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The goal of the contract is to strengthen Armenia’s resilience by focusing on strengthening key systems against a wide range of potential threats. These key systems include: natural resource management; disaster risk management; agriculture, food security, and food production systems; water resource management; energy systems; and the systems that support climate resilient infrastructure. The goal will be achieved through provision of technical assistance, capacity building, in-kind support, and grants under contract.

Task Order Technical Requirements

Natural Resource Management
Potential task order interventions will strengthen the public and private environmental and natural resource management systems to promote self-reliance, a healthier population, sustainable livelihoods and economic opportunity, peaceful management of conflict over resources, and increased resilience. This can include interventions that address land and resource rights; environmental and plastic pollution; natural resource-related conflict and violence; urban resilience, and environmental health, and other interventions that may be relevant and appropriate.

Disaster Risk Management (DRM)
Potential task order interventions will build the resilience of communities, cities, institutions, systems and societies to shocks and stresses. This can include bolstering institutions and capabilities at the national, local, community, and civil society levels to strengthen each of the four key phases of DRM - mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery - with the emphasis on preventing new risks, reducing existing risks and strengthening resilience; engaging the whole society and all parts of the Government of Armenia to ensure shared national responsibility for DRM; applying multi-hazard approach and inclusive risk-informed decision-making; and enabling rapid deployment of funds and other resources in the event of sudden onset disasters, and other interventions that may be relevant and appropriate.

Agriculture, Food Security, and Food Production Systems
Potential task order interventions will work with the public and private sector to increase domestic production for domestic consumption and reduce dependence on imports to stabilize market systems, as well as to increase domestic production for export and export market diversification. This can include supporting agriculture sector knowledge management, increased domestic production of staple crops for domestic consumption, food systems resilience, as well as other interventions deemed necessary and appropriate to improve food security in Armenia.

Water Resource Management
Potential task order interventions will support the implementation of the U.S. Government’s Global Water Strategy in Armenia. Interventions can support strengthened sector governance, financing, and markets; increase equitable access to safe, sustainable, and climate-resilient water and sanitation services; improve climate-resilient conservation and management of freshwater resources; reduce conflict and fragility related to water, and other interventions that may be relevant and appropriate.

Energy Systems
Potential task order interventions will support efforts to increase energy system resilience by supporting market liberalization reforms; increased regional energy trade; diversified domestic generation of renewable energy; adoption of energy efficiency measures; and cybersecurity measures to protect Armenia’s energy systems. This can include strengthening relevant government and non-governmental institutions, policies, systems, workforce, and skills to further energy reforms and engagement with the private sector to promote energy system resilience, and other interventions that may be relevant and appropriate.

Systems to Support Climate-Resilient Infrastructure
Potential task order interventions will support the development of climate-resilient infrastructure and the systems that support their development. This can include the preparation of technical and economic pre-feasibility and feasibility studies; development of infrastructure design documents; development of strategies, action plans, and other documents needed to institutionalize climate-resilient infrastructure into Government of Armenia processes; developing the capacity of the Government of Armenia and the private sector to implement climate-resilient infrastructure solutions, and other interventions that may be relevant and appropriate. Potential infrastructure sectors may include transportation, water, sanitation and waste management, energy, communications, and shelter services, and others identified in the future.

Responding to Shocks and Unforeseen Events
Due to unforeseen requirements and ever changing environments, potential task orders may be issued that require technical interventions that fall within the purview of USAID/Armenia’s Economic Growth Office, but have not been identified as of yet. These task orders will be used to respond to unanticipated events impacting on or related to the achievement of overall project and Economic Growth Office objectives. Based on demonstrated need and available funding, task orders will be used to provide assistance to the Government of Armenia, and/or the private sector to better navigate and respond to these shocks.
While specific activities undertaken will be determined by the nature and scope of the economic shock, as well as the needs of the GOAM, illustrative activities that will be implemented under this objective include:

? Training and capacity building
? Assessments
? Technical Assistance
? In-kind support such as equipment purchases
? Small scale infrastructure development
? Grants Under Contract

This will be the first TO under the USAID/Armenia Resilience Single Holder IDIQ. The RFTOP will be released together with the IDIQ RFP.

Goal: Increase domestic production of critical agricultural value chains to increase food security and reduce dependence on imports.

Result Area 1: Increased efficiency and production of critical crops for domestic consumption

- Establish baseline to determine where opportunities for increased production of staple crops exist.
- Re-introduce extension services to provide knowledge support to farmers for more efficient production.
- Increase collaboration among farmers to achieve efficiencies and economies of scale.
- Support mechanization, improved seeds, storage, and other measures to improve yields and reduce post-harvest losses

Result Area 2: Agriculture sector knowledge management

- In partnership with National Agrarian University, strengthen digital agriculture capacity through development of a publicly accessible, web-based agriculture information dashboard, and productive use mapping tool.
- Data collection and maintenance, dissemination, and access for risk identification, planning, and decision making for farmers, private sector actors, and government as part of agricultural information tool above.
- Increase public and farmer awareness of economic opportunities related to agricultural production
- Content development for web-based access/social media for enhanced farmer information and training purposes.
- Bring to scale existing ANAU’s youth engagement programs and expand offerings at secondary school, vocational education, and higher education levels.

Result Area 3: Disaster Preparedness and Resilience

- Expand early warning capacity to include risk assessment related to medium to longer term threats that have an impact on food security.
- Establish coordination and risk assessment mechanism inclusive of the university, government, and private sector to consider and discuss threats and mitigations to food systems and security.
- Increase availability of public information regarding risks and threats to the food systems and improving collection of related data.
- Expand University’s capacity to improve available data for surveillance of pests and biothreats to contribute to national early warning and management.

Result Area 4: Rapid Response/Windows of Opportunity

- Support shorter term recovery from unanticipated events or disasters that threaten the food system in the transition between emergency response and development activities.
- Support grant for specific, innovative activities requested by women or youth entrepreneurs for testing purposes or bringing to scale agribusiness and digital agriculture opportunities.
- Provide studies, research, or analysis requested by government or farmers to help understand threat or risk and possible responses.
- Provide specialized technical assistance on a limited basis to address a specific risk, threat, or opportunity.

NOTE: The anticipated solicitation release and award dates are notional and subject to the timeline of the USAID/Armenia "Armenia Resilience IDIQ." Timing for the issuance of the Disaster Resilience RFTOP will depend on the award of the IDIQ. USAID/Armenia will update the business forecast as decisions are made.

This task order will likely focus on developing the country’s capacity to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from natural and human-caused disasters. It will leverage changing roles and responsibilities in Armenia's disaster response system and reduce Armenia's vulnerability to disasters through mitigation efforts, making Armenia's economic, social, health, and environmental systems more resilient.
Subsequent task order may be used to provide USAID/Armenia with flexibility to support disaster response and recovery interventions.

The purpose of this contract is to support USAID/Armenia and its implementing partners to improve program management and development impact through collaboration, learning and evidence-based decision-making.

USAID/Armenia is committed to fostering a learning-oriented culture and use of robust evidence and analysis, generated by non-biased qualitative and quantitative research to make strategic and programmatic decisions. The Mission seeks to ensure greater coordination and harmonization of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) practices across the technical teams, with an explicit focus on measuring and improving development performance and progress toward achieving the overall goal of the CDCS.

Towards this end, this Contract will support greater rigor and coherence in MEL and CLA efforts, allow greater flexibility to assess changes in Armenia’s development context, support synergies between MEL activities across DOs, and bolster Mission efforts to incorporate learning and adapting throughout the program cycle.

The Contract has the following interlinked objectives:

(a) Learning and adaptive management - Strengthen the Mission’s learning and adaptive management practices and use of evidence for programming decisions by developing, adapting and integrating Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) tools and approaches in Mission processes.

(b) Evaluations, assessments, analyses and studies - Design and conduct evaluations, analyses, assessments, and studies to meet the Mission’s need for learning and evidence-based programmatic decision-making.

(c) Performance monitoring - Strengthen the Mission’s and its implementing partners’ performance monitoring systems by developing effective monitoring tools including adoption of digital and virtual tools and geographic information system (GIS) technologies for monitoring performance at the strategy, project and activity levels.

(d) Capacity building - Strengthen Mission’s and local partners’ capacities in monitoring, evaluation, learning, and adaptive management.

To achieve the above objectives, the Contractor must support the Mission in the following areas of work:

- Assessments, analyses, studies;
Monitoring;
- Evaluations;
- Data management, analyses, visualization, and use
- CLA and adaptive management
- MEL capacity building

Youth Prosperity through Agricultural Pathways in Higher Education

This activity will be competed under the USAID Central America Regional Support Services (CARSS) IDIQ and will focus on increasing municipal effectiveness, inclusiveness, and responsiveness.

This activity aims to transform Zambia’s agricultural sector into an efficient, equitable, and sustainable producer of high quality and nutritious food for consumption, sale, and trade.

Improving holistic foundational skills learning for children aged 7-14+ affected by crisis in Ethiopia.
- Strengthen subnational capabilities to plan and implement education in emergencies service delivery.
- Improve quality components (teachers, learning materials, school leadership) to improve learning.
- Increase community and parental engagement in education recovery.
- Integrate mental health and psychosocial support in education service delivery.

New IDIQ

The purpose of this Activity is to provide USAID/Colombia with technical and advisory services related to the monitoring, evaluation, and learning of USAID/Colombia’s strategy and activities.