Terms of Reference for

Operational plan for Accelerator

Background

Women Affairs Center (WAC) was established on August 1991 by a group of activist professional women to promote women's rights and gender equality within the Palestinian society via empowering and enhancing women abilities in a range of non­traditional skills to address the problems and respond to the needs of women under the difficult political, socio­economic, cultural and legal context in the Gaza Strip. It’s a women knowledge based center playing an innovative and catalytic role in empowering women; and advocating women's rights and gender equality in the Palestinian sustainable development process. WAC is an independent and non­profit Palestinian NGO with the purpose of empowering women and advocating women’s rights and gender equality through capacity development, information and innovative research and advocacy programs. 

Status of Economic Situation of Women in the Gaza Strip

PCBS (2018) presented high population growth rate (3.44%), population number is 1.94 million, 5 births of fertility rate, and large household size (5.7). The GDP per capita is 1,734.6 USD, 38.8% of population are living below poverty line, and 21.1% of population are living below deep poverty line. 

Women face extreme discrimination in terms of employment and income opportunities, restricting them from both entering the labour force, or finding fairly paid work in which their rights are upheld. Women’s unemployment rates remained high at 50.1% and women’s participation rates in the labour market stood only at 17.4% (compared with 65.9% for males) in Gaza. The majority of formally employed Palestinian women work in part-time positions, in fields such as education and clerical work. 38.3% of women are working in the informal sector, compared to 9.2% of men. Public-sector wages showed significant disparities between men and women, the average daily wages earned by women amounting to only 84% of those earned by men. Palestinian society still perceives women’s presence in the labour market as a threat to men’s work opportunities, and as being more expensive to the employer than the presence of men, because of the perceived high costs of their employment owing to marital status and maternity leave. The World Bank (2018) stated that unemployment among youth reached 70% due to change in context reflected by lack of progress towards peace and reconciliation, decline in donor funding and unstainable economic situation. The percentage of households headed by a young person aged (15-29) reached 17%. Young women face in labor market multiple deprivations and constraints that underlie gender inequality specially lack of their employability skills. There are high unemployment rates (83%) among young women graduates. More than one third (28%) of the young females in Gaza Strip desire to immigrate abroad.

WAC supported through Small business and development program 200 women entrepreneurs during 2018 to starting/upgrading small scale projects, and providing them technical and financial assistance, catching and marketing their products.

The objective of this assignment is to develop an operational for accelerator as a main function of development and small business program in WAC.

Purpose and Expected Outputs of this Assignment

The consultant will be responsible for:

Provision of the accelerator structure.

Brief of feasibility study for the accelerator.

Key features of accelerator and operational models of accelerator. 

Goals and purpose of accelerator.  

Services offered to women through accelerator. Mode of service delivery 

Type of beneficiaries 

Accessibility and inclusiveness

Type start-up businesses (economic sector, manufacturing vs. services)

Services accessed by entrepreneur through accelerator.  

Methodology

The methodological design of the accelerator will be proposed by the consultant.

Timeline

The consultancy period of 20 days starts from the agreement contract sign-off date and ends when Plan approved the final concept.

Qualification and Experience Required

The proposed team by the form for the assignment needs to have the following educational background and experience.:

MSc degree with demonstrable expertise (at least 10 years) in Economics, Social development especially and entrepreneurship 

Demonstrable experience in making operational plan for accelerator.

Ability to conduct high quality operational plan for accelerator, meet deadlines and respond to requests and feedback provided timely and appropriately 

Excellent track record in designing and conducting guide line for accelerator.

Excellent written and verbal communication and reporting skills in English 

Submission of proposals and criteria for evaluation 

The interested consultant / consultancy firm is invited to submit the following application documents:

Technical Proposal, not exceeding 7 pages, 

Financial proposal detailing consultant(s) itemized fees,

CVs of the consultant(s) who will undertake the operational plan

3 references need to be provided Please make sure to submit the financial proposal in a separate file. 

Report Outline

The report outline for operational plan accelerator contains at least the following parts:

Executive summary.

The context of the operational plan 

accelerator.

The guideline of the accelerator.

Brief of feasibility study for the accelerator.

Application

Consultancy offers should contain the following:

One copy of both Technical and Financial offers in separate and sealed envelopes.

Profile / CVS of the consultant with relevant experience in similar consultancies.

The prices in dollar 

The evaluation method will be the quality and cost based selection. A two-stage procedure shall be utilised in evaluating the Proposals; a technical evaluation and a financial evaluation. 

Proposals will be ranked according to their combined technical and financial scores using the weights of 70% for the Technical Proposal; and 30% for the offered price.

Closing Date and Delivery:

Closing date for receiving consultancy offers on Thursday 1/04/2021. at 12:00 PM. Offers must be submitted by hand on WAC office.

For Any Enquiry:

Call Program Coordinator: Miss. Reem Al Nairab 

Mobile No. 0599486452