CONCEPT  NOTES (RFCN) FOR Implementation of Youth Entrepreneurship for the Future of Food and Agriculture (YEFFA)-2025

Synopsis of the request for concept note (RCFN)

2. Background

2.1 AGRA

Established in 2006, AGRA is an African-led and Africa-based institution that puts smallholder farmers at the center of the continent’s growing economy by transforming agriculture from a solitary struggle to survive into farming as a business that thrives.  Together with our partners, we are working to sustainably grow Africa’s food systems.  In Rwanda, AGRA is focusing on supporting SMEs that are small, informal, and underfinanced, with a special focus on youth and women led SMEs during the current strategy period with interventions that cut through four business lines and three cross-cutting areas. AGRA selected four complementary and integrated business lines: the seed systems, sustainable farming, inclusive markets & trade (IMT), and policy& state capability (PSC). Besides the four business lines, AGRA and its partners selected three cross-cutting areas (a) inclusivity (enabling women and youth to contribute to agriculture for their economic empowerment) (b) climate change adaptation (equipping farmers and strengthening food systems to absorb and recover from shocks, and (c) nutrition (improving nutrition outcomes by diversifying crops and ensuring food availability).

Rwanda’s Vision 2050, under its pillar on agriculture and wealth, aims to attain an agricultural transformation that is equally led by both women and men, professional farmers and commercialized value chains. Similarly, the National Strategy for Transformation (NST1, 2017-2024) sets a 7-year target to create 1,500,000 (214,000 annually) decent and productive jobs through modernizing and increasing productivity of agriculture and livestock value chains. To contribute to this, the Rwanda AGRA Country Strategy 2023-2027 focuses among others, on strengthening youth entrepreneurship using agri food pathways with the aim of creating descent and fulfilling job opportunities.

AGRA is a champion of an inclusive agricultural transformation where youth and women are given the opportunity to play their commensurate role in driving food systems transformation. More information: https://agra.org/.

Background on YEFFA

It’s estimated that 78% of Rwanda’s population is under the age of 35. This large and growing youth population presents both a challenge and an opportunity for the country. About 3.1% of youth have attended technical or vocational school. Females (2.9%) are domestic workers across all age groups compared to males (1.8%). Youth in this age bracket currently represents 34% of the total population with a gender distribution of 57% female. People with disabilities account for 2.7% of youth population with a higher rate amongst young men (3.1%) than young women (2.4%). Employment creation and skills development are central to Rwanda´s transformative vision, aiming to become an upper-middle income country by 2035. As such, the Government of Rwanda committed to create 214,000 jobs annually.

The labor market in Rwanda is affected by a low level of vocational/entrepreneurship skills among Rwanda’s youth. Technical and vocational skills are central to job creation in Rwanda. It’s imperative to match existing skills to the labor market needs. Most outright unemployment is held by formally educated youth. Entrepreneurship culture is still limited among Rwandan youth, as more men are likely to be working ‘off-farm’ than women. Despite Government’s efforts in promoting women empowerment, gender disparities still exist in terms of access to economic activities.

In responding to the above challenges and opportunities for youth in Rwanda, particularly young women, AGRA and the Mastercard foundation jointly designed the Youth Entrepreneurship for the Future of Food and Agriculture (YEFFA) program. The program aims to strengthen the agri food system so that it creates 132,000 dignified and fulfilling work opportunities for Rwanda youth, especially women, over the next five years. This target will be achieved through development of selected value chains including avocado, poultry and chillies, accelerating financial access, expanding access to business development services, strengthening market systems, improving coordination within the entrepreneurship ecosystem, and increasing youth inclusivity and voice. 

The YEFFA program employs a youth-centered, gender-responsive approach to: 

• Build the capacity of youth and youth-owned agribusinesses, 
• Improve the productivity and resilience of target value chains,
• Support government to create an enabling environment and coordination for youth employment and youth-owned enterprises in agriculture, 
• Enhance access to finance and markets and strengthen the ecosystem of enterprise support while building platforms that consolidate voice and agency of youth, for young women. 
• Increase the inclusion and strengthening the voice of youth, especially young women.

The program contributes to the following portfolio outcomes

Portfolio Outcome 1: Strengthened coordination of strategic partners to promote dignified and fulfilling work opportunities for financially disadvantaged young people, especially young women

Portfolio Outcome 2: Strengthened Youth Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

Portfolio Outcome 3: Equitable access to increased market opportunities

Portfolio Outcome 4: Improved sustainable agricultural productivity for competitiveness by youth farmers

Portfolio outcome 5: Deepened Financial Inclusion for youth

Portfolio Outcome 6: Increased inclusion and Strengthened Voice of Young People especially women

3.The Grant Funding Opportunity

To implement the YEFFA program, AGRA is seeking potential partners (youth agri-SMEs, youth led NGOs, Financial institutions, public institutions, anchor farms and firms) to manage the necessary sub-awards, to deliver on the following strategic portfolio outcomes. An applicant can choose to implement activities under one portfolio outcome or select activities from various portfolio outcomes. The eligible value chains are avocado, poultry, animal feeds and chilies.

Portfolio Outcome 1: Managing Mastercard Foundation Agriculture Portfolio Partners and Sub-Contractors in Rwanda

• Develop an integrated program framework/logic for Rwanda’s Agriculture and Youth Employment in Agriculture (YEFFA) program that captures the program’s strategic objectives and shows where each partner’s program/investments fits into the framework and deliver increased employment opportunities for Women and Youth in the agriculture sector.
• Build Capacity of Portfolio YEFFA Strategic Partner’s M&E systems and use data/evidence to guide program implementation.
• Develop and implement a coordination framework/mechanism that creates opportunity for joined up planning, monitoring and learning as a way of strengthening programmatic interventions and eliminating duplication among YEFFA partners.

Portfolio Outcome 2: Strengthened Youth Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

• Establish a Youth Support Coordination Platform (meeting/dialogues) to facilitate collaboration among youth entrepreneurship ecosystem stakeholders and share innovative solutions and best practices and effective functioning of the platform
• Strengthening Capacity of Youth Entrepreneurship Ecosystem actors to provide effective support services to youth. E.g. in BDS, digital marketing, investment readiness

Portfolio Outcome 3: Equitable access to increased market opportunities

• Link MSMEs Owners with ESOs for Coaching & Mentoring to support business model strengthening, market linkages, investor readiness, investor matchmaking and transaction advisory services
• Enhancing Capacity of Key Government Institutions to support Certification of Youth in Horticulture Value Chain for Increased Access to International Export Markets
• Training and Capacity Building to interested start-ups and established SMEs in food product development.

Portfolio Outcome 4: Improved sustainable agricultural productivity for competitiveness by youth farmers

• Facilitating the transfer of technologies and provision of startup Kits that support the sustainable production of Chili, Avocado and Poultry or the processing of these commodities into viable products with good commercial potential.
• Facilitate accelerated access to mechanization by supporting youth led initiatives (including digital innovations) for demand aggregation, technical service provision, and farmer training on mechanization.
• Training youth from TVET institutions on the fabrication and marketing of Productive Use of Renewable Energy (PURE) Solutions that address value chain constraints e.g. fabrication of drying solutions for the reduction of post-harvest losses in the Chili value chain

Portfolio outcome 5: Deepened Financial Inclusion for youth

• Support to Scaling availability of ag sector oriented fintech solutions to rural based youth farmers (linked to BRD consortium within Rwanda YAW Portfolio)

Portfolio Outcome 6: Increased inclusion and Strengthened Voice of Young People especially women

• Prize Competition on Productive Assets and Innovation

The concept note must clearly show how jobs will be created using any of the following pathways.

• On-farm production,
• Agriculture service provision,
• Agribusinesses/SMEs,

Also indicate how many job opportunities will be created because of your proposed intervention.

4 Eligibility Requirements

4.1 Type of partners

The applicant must meet the following criteria:

1. Youth led organizations, youth led agriculture cooperatives, women led SMEs and organizations with a track record of delivering in the agriculture sector.
2. Wellestablished private company, SMEs, or BDS professional with a track record of service delivery to value chain actors that work with youth and women businesses.
3. Civilsociety organizations, social enterprises, agriculture technology firms, research institutions, market facilitators and local think-tank organization engaged in agricultural development or developing knowledge products used in policy formulation or designing programs that are beneficial to 
4. Conversant with youth ecosystem in Rwanda. Additionally, conversant with the Rwandan agribusiness sector.
5. Financial institutions with track record to facilitate business in agriculture
6. Currently not blacklisted from participating in AGRA’s project implementation

4.2 Partner capacity

1. Provenperformance in implementing agricultural development programs and projects.
2. Relevant experiencein youth and women entrepreneurship, agricultural technology promotion and awareness creation
3. Adequateassets, systems, structures, and presence in the main agricultural regions of the country. Presence here refers to availability of staff, assets such as vehicles and other field tools in the Rwanda AGRA target 
4. Properleadership, governance, financial management, internal controls and monitoring systems, and accountability.
5. In-depthunderstanding of mainstreaming approaches for climate resilience, nutrition sensitive agriculture and participation of vulnerable groups such as women and youth in regional value chains will be considered an 
6. Excellentgrasp of markets systems analysis and design of interventions that have the potential to sustainably capture large number of smallholder 
7. Well established and recognized in Rwanda youth ecosystem networks and women networks.

Applicants will be required to possess requisite technical capacities and present CVs of key staff who implement the project, registration certificates, audited financial statement and any other document that may help the analysis of organization capacity.

AGRA may request additional documentation or references to ascertain declarations that applicants will submit in response to this call for concept notes. Applicants do so on their own volution and motivation, and AGRA will not reimburse any expenses related to preparation and submission of the concept notes.

Please note that to ensure optimal results and effectiveness of the program, applicants may be organized into a consortium where necessary. Work opportunities creation for youth and women, , enabling environment for youth voices engagement, value chain development and SMEs development are the main focus of this call.

Key expected results from this work include the following, for which the investments will be contributing

General, the interventions will contribute to:

• Reaching 800,000 youth in agriculture sector with various interventions. Creation of 132,000 descent and fulfilling work opportunities.
• Provide 500 SME’s (Agriculture produce and Agri food services) and cooperatives with capacity enhancement skills and tools to enable them play the middle role between smallholder farmers and off takers, processors and exporters (Market)
• Unlocking at least USD 10,000,000 in trade and investments in agri-food system through access to finance by SMEs as well as foreign investment in the agricultural space as a result of a functional enabling environment.
• Contribute to GoR’s ambition to increase avocado export revenues from $11 million to $258 million and increase chili export revenues from $8 million to $68 million by 2029.

5. Period of performance

The overall period of performance is estimated to be 36 months maximum, from January 2025 to January 2028.

6. Period Grant applications will be accepted.

This Request for grant applications will remain open from 12^th November 2024 till 23^rdNovember 2024. Interested organizations/ institutions must submit before the final deadline; grant applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis as indicated above in the synopsis.  Applications made after the final deadline will not be considered.

Technical evaluation criteria

How to apply

If eligible and interested in this Request for concept note, please submit your application by following the steps described below;

• Request a new account from here: https://agra.synisys.com
• Createan account as an  If you are a previous applicant through AGRA’s AMIS system you do not need to create an account. Just follow step 3.
• Login to the system with your credentials: https://agra.synisys.com/portfolio/requests
• Choosethe request and submit your application via Create New Response section of the form The following must be presented with your submission;
• Acopy of your organization’s registration certificate
• Detailedorganization profile together with CVs of the project team
• Projectimplementation brief budget
• Mostrecent Audited Financial statement