| Overview : UNCDF is the UN’s capital investment agency for the world’s 46 least developed countries. With its capital mandate and instruments, UNCDF offers ‘last mile’ finance models that unlock public and private resources, especially at the domestic level, to reduce poverty and support local economic development. The UNCDF Inclusive Digital Economies (IDE) practice launched its new strategy, ‘Leaving no one behind in the digital era’, which is based on over a decade of experience in digital finance in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The goal of UNCDF is to empower millions of people by 2024 to use services daily that leverage innovation and technology and contribute to the SDGs. To achieve this vision UNCDF uses a market development approach and continuously seeks to address underlying market dysfunctions that exclude people living in the last mile. Following the launch of its recent strategy, the IDE practice is going through organisational changes and intends to strengthen its data management system and practices. UNCDF is currently lacking efficient systems to collect data, monitoring progress and overall maximize the utility of its data. UNCDF IDE is looking to hire the services of a data consulting company, with strong technical expertise in data strategy development and data management systems for medium and complex organizations. This firm’s primary objective will be to assess the existing data management practices used within the IDE practice and propose different iterations for the improvement of the data management system and practices. UNCDF IDE will ask the firm to develop a proof of concept that can be limited in scope. This assignment shall be followed by a second RFP to implement and roll out the solution globally. UNCDF requires a sustainable and flexible data system and culture that can easily evolve and adapt to the changes in sources and forms of monitoring data beyond the initial implementation. Specific objectives: UNCDF requires the services of a data consulting company to support and work with the Inclusive Digital Economies practice on the design of a data management strategy and system. The company will advise on data strategy, architecture, analytics, and governance. The firm is expected to first undertake a needs assessment to understand UNCDF’s data inflows, use cases, and existing data management systems, and then advise on options for adjustments to the current structure and practices in the form of project proposals that present varied levels of required technological, functional, operational, and business activities. The firm is expected to work under the supervision of UNCDF’s project manager, the IDE operations analyst. Scope: The company is not responsible for the collection of any data points but is responsible for developing proposals for data collection, management and analysis. The absence or insufficiency of data sources should not prevent the firm from completing its objectives. UNCDF is operating in 20+ countries across the globe and there would be a total of 300 users including: - 25 key users which access to underlying database
- 10-20 users with restricted access to specific reports (consolidated results used for management meetings)
UNCDF IDE is split in sub-programs that operate in parallel and do not necessarily use the same tools / software so one of the expected outcomes of this assignment is to align everyone on the same data management system. The major data sources are: - Results Measurement (monitoring): Excel based, very manual or Power BI and Airtable, Asana
- Communications: Airtable / Excel / Google analytics
- Fundraising: soft and hard pipeline are tracked in Excel
Potentially an additional data source will be included: - Budget and finance, contract administration and grants: using on corporate software: Atlas but will move to Oracle (Quantum)
The exact scope of the exercise is to be defined jointly with the selected supplier during the inception phase of the project. This assignment will ideally focus on providing a data management system for the results measurement data and to propose linkages with budget and finance information that can be extracted from corporate software soon to be launched (Quantum) For full details on this opportunity please refer to the attached Request for Proposal document | 
