| Overview : About the Uganda Tourism Ecosystem Platform (UTEP) Tourism has been recognised as one of the key drivers of Uganda’s social and economic transformation over the last 10 years. In line with global trends, the tourism sector in Uganda has grown, creating a positive impact on employment creation and foreign exchange earnings for the country. The sector has emerged as the single largest export earner and contributed to 6.6% of the national GDP and to 15.7% of total exports in 2016. The total contribution of Travel & Tourism to employment, including jobs indirectly supported by the industry is 5.8%. Notwithstanding this positive trend, the sector has not lived up to its full potential largely due to low competitiveness. Compared to neighbouring countries like Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda, the competitiveness of Uganda’s tourism sector is still relatively low, resulting in lower numbers of visitors. This is mainly because of a narrow product range, relatively high prices, and inadequate skills of employees, low quality of services, an unfavourable tax regime, and high operational costs. Despite the potential to include low-income people and local communities in tourism value chains, they are still largely excluded. Those people and communities living near and around Uganda’s tourism attractions have largely not been able to transform the experience of having tourist visitors in their area into business and income earning opportunities; for instance, through offering community based tourism products or providing goods and services to companies, lodges or restaurants that cater to tourists in these areas. A mapping study of the tourism sector in Uganda revealed that there are four systemic challenges that are constraining sustainable and inclusive growth of the sector. These include: a) limited information on inclusive business practices; b) lack of policy incentives that promote inclusive business practices; c) limited capacity of tourism MSMEs to include low-income people and local communities into their value chains and d) absence of market linkages between key market players, including tourism MSMEs and local communities. Furthermore, the current sector coordination mechanisms are inadequate, incoherent and lack the resilience to effectively address the four challenges identified above. Inclusive businesses present a promising approach to realize the sector’s full potential for socio economic transformation and bring the benefits of economic growth in tourism directly to low-income people. Inclusive businesses are defined as businesses that include low-income people on the demand side as customers, and on the supply side as owners, employees, producers and entrepreneurs at various points within the value chain. They build bridges between business and the poor for mutual benefit by bringing the benefits of economic growth directly to low-income communities. Inclusive businesses create a strong foundation for profit and long-term sustainability and growth by bringing previously excluded people into the marketplace. By including low income people and local communities in tourism value and supply chains the tourism sector could increase its competitiveness and potential social economic transformation. In line with its Private Sector Strategy, UNDP is becoming increasingly well positioned to support inclusive growth and development and contribute to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to through innovative approaches of inclusive market development (IMD). Through IMD, UNDP engages the private sector and other stakeholders to improve opportunities for the poor to participate in markets. The UNDP 2013 flagship report “Realizing Africa’s Wealth - Building Inclusive Businesses for Shared Prosperity” calls for greater coordination of the diverse tourism stakeholders to achieve greater impact for inclusive businesses and ultimately low-income people. Inclusive Business Ecosystem Initiatives (IBEI) have been particularly successful in creating such inclusive business ecosystems. These initiatives coordinate diverse stakeholder in the ecosystem - companies, governments, development partners, civil society organizations (CSOs), research institutions and intermediaries - at multiple levels to ensure that individual activities build on and reinforce each other. An essential part of the IBEIs are multi-stakeholder platforms that bring together all relevant stakeholders of the inclusive business ecosystem in a collaborative manner. A collective, coordinated and systemic intervention is needed to address the above-mentioned challenges and catalyse sustainable and inclusive growth of the sector. In this regard, UNDP and Government of Uganda have developed an initiative aimed at strengthening the tourism inclusive business ecosystem in Uganda. The initiative – Uganda Tourism Ecosystem Platform (UTEP) – was established in April 2017, and is intended to catalyse inclusive growth and development of the tourism sector in Uganda. The UTEP brings together all relevant tourism stakeholders under one common platform to design and implement targeted interventions that address the above-mentioned ecosystem challenges that inhibit the growth of inclusive businesses. The Platform includes the Government of Uganda, Private Sector, Business Associations, Business Service Providers, Development Partners, Civil Society and Academia. The vision of the Uganda Tourism Ecosystem Platform is: “Uganda as a preferred sustainable and inclusive tourism destination with a tourism sector that creates opportunities for all”. So far, UNDP Uganda has carried out a mapping of inclusive businesses and their ecosystem, identified key challenges and opportunities in the ecosystem, supported the launch of the Uganda Tourism Ecosystem Platform, and defined a collaborative action plan for the UTEP in collaboration with other key stakeholders of the platform (refer to Annex 1). However, inclusive business models also face enterprise level challenges preventing them to grow, scale-up (geographically or into different product and service lines) and hence have a large positive impact on target communities. These challenges need to be identified and tackled. They may include gaps in business, technical and financial capacity. About our Innovation Challenge Call UNDP Uganda now wishes to initiate an Innovation Challenge Call for “Scaling-up inclusive business models in support of Uganda as a preferred sustainable and inclusive tourism destination with a tourism sector that creates opportunities for all“. This Innovation Challenge Call seeks to support the scale-up of inclusive business solutions, by addressing key business level barriers through targeted funding and/or targeted technical assistance. Applicants should present an innovative idea/solution that helps them to scale-up operations and impact. UNDP is inviting proposals from interested innovators who can implement their suggested ideas in a sustainable manner. All proposals must present the business model of the company/organization, show how it is inclusive and financially viable, explain which barriers the business/organization faces in scaling up, how the prize award would be used to overcome them, and what impact the solution would have on low income people and local communities. The expected output from this Innovation Challenge Call is that UNDP supports up to five (5) inclusive businesses to scale-up operations, leading to a clear positive impact on the target beneficiaries and advancement towards Uganda as a preferred sustainable and inclusive tourism destination with a tourism sector that creates opportunities for all. The award Winners can receive up to US$ 40,000 in cash and/or in-kind support (goods and services) through this Innovation Challenge! For example, if your business/organization struggles with a lack of skilled staff, the funding could be used for a training program. It could also be used to fund trainings of local communities to deliver products or services at a quality that matches market demand. The prize award contribution must be matched with at least the same amount by the recipient of the award, in cash or in-kind. In cash contribution on the part of innovators are encouraged and will be preferred in the evaluation. In case of in-kind matching, only new contributions (as opposed to existing resources) by the applicant will be taken into consideration. However, reassigning current employees to implement the proposed solution by carrying out new activities shall be considered an in-kind contribution. Who can apply? Applications must be led by a private sector firm or a not-for-profit social enterprise with a financially viable business model. The firm must already operate an inclusive business. It must be able to show that a significant number of low-income people are already included in its value chain in a strategic way and for mutual benefit. How to Apply - Download documents from procurement-notices.undp.org
- Develop your Proposal including a proposed solution for funding support. The proposed solution must explain the business model of the company/organization, show how it is inclusive and financially viable, and explain which barriers the business faces in scaling up, and how the prize award would be used to overcome them.
- Submit to tenders.kampala@undp.org by no later than 14:00 hours on Friday 17 November 2017.
Criteria for selecting the winning innovator UNDP will set up an evaluation committee, comprising mainly of UN staff as well as technical experts to review all proposals received using UNDP’s principles of fairness and integrity. The following criteria will guide the selection of the winning proposal: - Company has a solid performance track record (30%)
- Business model is sustainable, scalable, catalytic, and has a proven significant impact on the poor (30%)
- Proposed solution is effective and feasible with the available means and partner contribution (40%)
When preparing your proposal, please be guided by the documents attached hereto. NB: Please submit your quotation strictly to this email: tenders.kampala@undp.org. Kindly note that only quotations sent to this email will be processed. Quotations sent to my email or any other UNDP staff email will be rejected. NOTE: Your submission should not exceed 9MB in PDF format. | 
