Opportunities for Youth Employment Access to Finance Action Research and Knowledge Development Partnership Consultancy

SNV is a not-for-profit international development organization with long-term, local presence in more than 30 of the poorest countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Our team of local and international advisors work with local partners to equip communities, businesses and organisations with the tools, knowledge and connections they need to increase their incomes and gain access to basic services – empowering them to break the cycle of poverty and guide their own development across three sectors: Agriculture, Renewable Energy and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH).

Project Background

SNV’s Opportunities for Youth Employment (OYE) is a market based approach to sustainably reduce youth unemployment and underemployment. We act as a match maker between young people and private companies. SNV’s Opportunities for Youth Employment (OYE) approach tackles the youth unemployment issue in a comprehensive and sustainable way. We do so by:

• Providing disadvantaged youth in rural  and peri-urban areas with life skills and relevant technical training (push factor);
• Linking youth to market opportunities for employment and enterprise development, including access to finance (match factor);
• Employment creation and enterprise development in identified growth sectors (pull factor).

The model is based on SNV’s decades of experience in value chain and inclusive market development for the agriculture, energy and sanitation sectors. In addition, we build on partnerships with private sector companies, (local) government institutions, financial service providers, and trainers and coaches from public and private sectors.

CENTRAL RESEARCH QUESTION: how different financial products can be best structured to be relevant and responsive to the financial and business needs of young women and young men for their empowerment.  More specifically we seek to acquire deeper insights on the following:

• Explore the different financial products that are available in the market that can be used to improve the financing options for young women and young men.
• Explore how the different financial products can be blended or structured to best serve the youth including tackling key challenges previously experienced in using some or all of these facilities.
• Proffering suggestions on the best way of ensuring effectiveness of products.

The Basis of the Research

Experiences with implementing the OYE model, as well as outcomes from the country market scans, identified the critical but fraught issue of appropriate financing and broad financial inclusion when it comes to youth and youth enterprise development.  Apart from formal employment opportunities, nearly all self-employment, enterprise or income generation options require some level of financing from very modest savings to start-up capital whether the opportunity is individual or group based.  Financing options that are youth appropriate and youth-needs’ responsive are scarce and difficult to access.

SNV seeks to facilitate access to youth appropriate financing by combining and matching a range of instruments to specific needs of groups and individuals in different value chains depending on the nature of the market and where opportunities are along the chain.

In the context of the recent start of SNV’s youth employment projects in Zimbabwe and Zambia, we have the ambition to obtain a better insight into challenges and the potential to access finance (formal and informal) among the young women and men we are targeting. To this effect, we are aiming to establish an action research in partnership with local/national knowledge institutions and/or consultants with a relevant academic background.

Scope of Work

The assignment, which will be executed in Zambia, and is structured to facilitate the development of more youth  responsive and effective financial services and products that will support SNV’s OYE programme and other youth related initiatives within these countries, as well as facilitate the identification of policy opportunities that need exploitation by youth interventions and/or policy gaps that need to be addressed by policy makers.

a.  Deepen the understanding of issues within the demand side for financial services viz;

i.   Identifying financial needs of youths intending to get into business and those already in business; financial needs of youth formed or youth run enterprises; differences in the demand for financial services between young women and young men.

ii.  Identifying the impediments that youth face in accessing appropriate financial products in particular segregating the needs of young women and young men.

iii. Exploring the attractiveness or lack thereof of savings and lending schemes among the youth.

b. Deepen the understanding of issues within the supply side of financial services viz;

i. Established youth inclusive financing mechanisms that have been in place in the countries in the last 10 to 20 years with particular emphasis on those facilities that support Agriculture / agribusiness along wider value chains (service/input supply, production, processing, marketing, sales and retail), agriculture supportive energy businesses and/or other green enterprises.

ii. Outline the successes or failures of these highlighting the likely causes for their success or failure.

iii. Explore the form or structure of these facilities i.e. characteristics of the facilities – short term, long term, equity, quasi equity, off-balance sheet, guarantees etc.

iv. Outline the funding institutions and funding medium e.g. using banks or microfinance institutions to disburse the funding.

v.  Explore the use of grants or blended facilities (e.g. grant-loan, loan-guarantee) highlighting the successes or failures – the research should bring to the fore the institutions that are or were involved in this type of funding and possible reasons for continuing or discontinuing.

vi. Explore the existence of savings and lending schemes for youth or those supporting youth participation – their size (membership, funds/capital size), governance (self-managed or affiliated to a larger institution).

 In as much as is possible, the study should seek to dis-aggregate issues above in terms of gender (female and male) and location (rural and urban).

This assignment is expected to involve extensive desk research and key informant interviews. The consultant will be supported and advised by the OYE Project Team led by Roy van der Drift throughout the assignment and will have access to SNV’s extensive knowledge database related to and for the purposes of this assignment. SNV will facilitate and arrange for any interviews with relevant stakeholders within the Zambia market.

Key Deliverables:

The appointed consultant is required to:

a.   Undertake an inception meeting from where preliminary consultation on the scope, expected deliverables and related timelines will be discussed culminating in the production of an inception report, including the agreed upon methodology.

b.   Perform desktop research (project reports as well as open source data) and develop an oversight on the ToR topic;

c.   Conduct a comprehensive research and review of youth financing ecosystem (people, processes, products, policies).

d.   Prepare a comprehensive report that responds to the objectives of this study.

e.   Suggest/recommend best practices towards the development of context responsive youth inclusive financial services.

• First degree in Economics, Business Management, Banking and Finance or any related but relevant degree.
• At least five years’ experience in research in the access to finance field – prior work with youth will be an added advantage.
• Masters degree in Business Management, Agribusiness or Agricultural Economics and experience in financial services will be an added advantage.

In response to these ToRs, you may include all or some of the following;

• Understanding of the work; the applicant should briefly describe how they understand the work to be done.
• Approach, Methodology and Strategy; the applicant must outline the methodologies they intend to maintain indicating reasons for preferring these over other alternatives.
• Experience/past performance; the applicant must detail recent previous work done highlighting 1) name of project 2) brief description of assignment 3) methodology employed 4) references details.
• Expected Support from Client; The applicant should detail the support, human or material expected from client to deliver the described work.
• Cost of proposal; The applicant should present a financial proposal with an accompanying budget narrative that provides in detail the total costs for the assignment.

If you believe that your credentials meet the outlined profile, we invite you to apply and submit your Expression of Interest including CV in English before 27th June 2020.

We do not appreciate third-party mediation based on this advertisement.

NB: Only shortlisted will be contacted.