TERMS OF REFERENCE

Recruitment of Consultancy firm to develop the SADA web-based stakeholder engagement and Management platform

1. ORGANIZATIONAL BACKGROUND

Smart Africa is a bold and innovative commitment from African Heads of State and Government to accelerate sustainable socio-economic development on the continent, ushering Africa into a knowledge economy through affordable access to Broadband and usage of Information and Communications Technologies.

The Transform Africa Summit held in Kigali, Rwanda on 28th-31st October 2013 culminated in the adoption of the Smart Africa Manifesto document by seven (7) African Heads of States (Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Mali, Gabon, Burkina Faso) in which they committed to providing leadership in accelerating socio-economic development through ICT’s.

On 30th -31st January 2014, The Smart Africa Manifesto was endorsed by all Heads of State and Government of the African Union at the 22nd Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union in Addis Ababa. This development places the Manifesto at the heart of the ICT agenda in Africa beyond just the 7 original signatories at the Summit to all the 54 African countries. The Smart Africa Alliance has since grown to include 39 African countries that represent 1.1 billion people.

The Smart Africa Manifesto aims to put ICT at the center of national socio-economic development agenda of member countries; improve access to ICT especially Broadband; to improve accountability, efficiency, and openness through ICT promoting the introduction of advanced technologies in telecommunication; to put Private Sector first, and to leverage ICT to promote sustainable development.

2. SADA BACKGROUND 

With a population estimated to approximately 1.3bn people who are majorly youthful, ensuring quality jobs to leverage on the continent’s demographic opportunity is set to be one of Africa’s game-changer. An estimated 15 to 20 million increasingly well-educated young people will join the African workforce every year for the next three decades.

The Smart Africa Digital Academy (SADA) is the delivery vehicle of the Smart Africa capacity building and skills development activities across the various digital skills spectrum. It is a pan-African dynamic learning ecosystem in which African citizens of all ages and social classes can gain or improve their digital skills, gain qualifications, meet the emerging talent needs of employers, industry or be self-reliant. SADA also calls for a coalition of digital skills development by federating stakeholder’s currently fragmented efforts and replicating successful initiatives across the continent.

3. OBJECTIVE OF THE ASSIGNMENT

The overall objective of the consulting firm's mission is to develop a web-based Stakeholder Engagement Platform integrating a membership management module to support the Smart Africa Digital Academy expansion. The platform will serve as an interface for organizations, big and small, from the public or private sector, and governments to join the Smart Africa digital skills coalition to curb digital divide through their activities, contributions and initiatives at the national or continent-wide levels.

4. SCOPE OF WORK

4.1 Detailed Scope of work for the development of a Web-based stakeholder engagement platform.

The platform provides a single point of access on Smart Africa Digital Academy coalition for stakeholder’s engagement. It will provide interactions between a community of enterprises, SMEs, universities, education providers, policymakers, international organizations, donor agencies to promote digital skills initiatives and best practices on the Africa continent. Key areas of work are:

• Provide a detailed technical scope for the platform development to support the following features:
  • Possess the required features for successful SADA stakeholder engagement: - user profiles matching the variety of stakeholders, - real time engagement and communication features (chat, forums, comments, etc), - data collection and analysis capabilities (surveys, feedback, etc), content sharing, event management (promotions, webinars, conferences, etc), dashboard and reporting, and interoperability with other CRMs and analytical tools.
  • Information and links to Africa National policy initiatives and digital skills strategies
  • A private tool for Smart Africa member states to populate national initiatives
  • Searchable African repository of digital skills initiatives and labor trends. The repository will build upon the upcoming Smart Africa Digital competency framework and provide up-to-date data on digital skills development in Africa
  • A set of APIs to update contents (primarily in English) from known partners and national websites
  • a multilingual-ready platform to support content-publishing in official AU languages (English, French, Arabic and Portuguese)
  • Compliance with existing Data Protection regulations and IP rights in Africa and globally.
• Develop the Smart Africa Stakeholder engagement portal 

4.2 Detailed Scope of work for the implementation of a membership management platform

The platform will provide centralized members information, including membership history, contact details, renewal dates, and more, elevate member experiences with trigger-based journeys, engagement metrics and ensuring our members feel valued and boost the overall member’s engagement. Key areas of work are:

• Provide a detailed technical scope for the platform development to support the following features:
  • Unified member profile consolidation data from all sources,
  • Membership status, activity history, engagement tracking.
  • Integrations with external systems to collect member data
  • Customizable role-based views and access permissions
  • Configurable online member registration and onboarding workflows
  • Automate manual tasks like data entry, application processing, invoicing
  • Set up triggers, alerts and notifications to streamline communications
  • Integrate bots/RPA tools to further automate repetitive processes
  • Centralized, real-time view of member data across all sources
  • Easy to use dashboards, reports and visualizations
  • Ability to create custom reports as needed for segmentation and analysis
  • Integrate analytics for monitoring KPIs and metrics
  • Configure for high availability, failover and scalable capacity
  • Must be able to easily integrate with Dynamic 365/ or were built in Dynamic 365
• Develop and integrate the membership management features

5. INDICATIVE TIMELINES AND EXPECTED RESULTS

The selected firm must carry out the project within maximum six (06) weeks from the date of signing the contract.

6. FIRM PROFILE AND EXPERIENCE

• Demonstrate experience in the field of:
  • Deployment/Implementation of Customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) for organization or enterprise
  • Architecting, implementing and managing solutions on the Microsoft Power Platform covering major components like Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI
  • Web development, web design and content design
  • Stakeholders’ management and community building, having a clear understanding on membership management.
• Demonstrate technical ability in the field of digital skills, analysis of skills needs and learning
• Ability to provide Continuous Integration / continuous delivery automation.
• Demonstrate the ability to design user-friendly, intuitive deliverables and evolutive platforms/systems
• Have proven references for at least two contracts or relevant services in the past five years;
• Ability to work in a French and English environment.

7. EVALUATION CRITERIA

The financial proposal of only those firms which secure a minimum score of 70/100 in the technical evaluation will be opened.

St= Score for the Technical Evaluation

1. Financial Criteria

Once the technical criteria have been evaluated, the costs of all bids will be listed from low to high. Computing the cost criteria score will be accomplished by use of the following formula:

= Sf

The Applicant getting maximum marks on 70-30 weightage (70% for technical and 30% for financial) will be considered for the assignment. The weights given to the Technical (T) and Financial Proposals (F) are: T = 0.70 and F = 0.30

The Final Score (S) is calculated as follows: S = St*T + Sf*F

8. SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS FOR PROPOSALS

A specific outline must be followed to facilitate the Smart Africa Secretariat’s review and evaluation of the responses received.

A response to this RFP must include the following sections in the order listed:

1. A cover letter confirming the firm’s interest to provide the services required
2. Administrative documents (Company registration certificates, Tax clearance certificates). Failure to submit will lead to automatic disqualification of the offer.
3. A technical proposal containing the following content:

• Executive summary
• Business experience/Profiles/Portfolio
• Methodology, Approach, and Workplan
• Architecture for the Platforms
• Demo Links or Screenshots of expected features
• Mission team experience
• Updated Curriculum Vitae for the team and relevant certificates requested
• Recommendation letters signed and stamped

4. Financial Proposal containing the following tables.

• Summarized Total Cost VAT Inclusive (Value of tax indicated on final cost)
• Breakdown of a remuneration package
• Breakdown of reimbursable expenses
• All companies should quote in United States Dollars (USD) as currency.
• All bidding firms/ companies should Indicate their preferred payment terms

NOTE: All financial proposals/offers should be password protected and Smart Africa will request for it for bidders who have been qualified in the technical evaluation phase.

9. SUBMISSION PROCESS

Technical and financial proposals must be submitted via email in pdf format showing each the nature of the offer concerned (technical or financial offer); The proposals must be sent to the email: procurement@smartafrica.org not later than 16^th February 2024 at, 05:00 pm local time (Kigali).

Late proposals will be rejected.

10. RIGHTS RESERVED 

• This RFP does not obligate the Smart Africa Secretariat (SAS) to complete the RFP process.
• SAS reserves the right to amend any segment of the RFP prior to the announcement of a selected firm.
• SAS also reserves the right to remove one or more of the services from consideration for this contract should the evaluation show that it is in SAS’s best interest to do so.
• SAS also may, at its discretion, issue a separate contract for any service or groups of services included in this RFP. SAS may negotiate a compensation package and additional provisions to the contract awarded under this RFP.
• The Smart Africa reserves the right to debrief the applicants after the completion of the process due to expected high volume of applications and avoiding the compromise of the process.

11. ENQUIRIES 

Any enquiries will only be received and addressed three (3) days or more prior to the bid submission deadline. Prospective respondents who may have questions regarding this RFP may submit their enquiries to tenderenquiries@smartafrica.org 

12. ANTI-CORRUPTION

Smart Africa is committed to preventing and not tolerating any act of corruption and other malpractices and expects that all bidders will adhere to the same ethical principles.