Consultant at Mercy Corps Nigeria

Mercy Corps has been present in Nigeria since 2012, focusing its interventions on humanitarian assistance, economic development, and conflict mitigation. With the ongoing insurgency in Northeast Nigeria causing the displacement of millions of individuals, Mercy Corps started its humanitarian response in 2014 to address the rising humanitarian needs. As the crisis has persisted, Mercy Corps’ strategy has also expanded to address the root causes of the conflict and seek to build the long term resilience of communities with integrated programs focusing on governance, the recovery of markets and livelihoods, social cohesion and social protection, youth empowerment, and local conflict management. With funding from institutional donors, foundations and private corporations, Mercy Corps operates along the humanitarian- development- peace nexus across Nigeria with the ambition of further deepening linkages across the country portfolio and expand both in depth and length its interventions to provide durable solution in current programming areas and address the emerging needs in new areas.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Consultant - Investment Requirements, Financial Feasibility and Go-to-Market Strategy for Locally Fabricated Planters

Location: Borno
Timeframe / Schedule: One Month
The Consultant will report to: Field Coordinator and Senior Intervention Officer

Purpose / Project Description

• The Feed the Future Nigeria Rural Resilience Activity (RRA) is a 5-year USAID funded program being implemented by a consortium led by Mercy Corps with support from IFDC and Save the Children across the states of Adamawa, Borno, Gombe and Yobe in North-East Nigeria.
• The Rural Resilience Activity will facilitate economic recovery and growth in vulnerable, conflict-affected areas by promoting systemic change in market systems.
• This will ensure long-term improvements to markets that will sustainably move over 500,000 individuals out of chronic poverty.
• In the last few months, RRA worked with some suppliers of imported and locally fabricated manually pushed planters. There is evidence that there is a growing demand for the planters which sell between 40,000NGN and 65,000NGN for locally fabricated and imported respectively.
• Although there is a potential, market currently lacks evidence for sustainable financial returns of promoting this innovation, potential for scalable investments among the existing local fabricators of planters.  

Consultant Objectives

• The Consultant will provide insights and rationale for commercial case for local fabrication of planters at scale and a development of route to market.
• The consulting services to produce a commercial case to illustrate the economic viability of business innovation and technologies promoted, which, in turn, can help private sector partners make more informed investment decisions.
• The consultant will generate evidence to answer the following questions:
  • Is it financially feasible to scale locally fabricated planters?
  • What are the investment requirements for the scale-up? c) What is the go-to-market strategy for the market?

Consultant Activities
Broadly, activities will take the form of estimating investment requirements, determining financial feasibility and developing go to. This will include:

Investment Requirements and Financial Feasibility:

• Generate evidence to demonstrate if it is commercially viable to up scale the locally fabricated manually pushed planters.
• To estimate investments requirement for the private sector players producing or importing planters. Identification and analysis of fabrication/import scalability which can be overcome by targeted investments or new partnerships.
• To determine the financial feasibility of scaling up of planters’ fabrication, so as to attract private-sector investment.
• Market analysis for fabricated planters in North East Nigeria, setting out key data and analysis relating to products, costs, networks and demand/supply channels.

Go-to-Market Strategy:

• Formulating a strategic plan; sales, marketing, operational andmanagerial.
• Propose partnerships with individual companies, to provide them with the technical support to make those investments attractive and feasible.
• Formulating and mapping a multi-stage distribution plan for the product.
• Developing a competitive pricing strategy.
• Making financial projections in order to develop a financial plan.
• Risk analysis and mitigation.
• Develop an illustrative economic viability of climate smart approaches and technologies that could be promoted, which, in turn, can help private sector partners make more informed investment decisions into the livestock market.
• Develop a market entry strategy that included assessment of technical requirements, marketing plan, management plan, and operations plan.
• The operations plan highlighting action plans for sourcing raw materials, partnering with sales agents or distributors, quality control, and an implementation timeline.

Consultant Deliverables

• Solid business case and strategy document that makes the planters fabrication more investible bankable.
• Marketing Strategy: The marketing strategy was informed by the data that we collected in the survey and focused on segment selection, sales strategy, product development, communications strategy, competitive differentiation, and distribution strategy.
• Based on the market data and information from the project's expert team, projections were developed for two cases in an excel-VBA based financial model tool with auto-iterative sensitivity analyses

Consultant Required Experience and Skills

• Master's Degree in Business Administration, Mechanical Engineering or equivalent
• 7+ years of experience and proven track record in successful economic development design, business case development, economic and financial modeling
• Working experience as an investment advisor
• Working knowledge of the Nigeria mechanization sector
• Working knowledge of farm machineries, and other competitive factors
• Working experience engaging small scale businesses and informal family run businesses
• Exceptional interpersonal communication skills
• Ability to work effectively under tight deadlines
• Language skills: English and Hausa.

Application Closing Date
30th June, 2022.