Financial education is a fundamental tool in reducing the challenge through enhancing youths and MSMEs’ level of financial literacy. It increases the access and utilization of financial services, which allow enterprises to innovate and exploit their capacity. It also improves MSMEs’ competency and enables to survive in an increasingly turbulent environment. As financial education for entrepreneurs’ spreads throughout MSMEs, it can create a self‐reinforcing mechanism.

On the other hand, financial institutions need to come out from the vicious circle. They need to create awareness to MSMEs the new joining labour force about the various types of financial products and available services. This would help FIs to broaden their customer bases and mobilize more resources. Likely, MSMEs and particularly youths ease the intention of feeling precarious unemployment and financial insecurity.

Through BRIDGES engagement for a year and half in the financial market, it was found out that the unemployed young men and women lack awareness about the various financial service offerings that would enable them access credit to realize their vision. Hence, this intervention has been implemented in Addis Ababa, Oromia, Amhara regions which resulted in training of more than 15,000 youths leading to more than 7000 youth to access credit so far. The training encompasses on mid sets, basic entrepreneurship, financial institutions awareness and product offerings as well as credit.

The financial education will be provided using different delivery channels ranging from financial literacy campaigns to more structured seminars and workshops. BRIDGEs will be engaged in supporting the intervention through creating the working platform, which will help the main actors to pay their own part in closer coordination.

The Financial Education interventions mainly target unemployed youths and MSMEs in Somali Region. These target groups can easily reach and communicate through the concerned public administration. In general, the initiative will be operational in partnership with the Region Job Creation and enterprise Development Bureau, TVET’s, Shebele bank, SACCOs, other MFIs and the consultants. For the awareness creation program, it was envisaged to reach to 5000 unemployed youth in which at least 2,000 will be accessing credit from various financial institutions.

BRIDGES PROGRAMME

 First Consult (FC) is contracted to provide management and technical support services to Mastercard Foundation under the BRIDGES programme to support the creation of close to 600,000 youth jobs (80% women) and 15,000 MSMEs, with 300,000 unemployed youth trained through supporting IP job creation initiative and market linkage between IPs and MSMEs.

 The BRIDGES Programme will address two fundamental, immediate and complementary challenges to unlock the potential for job creation within IPs and their surrounding ecosystem. (1) Making the

industrial workforce markets work, which through the Enterprise Partners Programme, First Consult have successfully piloted in a few industrial parks and is now ripe for scale-up. (2) Making the IP business linkages (MSME) markets work to enhance domestic manufacturing value-added (MVA) for every given dollar of export. This will be done by substituting the currently-heavy import-dependent operations – itself a constraint on the factories - via local suppliers (MSMEs) in a number of ways.

 The Government of Ethiopia recognizes the critical role played by Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in creating job opportunities especially for young people and women, as well as for boosting national income and wealth that is important in igniting industrial transformation and private sector development. This is also well articulated in the Growth and Transformation Plan which prioritizes and identifies the development of micro and small businesses as catalyst for promoting industrial development. However, issues such as A2F, premises, market and linkage issues remain a challenge. To address the aforementioned, the A2F issue, BRIDGES Programme partners with many Financial Institutions (FIs) to ensure that FIs received the necessary Technical Assistances that will enable the FIs to cater the wider group of MSMEs that are youth focused.

 OBJECTIVE        

The objective of this assignment is to provide financial awareness training to more than 5000 unemployed youths and MSMEs in Somali region and enable a minimum of 2,000 of them to access credit from financial institutions through strong follow-ups, supervision, and mentorship.

SPECIFIC TASKS

The firm will be responsible:

a.       Coordinate with relevant stakeholders to facilitate the signing of this MOU on behalf of BRIDGES

b.       Coordinate with relevant financial institutions, Somali Region Job Creation and Enterprise Development Bureau, TVETs and identifying potential list of trainees;

c.       Provide one-day financial awareness training to 5,000 unemployed youths and MSMEs in the region and city administration

d.       Enrol the trainees in the developed format and report to the programme

e.       Follow-up, supervise, and provide proper guidance to trainees to access credit from financial institutions. Access to finance is expected to be created to 2,000 youth on success fee basis

f.        Link and support MSEs with financial institution

g.       Provide capacity building supports to relevant stakeholders

h.       Any other tasks to be determined

 DELIVERABLES

The following reports will be required as deliverables:

1.       Develop modules on mind sets, entrepreneurship and financial literacy

2.       Coordinate with relevant stakeholders in targeting, selecting and providing trainings to the youth

3.       Monitor the training delivery and report on timely manner

4.       Regularly report the number of trainees and the number of trainees accessing credit to the Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning and (MERL) and the Access to Finance team at First Consult, BRIDGES Program;

5.       Organize workshops for the relevant stakeholders as per the BRIDGES request and work plan

6.       Submit the Final assessment report to the Access to Finance team, which illustrates the overall performance, challenges encountered, way of forward.

 The assignment will take 12 months, with a possibility of extension, starting from December 2022. Performance based payment will be applied.