Call for Expression of Interest for the Development of a Youth Digital Entrepreneurship Application
Background
Digitalization has transformed the world in almost every aspect of life throughout the last few decades. Access to the internet, the increase in number of people using mobile phones, and the advent of social media and other ICT services have changed the way people interact, communicate, learn, and work in almost every country. Digitalization is affecting all aspects of everyday life, including employment, decent job opportunities, as well as community and economic development.
Building an inclusive digital economy has long been a core economic development objective of the Government of Rwanda. The Government charts an ambitious course for achieving rapid digital transformation and has embraced the digital economy as a lever for accelerating growth, improving services delivery, and enabling more work opportunities for Rwandans, especially young Rwandans.
The National Strategy for Transformation (NST1) reinforces the willingness of the government of Rwanda to ensure digital literacy for all youth (16 to 30 years) by 2024 through the implementation of a national digital literacy program with the objective of achieving digital literacy of at least 60% among adults.

Despite the efforts of the government and its partners, rural youth still face challenges for digitization. To better understand the needs of rural youth in terms of digitization, CRS Rwanda conducted an assessment in May and June of 2022 which targeted the urban and rural young entrepreneurs. Of the 36 youth entrepreneurs consulted, almost half were young women. While there are some common challenges facing both urban and rural youth entrepreneurs such as access to finance, rural youth entrepreneurs faced additional challenges linked to lower levels of education and training, greater distances from markets and services including business development services.

Rural youth entrepreneurs displayed lower levels of business and financial knowledge and expressed frustration at not being able to use technology, especially social media, to market their goods and services. Youth entrepreneurs also complained about the lack of access to timely business development services and financial service information in Kinyarwanda, as well as the difficulty of understanding and recording financial transactions.
Youth for Youth (Y4Y) – East African Digital Entrepreneurship project is an initiative funded by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and implemented in collaboration with the Government of Rwanda through MINICT and MYCULTURE and Caritas Rwanda. This initiative (2022-2025) aims at promoting the digital solutions for the most pressing problems faced by young Rwandans living in rural areas.
Thus, the consortium partners as well as the young people consulted believe that a digital application will be one of the solutions adapted to help young rural Rwandan entrepreneurs. The consortium partners would like to launch an open challenge for individuals or groups of young Rwandans to develop a digital application that will address the main issues of young entrepreneurs especially from rural settings.


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Problem To Be Addressed By This Challenge
In the context of better understand the issues that threaten young people, especially those in rural areas, regarding digitization and entrepreneurship, in May and June 2022, CRS Rwanda conducted a rapid qualitative needs analysis. CRS conducted Focus Groups Discussions with young entrepreneurs from two districts of Rwanda (Gasabo and Nyarugenge) and young entrepreneurs from one rural district (Nyamagabe). After this needs assessment, CRS organized a 3-days workshop with stakeholders including ministries, youth-serving organizations, and youth representatives. During this meeting, participants discussed issues identified in the CRS analysis, proposed improvements, and discussed possible solutions. After putting together, the identified issues, CRS organized a one-day meeting that brought together youth entrepreneurs from Rubavu, Nyabihu, Gisagara, Huye and Nyamagabe districts with the main aim of proving the issues affecting rural young entrepreneurs.
Lack of appropriate business management tools, inadequate business management skills and inaccessibility to the information in Kinyarwanda that can enable rural Rwandan young entrepreneurs to enjoy profitable and sustainable business, these are the main issues that this challenge intends to address through the provision of easy-accessible and -easy-usable digital solutions.

Objectives Of The Challenge
The Y4Y consortium partners are launching a Challenge Funds to attract youth entrepreneurs/youth-led startups to competitions to create digital solutions for young entrepreneurs.
The main objective of this challenge is to produce a youth friendly single smartphone-based digital solution in two languages (Kinyarwanda and English) to facilitate the young entrepreneurs in business bookkeeping, accessing necessary business-related information and accessing microlearning for boosting and improving the business.
The specific objectives of this challenges are:
• Promote digital solutions to common problems (stated above) for young Rwandan entrepreneurs both in urban and rural settings
• Support talented ICT young people to showcase their talents and then make valuable and profitable contributions through the competition
• Complement the GoR to spread digitization among young people, namely entrepreneurs, especially in last-mile settings

Deliverables
Y4Y will subsidize the best applicant for developing, testing, piloting, and updating the digital application for a period of one year. After this period, the hosting agency, in collaboration with Youth for Youth,will establish an affordable price which will continue to be paid by the users for accessing the application.
The expected deliverables from this competition are:
Development of a Youth friendly Digital Platform
• Assess the existing digital applications for bookkeeping, information sharing and microlearning that can serve as reference to avoid duplication
• Being both smartphone and computer-based application that can be accessed off-line and synchronize data once connected on Internet.
• An application that hosts maximum and easy-accessible and evolving platforms for business bookkeeping, accessing important business-related information and easy-accessed microlearning for young entrepreneurs
• An ease-of-use application with possibility to select the preferable langue (Kinyarwanda and English)
Testing the application
• The selected winner with test the application on the young entrepreneurship in both urban and rural settings
• Review the application based on the feedback and finding from the testing
• Share the findings with the consortium partners
Piloting the application
• Train the community-based facilitators (Private Services Providers – PSP and Digital Ambassadors) who will popularize the digital application
• Provide a regular support to the community-based facilitators as needed
• facilitate workshop of consortium partners to discuss and review the digital application
• Conduct monitoring and evaluation
• Share the progress with the consortium partners

Required Expertise And Abilities
Interested contestants must fulfill the following requirements:
• Being a national registered company or individual taxpayer
• Technical Leads must be between 18 and 30 years of age
• Strong understanding of IT system development lifecycle, systems engineering, and systems integration implementation process
• Prove experience in youth entrepreneurship development (business canvas, bookkeeping, marketing, customer relationship, etc.)
• Strong ability to understand how a particular solution fits into the overall client needs
• Systems implementation skills include requirements/process analysis, conceptual and detailed design, configuration, and troubleshooting
• Completion of assignments of similar nature and magnitude: candidates must submit at least two evidence of the works they completed.
• Candidates with existing/functional equivalent products are eligible to apply provided they can modify/tweak solutions to fit project objectives.
• Excellent proficiency of Kinyarwanda and English, both written and spoken.

Key Dates And Deadlines
The interested bidders must refer to the following dates and deadlines
• On the 19th of August, a briefing meeting will be organized to provide all necessary clarifications and respond to the questions of the interested bidders. This meeting will take place from 10:00 am to 11:30 am at GIZ Digital Transformation Center in Kacyiru at the Career Center Building on the 7th Floor.
• The interested bidders will have from the August 19th to 31, 2022 to prepare their proposal.
• The technical selection of three finalists will be done before September 5, 2022.
• The financial evaluation to determine the winner and two runners up will be completed before September 9th, 2022, and they will be notified before the same deadline.
• Contracting with the winners following CRS processes will be completed before September 20, 2022.
• A Demo Day for the winner and the runners up which will be attended by senior officials and key stakeholders will be organized between September 26-30, 2022.
After this Demo Day, the winners will follow below timeline to implement the terms agreed in the contract:

Activities & Deliverables Oct-22 Nov-22 Dec-22 Jan-23 Feb-23 Mar-23 Apr-23 May-23 Jun-23 Jul-23 Aug-23 Sep-23
Review existing digital business application
Develop the digital application
Testing the digital application
Train the community-based facilitators (PSPs and Digital Ambassadors) on the application
Piloting the digital application

Expending the digital application to the youth entrepreneurs
Evaluation of Administrative and Technical/Prototype proposals
Following the briefing meeting performed with potential candidates on the first step, the first administrative evaluation of submitted proposals will be based on the following requirements:
• RDB company registration certificate
• Proof of Tax Clearance Certificate (RRA)
• ICT chamber profiling mark
• Proof of required experiences in IT and Youth Entrepreneurship training: Diversified team composition and business skills and proven skills in software engineering
• Technical proposal (prototype or script)
• Financial proposal in local currency
Only the candidates who will be selected at the first stage of administrative evaluation will be invited to present their prototype of the solution in front of the selection committee. This second stage evaluation will be based on:
• Understanding of the youth problems and the adequate solutions
• The content of the prototype: easiness and completeness of business bookkeeping, access to information and microlearning
• Interface Design: Look & Feel of the interface and easy to browse; - Technology Stuck: This refers to a set of technologies (programming languages or frameworks) used to develop a particular computer system or solution. –
• Implementation Plan/Schedule or Roll-out Plan
• Sustainability Plan (Support & Maintenance)
• Candidates will be ranked in respect to their score out of 100

Submission Procedure
Qualified bidders are requested to submit their applications to Rwandabids@crs.org with the subject line: Application for Y4Y challenge not later than August 31, 2022, at 6.00 PM Kigali time
All bidders are advised that this tender does not constitute in any way a commitment on the part of CRS or its agents, for any service requested.
Done at Kigali, August 12, 2022
Jude Marie Banatte
Country Representative
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