledgment of any materials produced by the Consultant during the course of this engagement are addressed in the main contract agreement entered into between Mercy Corps and the Consultant for performance of services for AgriFin Accelerate

Task Manager / Reporting: Task Manager is Collins Marita, Mercy Corps AFA Director (Research and Impact Assessment), Together with the Program Director have final sign-off on deliverables and invoices.

Payment and Schedule: Payment will be made based on days worked with a maximum number of 10 days a month to span initial 6 months. Payment will be upon satisfactory delivery and acceptance of services rendered as a result of this consultancy.

All activities and deliverables related to this consultancy will be completed before November 2020.

Mercy Corps AFA expects the selected Individual to have the capacity to execute various MEL tasks in different contexts with the Program Director have final sign-off on deliverables and invoices.