Consultant (Village Savings and Loans Trainings for Women Groups in Shani LGA) at Christian Aid

Background

• The Boko Haram insurgency in north-east part of Nigeria has led to the displacement of over 14m people across the north-east region, with spill-overs into other regions in Nigeria. Christian Aid Nigeria is responding to the needs of the affected population by setting up a huge humanitarian response infrastructure in north-east Nigeria to contribute to supporting over 8m people in need of emergency life threatening situations.
• Through its humanitarian interventions, Christian Aid Nigeria supports affected communities with access to food through both in-kind and cash transfers to enable them to purchase food and meet their entitlements and attain an acceptable food consumption score, reduce malnutrition of children from 6 months to 5 years, and increase access to food for pregnant and lactating mothers and the people living with diseases.

Purpose

• Christian Aid is work working with WFP to improve the nutrition condition of communities in Shani LGA through the implementation of various nutrition and community strengthening activities such as the blanket supplementary feeding programme, cash-based transfers and other community based strategic behaviour change commination initiatives that are consistent with interest, localities and context.
• Christian Aid is also looking to contribute to restoring livelihoods and food security of these communities by increasing agricultural production, Income Generating activities and other livelihood activities for members of the host communities in 2 communities each of Shani LGA.
• Specifically, the project seeks to empower pregnant and lactating women benefiting from WFP cash for nutrition intervention to improve their access to economic opportunities.
• One of such support is the Village Savings and Loans Association (VSLA).
• The primary purpose of the VSLA programme is to provide simple savings and loan facilities to the beneficiaries in a community that does not have access to formal financial services.
• The activities of the VLSA groups is hoped to shore up timely utilization of health services for family planning, healthy pregnancies, deliveries and newborn care and generally, the nutrition situations of the various communities.
• Also, the VSLA will provide some form of self-insurance to members, supplemented by a social fund which provides small but important grants to members in distress.
• It will also improve the economic and social security for women and girls, their household and their community.

Scope of work and Specific duties of the Consultant

• Christian Aid is deploying several trainings for the beneficiaries in line with the project objectives. CA is thus seeking to engage for immediate deployment, facilitators to conduct the Village Savings and Loans training for women groups in Shani. The key duty of the trainers will be:
• Conduct a 1 - day training on VSLA field training, including process of VSLA formation and operation, and financial Education
• Enable the VSLA groups to determine their seasonal calendar to know when to save, borrow and buy their goods.
• Conduct 16 (1 day) 4 per day training on Village Savings and Loans Association curriculum in Shani LGA as assigned. It is anticipated that the 30 -35 participants in each session of the training. (16 sessions in total)

Deliverables and deliverable schedule:

• Deliverable #

Description
Deliverable #1:

• Submission of training plan including Agenda
• Within first two days

Deliverable #2:

• Conduct Training on VSLA for women groups in Shani
• Within four days (four sessions per day)

Deliverable #3:

• Training report with pictures and assessment of the beneficiaries pre and post training results.

Three days after the training:

• Written deliverable shall be submitted electronically and produce in Microsoft word. Consultants shall complete the training report to include names of participants disaggregated by sex, livelihood skill type and community.

Reporting:

• The technical direction of the training will come from the Senior Programme Coordinator and Project Manager while the facilitator will work closely with the Christian-Aid FSL Coordinator.