About this Call for Application:

Remittances have great potential, both in their own right and as a gateway product to a full suite of financial services that could be linked to them, to improve life for migrants and their families. Many factors—lack of interoperability between sending and receiving countries, disharmonized, patchwork-style policy and regulatory regimes, not to mention the powerful force of habit—constrain remittances from fulfilling their immense potential. One such constraint, however is a lack of clarity among remittance service providers (RSPs) and other financial service providers (FSPs) about which innovations have worked and could work for migrants and their families to deliver breakthroughs - affordable remittances and financial products offered through digital channels that migrants and their families trust and incentivized to use.

UNCDF is seeking applications from organizations to develop a holistic and gender-responsive framework to guide the inclusive innovation strategies of RSPs. The framework shall be both analytical and operational, and address where and how to do inclusive innovation across the key components of the remittances value-chain. The Inclusive Innovation Framework will harmonize other existing UNCDF workstreams, including those on enabling policy and regulations, open digital payment ecosystems and empowered customers, and offer recommendations for creation of synergies within remittances markets that can sustainably foster inclusive innovation in remittances practices in the future.

Scope: Programme countries; Bangladesh, Nepal, Ethiopia and Senegal

Location: Institution/home-based

Period: July 2021 – July 2022

Budget: Up to US$650,000 for one applicant/consortium. Applicants should provide budgets that separate the cost for each country assessment, indicating how they would allocate costs to produce high-quality country assessments with their technical approach and dissemination, both outputs and learnings.

Eligible candidates: Any type of organization (including commercial for-profit firms, research institutions, consulting firms, universities and non-profit organizations) with at least 10 years of demonstrated experience in remittance and cross-border payments, with demonstrated expertise in designing strategic frameworks, policies and toolkits for inclusive remittance and financial services, particularly in the domain of cross-border payments and remittances and development finance, including digital financial services, gender and financial inclusion.

Applicants are highly encouraged to submit joint proposals through partnerships between firms and institutions that provide a balance of academic rigour and implementation expertise for the success of the project.

Applicants may apply independently or in a consortium. Although not an eligibility criterion, consortiums having a pre-established partnership prior to the issuance of this request for applications will be preferred (see section: Eligibility for Application and Evaluation criteria of this RFA). UNCDF may propose to interested eligible applicants to form a consortium after the evaluation process has been concluded.

The selected institution will sign a Financing Grant Agreement with UNCDF.

Enquiries to this request for applications may be submitted by email to uncdf.rfa@uncdf.org

All applications must be submitted no later than 6th of June 2021 23:59 EST on the online submission platform:

https://apply.uncdf.org/prog/framework_for_inclusive_innovation_for_remittances/

Applicants can send any queries and requests for clarifications up until 10 May 2021.

A document answering frequently asked questions will be posted on the UNCDF website of the RFA, no later than 14 May 2021.