8 August 2025

Terms of Reference for a Baseline Assessment for the WISE Program: Empowering Young Women through SME Growth and Local Sourcing in Africa

Introduction

IDH and the Mastercard Foundation expanded their partnership through the launch of a transformative $40 million Pan-African initiative: “Empowering Young Women through SME Growth and Local Sourcing in Africa”, known as the WISE program. This ambitious, four-year program aims to scale local sourcing models across Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa, with a specific focus on unlocking the potential of young women in agriculture.

The program targets the improvement of livelihoods for 110,000 smallholder farmers and enabling 395,000 dignified work opportunities, with 80% targeted at young women. The key entry point for reaching this impact is through the co-creation and co-financing of projects with forty-nine (49) SMEs (25 in Nigeria, 16 in Ghana and 8 in South Africa) to drive sustainable and commercially viable solutions to the challenges and opportunities in agricultural value chains by changing business practices. Changes in business practices are scaled across the sector, both nationally and regionally, through convening platforms. These platforms transform sector practices by leveraging knowledge and insights generated from projects under the program. In Ghana, the program will focus on deepening and complementing the previous Grains for Growth (G4G) initiative, also funded by the Mastercard Foundation. In Nigeria, it will build on and scale the Cassava Youth Agripreneur Program (Y-CAP), which was initiated and implemented by IDH between 2017 and 2021. In South Africa, we will implement a two-year pilot to assess the viability of the program model within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.

Assignment Objectives

With this ToR, IDH aims to select an independent party to conduct a baseline assessment of the Empowering Young Women through SME Growth and Local Sourcing in Africa (WISE) program including but not limited to:

Collecting primary data from smallholder farmers based in Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa
Synthesizing primary data with secondary data sources to complete a baseline in line with the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning MEL) Plan of the Program, as captured in this document and the accompanying Baseline Assessment Matrix
Developing three infographics to capture key information on the program, specifically focusing on work opportunities for young women in agricultural value chains in each of the three countries: Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa

The ToR details the full scope of the assessment, including the objectives and proposed evaluation questions, key deliverables, timelines, and guidance on utilising the accompanying annexes

We encourage all interested and qualified parties (both individual parties and consortia) to thoroughly review these documents and apply)

Questions regarding the Assignment must be submitted by 15th August 2025 at 5 p.m. CET, by e-mail to justo@idhtrade.org and adjogatse@idhtrade.org

Proposals must be submitted by 3rd September 2025, 5 p.m. CET by e-mail to justo@idhtrade.org and adjogatse@idhtrade.org