Associates in Development Pvt. Ltd. (AiD) is implementing USAID’s Economic Recovery and Development Activity (ERDA); a five-year (2022-2027) activity designed to expand environmentally sustainable, socially equitable and climate resilient economic opportunities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and its Newly Merged Districts (NMDs) by strengthening and modernizing the agriculture sector and promoting on and off farm Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and creating business enabling environment.
The Bureau of Agriculture Information (BAI), Department of Agriculture Extension Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is extending information outreach to the farming communities through integrated information dissemination platforms. The BAI has developed and is managing these information technology advisory platforms, which include; Tele-Farming Call Center, Awareness Messaging Services, Agriculture Extension Dashboard, e-Agriculture Ecosystem and Agriculture Extension Web Portal. These platforms are providing advisory services through helplines and android mobile application to agriculture farmers, value chain actors and associated stakeholders. These services at the moment are available to the farmers of the settled districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa but need to be upscaled and extended to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and its NMDs. The USAID-ERDA has envisaged to provide specialized high-quality Technical Assistance (TA) and capacity building support to BAI’s Tele-Farming Center and Digital Services Platforms of Agriculture Extension Services of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
USAID-ERDA is seeking Expression of Interest (EOI) from private sector nationally registered firms/companies/consortium, specialized in harnessing technologies, data science, tele-farming systems and research to provide actionable and timely information to farmers, using “Human Centered Design (HCD)” approach. The firm/company/consortium is expected to perform and deliver a range of technical assistance and institutional capacity building interventions exclusively focusing strengthening, handholding, upscaling and capacity building of Tele-Farming Center and Digital Services platform through improved ICT and systems, data analytics capabilities, communications design, database management, data security practices and IVR operations. The duration of this direct assistance is around 24 months with an expected start from September 2023. Moreover, intermittent assistance and technical support may be needed in USAID-ERDA’s subsequent years till 2027.