United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: External consultancy to support KATI, a youth micro-finance project in Northern Uganda

KATI is a ground-breaking, award winning youth entrepreneurship initiative based in northern Uganda.

War Child established KATI in Uganda in 2015 as a forward thinking effort to leave some legacy after several years working in the country. It’s an unusual step for an aid agency, and one that we are rightly committed helping to succeed. As a youth oriented micro lending enterprise, with an emphasis on mentoring and promoting innovations that move young entrepreneurs into new markets it’s a relevant development intervention.

KATI has established an executive and operational team, provided loans and other support to over 250 clients, and is part of a wider network of agencies and private sector groups. Until now the focus of both KATI and War Child has been on the business development and support to entrepreneurs, with less attention towards loan recovery and bad debt monitoring. This area has since started to be tackled by KATI through extensive training and mentoring.

The plan is for KATI to become a financially independent and autonomous organisation within a realistic timeframe. It is now timely to consider what relationship and commitments War Child should have with KATI over the coming months and years if we are to realise the vision of a sustainable and independent organisation within the scope of the current business plan (2017-2020).

1.Purpose of the Consultancy

The Programmes, Finance and Fundraising departments of War Child UK have supported KATI in different ways in the past years. The team members nevertheless do not have specific micro-finance expertise, which hinders a sound understanding of progress, data and planning.

The main areas currently supported by War Child are:

• Governance: a War Child representative sits on the board of KATI;

• Finance: review of reports, key documents and analysis;

• Programme: development of reports, Analysis of data and support to M&E function;

• Fundraising: institutional and private fundraising.

As KATI is starting a new Strategic period and the support from War Child UK is diversifying and specializing, War Child UK is looking for a Microfinance expert based in London that will:

• Provide micro-finance training to the relevant Departments at War Child UK;

• Help develop a thorough understanding of KATI’s work, business plans and strategies to inform future investments, prioritization of tasks and critical decisions;

• Determine what information War Child needs from KATI and in what format to analyse the timeframe for KATI to achieve the goal of financial and operational independence;

• Mentor the key team members in the implementation of their tasks and the general support to KATI.

2.Objectives and Approach

The consultancy will particularly focus on the following key aspects.

Capacity Building

• Covering key aspects on the functioning of a micro-finance entity (business planning, data analysis, strategic investments);

• Strengthen the understanding of WCUK team regarding the microfinance environment, market and competition in Uganda to better inform support and inform the implementation of the Business Plan and objectives;

• Support WCUK team in the identification of the information needed from KATI to make decisions and support their process towards independence.

Financial support

• targeting the Finance team for the review of KATI’s reports, business plan, data analysis to inform strategic investments and determine if the right information is being provided for proper financial analysis.

Programme support

• review, analyse and create the tools to allow the Regional Ops Team, MEAL and Livelihoods Advisors in understanding KATI’s existing programming and reporting mechanisms, inform them and identify the best approach to guide KATI’s internal processes.

• Support the prioritization of tasks to better identify, plan, and structure the support provided by WCUK to KATI at programmatic, financial and governance level

The consultancy will be composed of both Desk Review and face-to-face sessions with the War Child team based in London, with an intense inception phase (1 or 2 sessions per week), gradually phasing to a monitoring/ad-hoc support.

The timing and planning of these will be agreed upon contract signature.

For more info and a TORs please go to our website;
https://www.warchild.org.uk/who-we-are/jobs/external-consultancy-kati