TERMS OF REFERENCE RECRUITMENT OF INDEPENDENT CONSULTANT TO FACILITATE THE 2023-2027 AFRICANS RISING STRATEGIC PLAN DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Africans Rising (AR) is a Pan-African movement of people and organizations, working for justice, peace, and dignity. The organization provides a space for progressive African civil society leaders engaged in various civic struggles to convene, connect, collaborate, and share knowledge. AR promotes citizens’ organizing and enables civic movements in their struggles for social justice.

Africans Rising (AR) is approaching the end of its first Strategic Cycle (2018-2022). Over the years, Africans Rising has built a track record as a continental movement of movements enabler, convener, and influencer within the social movement terrain in Africa region. Africans Rising visibility and clout has expanded beyond the continent and attracted significant recognition. African’s Rising is playing a leading role in relevant national, regional, and continental discourses that may shape dynamics of movement building within the next years and decades. 

Africans Rising needs to take a step back to reflect on its progress, examine ongoing development challenges and opportunities and envision its strategy for the coming five years. In the lead to its 2023-2027 strategic plan, Africans Rising plans to publish a call for expression of interest for the recruitment of an external facilitator (consultant) to lead its strategic development process. 

AR needs a plan that will reflect its current aspirations and ambitions to respond to the concerns and aspirations of community citizens in Africa. Some of the factors within the current landscape in Africa include but are not limited to, building consensus, solidarity, and cooperation for social, economic, environmental, and gender justice. The inherent challenges facing the promotion and protection of human rights and democracy on the continent have generated an increased demand for organizations like AR capable of providing expertise and support to individuals, organizations and diverse constituencies engaged in civic struggles across Africa and Diaspora. 

It is against this background that AR seeks to request the service of a qualified and competent consultant to facilitate the strategic plan development process leveraging his or her expertise in movement building and international development, and in consultation with relevant stakeholders.

The overarching objective of the assignment is to facilitate the design and development and produce an Africans Rising Strategic Plan 2023-2027 that reflects the aspirations and expectations of the Movement through a well-coordinated consultative and participatory process that considers key emerging movement and constituency building trends. 

• Develop strategic objectives for the next five years
• Identify key strategies to reach movement building objectives
• Develop an action plan that seeks to achieve movement building objectives
• Design a monitoring and evaluation mechanism that responds to changes in the external environment of the movement. 
• Develop the aligning resource needs document; and 
• Finalise a written strategic plan document.

In carrying out the strategic plan development process, the following should be considered:

Within Scope:

The support must enable AR to:

• Clearly identify and establish its unique selling points, i.e., competitive advantages or distinctive features that set it apart in Africa and Diaspora. 
• Identify strategies to strengthen its role as a movement builder, thought leader and influencer. 
• Build connection and legitimacy with local civil society groups and movements across Africa and Diaspora.
• Consider the peculiarity of citizens’ movements and provide support that meets their needs.
• Identify and build collaboration and synergy between movements and organised civil society groups.
• Identify strategies that enable AR to strengthen its local (Africa-based sources) resource mobilisation capacity and sustainability drive.
• Identify innovative ways to track and document key achievements. 
• Be responsive to topical issues in Africa and globally, aligning with its mandate
• Remain relevant to development discourses while staying focused on the mandate, i.e., being flexible and adaptable to topical issues while delivering on the mission of the Movement and achieving set targets.
• Define a framework to identify and respond to topical issues of concern. 
• Define strategic partnerships that add value to its work, recognise and nurture them.
• Identify strategies for effectively engaging and partnering the private sector in Africa as an essential partner. 
• Be a learning movement that is agile, innovative, and resilient.
• Be a youth sensitive and responsive grassroot movement
• Review and identify core strategic pillars of interest and identify nexus points for an integrated approach.
• Facilitate the smooth functioning of AR in relation to leadership transitions and succession planning at all levels.
• Adopt and streamline technology, not only as an area of interest, but also a strategic aspect that permeates AR and drives a holistic digital transformation, i.e. informs design, planning, implementation and branding.
• Be a gender sensitive and responsive movement.
• Be sensitive with creative industries, media and sport industries 

Out of Scope

The support provided in the development of the strategic plan, must not include:

• Substantial changes to AR’s vision and mission that shifts it from its fundamental purpose 
• Replicating AR after any other existing model that would make it lose its originality, values, and goal

The strategic plan development process is anticipated to include the followings:

• Online Inception meeting
• Strategic Plan development roadmap
• Internal consultations with AR organs 
• External consultations (incl. surveys, online workshops, webinar with AR members, one-on-ones, phone, email querying) 
• Interim findings and first draft strategy
• Feedback and review of draft strategy
• Submission of next draft
• Review of second draft
• Final submission

AR expects the process to be completed within six (6) months, from April 2022 – August 2022.

The consultant or team of consultants should comprise a subject matter specialist, should have competence on citizen movement building, monitoring and evaluation, law, advocacy, and gender. They should demonstrate the following collective qualifications:

• Experience in movement building, social science, development studies, project planning and management, Evaluation Studies, Economics, or other related social science field.
• The lead consultant or group should have experience carrying out strategic planning particularly for citizens movements.
• Ability to facilitate and relate with a range of stakeholders.
• Experience working in Africa is an added advantage.
• Experience in the use of multiple strategic planning methodologies and in developing strategic plan for movements and delivering reports in English are preferred.

• Proven knowledge, skills, and experience in qualitative data collection and analysis methods.
• Broad knowledge on movement building, advocacy, and capacity building.
• Context-relevant knowledge and expertise on grassroots movements and relevant development issues
• Practical knowledge and experience of the African region, country contexts and culture.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English.
• Desired working level language proficiency in French. Basic language skills in Portuguese and Arabic will be an added advantage.
• Experience in producing high quality written reports.
• Detail-oriented, demonstrated ability to multi-task and meet client deadlines.

The procurement will take place according to the following timeline:

Interested parties who intend to submit a proposal should apply on or before 12:00pm GMT on 20th April,2022. The submission must be emailed to: workwith@africans-rising.org   with the subject line “Strategic Plan development proposal”.

The main body of the proposal should be 5-10 pages and should include a cover letter summarising the applicant’s interest and capacity to implement the scope of work under this ToR.

Only shortlisted applicants will be contracted one week after the deadline for submission of applications.