EOI for Legal Services for Food Security Cat Bond

The World Food Programme (WFP), with its Headquarters located in Via C.G. Viola, 68/70, 00148 Rome, Italy is the leading humanitarian organization fighting hunger worldwide, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience by assisting almost 100 million people in around 83 countries each year.

In the past two decades, the world has seen the number of severe weather disasters surge to 336 annually (nearly one per day) compared to 70 per year six decades ago. Their impacts endanger the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable communities worldwide. In 2023, extreme weather events were the leading cause of acute food insecurity in 18 countries, affecting 72 million people-a 26% increase from 2022. Twelve of these affected countries are in Africa.

Traditional donor funding will not be enough to meet these humanitarian needs and end global hunger by 2030. New forms of financing, so that more resources are mobilized, and each dollar feeds more people, are needed. WFP thus recognizes Innovative Finance as a key enabler for achieving the outcomes of the WFP Strategic Plan 2022-2025, leading to the approval of the Innovative Finance Strategy 2025-26 by the Executive Director.

As part of its search for innovative solutions, WFP is exploring the role of insurance-linked securities (ILS), specifically a drought catastrophe (“cat”) bond, in closing the funding gap due to climate disasters. The instrument will achieve this by establishing pre-arranged climate and disaster risk financing.

Through the WFP Innovation Accelerator, WFP is seeking a specialised capital markets legal services provider (LSP) to advise and support its in-house legal counsel with legal structuring and assessment workflows during the transaction development process. This transaction represents a first-of-its-kind cat bond issuance in favour of a UN agency. WFP invites eligible suppliers to express their interest in providing the requested services .

The purpose of this request for EOI is to identify an LSP, with verified technical and financial capacity to serve as external legal counsel and provide professional legal advice on a highly specialised area of transactional law. Based on the review of EOI submissions, pre-qualified entities will be invited to participate in bidding for a tender (Request for Proposals (RFP). Successful bidders will be offered long-term agreements (LTA) for a period of 5 years.