The Economic Community of West African States ("ECOWAS") has received funding from the French Development Agency ("AFD"), and intends to use part of the amount to make payments under the Interim Phase of the West Africa Food Security Storage Support Project (Interim Phase ECOWAS Stocks).
The purpose of the Respondent's Services will be to provide Project Management Unit (PMU) support to the RAAA for the overall coordination of the Project. The expected Services are detailed in Annex 1.
ECOWAS invites Applicants to express their interest in providing the Services described above.
This Call for Expressions of Interest is addressed to Consulting Firms and Groups of Consulting Firms.
The eligibility criteria for AFD financing are specified in Article 1.3 of the "Guidelines for Procurement financed by AFD in Foreign States", available online on the AFD website: http://www.afd.fr.
Respondents may submit only one Application on their own behalf or as a Grouping. If an Applicant (including a member of a Grouping) submits or participates in several applications, these will be eliminated. However, the same Subcontractor may participate in several applications.
If the Respondent is a Consortium, the Expression of Interest must include:
- a copy of the Grouping agreement concluded by all its members,
or
- a letter of intent to form a consortium, signed by all its members and accompanied by a copy of the proposed consortium agreement.
In the absence of this document, the other members will be considered as Subcontractors.
The references and qualifications of the Subcontractors are not taken into account in the evaluation of the applications.
Interested Applicants must provide information demonstrating that they are qualified and experienced to perform the Services. In this regard, they shall provide evidence of recent and similar references.
The similarity of the references will be analysed according to :
- The size of the markets ;
- The nature of the Services: coordination and implementation of programmes/projects, including regional projects, involving several stakeholders;
- Field and technical expertise: expertise on agricultural policies, regional integration, storage, food and nutritional security, gender issues and the "do no harm" approach, financial engineering, communication and visibility, as well as institutional and human capacity building;
- Geographical context: experience in West Africa (within the fifteen (15) ECOWAS Member States as well as Chad and Mauritania), particularly with the various stakeholders working on food security and nutrition issues, in at least two ECOWAS institutional languages; and
- The candidates' network and their ability to quickly mobilize skills outside their core business.
Their references (active telephone contacts and/or e-mail addresses of the beneficiaries or lessors) must be specified for each experience presented.
ECOWAS will draw up a short list of a maximum of six (6) candidates, pre-selected on the basis of the applications received and after AFD's no objection opinion, to whom it will send the Request for Proposals for the performance of the required Services.
Expressions of Interest must be sent electronically to the following address: reserve2@araa.org with the reference: "AMI Interim Phase ECOWAS Stocks - PMU", no later than January 28, 2022 at 12:00 GMT (UTC).
Interested Applicants may obtain additional information at the above-mentioned e-mail address, five (5) working days before the date of submission of the Application, i.e. on January 21,2022.
The application:
A. Must contain the following elements:
a. Letter of interest (according to the model given in Annex 2) ;
b. If the Applicant is a consortium: a copy of the consortium agreement or a letter of intent to form a consortium;
c. The duly signed Declaration of Integrity (model in Annex 3);
d. A presentation brochure of the Design Office or the Grouping;
e. The list of references of recent and similar services (established in a free format);
B. Shall not exceed ten (10) pages all inclusive (excluding the presentation brochure); and
C. Will consist of one (1) non-editable PDF document.
Any application that is incomplete, and/or contains more documents than those requested, and/or does not comply with points B and/or C, and/or arrives after the deadline will be automatically rejected.