Procurement of Consultancy Services to Develop and Deploy the Africa RISE Gateway

AUDA-NEPAD is inviting proposals from specialised firms to design, develop and deploy the Africa RISE Gateway— a centralised digital platform supporting the Africa Resilient Irrigation for a Sustainable (RISE) Regional Accelerator Project (RAP).

About the Programme

Funded by the International Development Association, Africa RISE RAP is a five-year, USD 10 million initiative operating across 19 Eastern and Southern African countries. It supports the African Union's Framework on Irrigation Development and Agricultural Water Management, with a focus on scaling up Farmer Led Irrigation Development (FLID) and improving the planning, delivery and financing of irrigation across the region. What the Gateway Will Do Envisioned as a "System of Systems," the Gateway will serve as the region's central hub for:

• Knowledge management and multilingual technical resources
• Regional benchmarking of irrigation and FLID performance
• Policy, institutional and regulatory (PIR) tracking
• An Innovation and Challenge Fund management module
• Real-time integration with the Africa RISE Geospatial Analytics Platform and national monitoring systems via an API-first architecture

Scope of Work

The selected firm will conduct a comprehensive user requirements assessment, design and build the platform, populate it with content, provide technical assistance and capacity building across three tiers of users, and develop a sustainable operations and maintenance model — including full handover to AUDA-NEPAD. Timeline The assignment runs approximately 54 weeks, from June 2026 to August 2027, with five payment milestones tied to key deliverables (Inception Report, Requirements & Architecture Package, Functional Prototypes, Integrated Beta, and Final Commissioning). Team Requirements Firms must demonstrate at least 10 years of institutional experience delivering large-scale digital platforms, with a proposed team of 7 key experts — including a Team Leader, Business Analyst, Lead Developer, Data Engineer, Cybersecurity Specialist, GIS Specialist, and a Knowledge Management Specialist, totalling 620 person-days of effort.

Documents: Terms of Reference; Request for Expression of Interest

— From TORs - Africa RISE Gateway_0.pdf — STANDARD TEMPLATE

TERMS OF REFERENCE

Title of the

Consultancy:

Procurement of Consultancy Services to Develop and Deploy the Africa RISE Gateway Consultancy

type: (individual

or firm) Firm Procurement Number (from procurement plan) 926/AUDA/DITIR/RESILIENTIRRIGATIONF/QCBS/2026

Background The African Union Development Agency (AUDA -NEPAD) is an African -owned and led

continental agency, spearheading Agenda 2063, with a mandate to: a) Coordinate and Execute priority regional and continental projects, to promote regional integration towards the accelerated realisation of Agenda 2063; and b) Strengthen capacity of African Union Member States and regional bodies, advance knowledge-based advisory support, undertake the full range of resource mobilisation and serve as the continent’s technical interface with all Africa’s development stakeholders and development partners. AUDA-NEPAD has received funding from the International Development Association to implement the Africa Resilient Irrigation for a Sustainable (RISE) Regional Accelerator Project (RAP) in 19 Eastern and Southern African (AFE) 1 countries. The Africa RISE RAP is a five -year project with a total budget of USD 10 million and part of the World Bank’s regional Multi -Phase Programmatic Approach (MPA). It is aligned to the African Union framework on Irrigation Development and Agricultural Water Management (IDAWM) that was launched in 2020 and aims to implement one of the four recommended pathways of the framework on Farmer Led Irrigation Development (FLID). The project development objective (PDO) is to improve the planning and delivery of irrigation policies, investments and services in Eastern and Southern African countries. The Africa RISE Gateway will serve as the centralised Digital Orchestration Hub for the MPA. It must integrate knowledge resources and innovation management with real-time data feeds from the Geospatial Analytics Platform, enabling coordinated monitoring, learning and adaptive management across the MPA. The Gateway shall be built on an API-first architecture to allow seamless data exchange between regional monitoring dashboards and national implementation units, ensuring interoperability with programme partners and country systems. The Africa RISE Gateway will host and operationalise benchmarking of MPA and se ctor performance across the countries. It will serve as the analytical platform of the Africa RISE MPA. Regional benchmarking will ena

— From REOI - AFRICA RISE Gateway.pdf — June 2026

Official Use Only

_____________________________________________________ REQUEST FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST (CONSULTING SERVICES – FIRMS SELECTION)

Country: Multinational

Name of Project: Resilient Irrigation for a Sustainable Economy Project

Grant No.: P P514153

Assignment Title: Procurement of Consultancy Services to Develop and Deploy the

Africa RISE Gateway

Reference No: 926/AUDA/DITIR/RESILIENTIRRIGATIONF/QCBS/2026

Method: Quality and Cost Based Selection (QCBS)

1. Introduction

The African Union Development Agency – New Partnership for Africa Development (AUDA-NEPAD) has received financing from the World Bank toward the cost of the “Resilient Irrigation for a Sustainable Economy Project”, and intends to apply part of the proceeds for consulting services. “Consultancy Services to Develop and Deploy the Africa RISE Gateway”

2. Description of Services

The consulting services (“the Services”) include: Task 1: Africa RISE User Requirements

Assessment: Map and profile all user groups and partners including relevant African Union

agencies and departments (AUDA‑NEPAD, AU -SAFGRAD, SEBE), government ministries, transboundary water management agencies, regulators, MPA focal points, implementing partners, research institutes and universities and technical experts, farmers, aggregators, private sector, equipment suppliers and financial institutions and farmer unions and cooperative societies etc; Task 2: Design, Develop and Commission the

Africa RISE Gateway: Define system architecture, data structures, modules, dashboard

requirements and process workflows, including a unified data interoperability Layer that meets vPIC standards and aligns with the Africa RISE Regional Geospatial Analytics Platform and national irrigation monitoring systems. The architecture shall specify: (a) the endpoints and payload schemas through which national data collection tools, the Regional Geospatial Platform, and other authorized external data sources submit and validate benchmarking data; (b) the data lineage and version control mechanisms ensuring that published benchmarks are traceable to their submission source; and (c) the traffic-light alert logic that translates performance indicator values into color-coded risk flags for display in

the executive dashboard . Task 3: Technical Assistance (TA) and Capacity Building :

Develop and deliver a structured, tiered capacity -building programme and associated training materials f

Published by AUDA-NEPAD (African Union Development Agency). Submission instructions and deadlines are in the attached documents; the notice is listed at https://www.nepad.org/tenders.