ToR Question Guide
This guide helps businesses to fill out the SLP’s ToR form. It explains what the SLP requires from your organization, detailing what we mean when we ask a question and, in most cases, why we are asking it. Providing accurate and comprehensive answers will improve the quality of your ToR and the likelihood of receiving strong proposals in response.
Once you have filled out the ToR form, the SLP Support Team will review and provide comments within 2-3 business days. You will then have the opportunity to make any changes to your ToR before it is distributed via SLP Open or Match.
Project name
Please provide a brief descriptive name for the project. This is for administrative purposes.
Name of organization
Please provide the name of your organization. This will enable the SLP to identify your organization appropriately and match your registration data to your Profile Development data.
Service(s) required to deliver project
These services have been selected via a consultation process with leading experts and practitioners. These services also contain key words that will be used to match Service Consumers with Service Providers. Please select the skill areas where your organization requires services
These services contain key words that will be used to match Service Consumers with Service Providers
Please see explanation of each skill below:
“Community Capacity Building”: Building the capacity of individuals – both women and men – and communities to hear and react to information; provide feedback on preferences, consent, impacts, objections, and expectations; generally engage in two-way dialogue; and enter into negotiations and resulting agreements. Capacity building in these topics, as well as other related areas may be required at the outset of any investment in land or other natural resources. Only with a certain level of capacity can individuals and communities be expected to grant and sustain a social license to operate.
“Environmental Impact Assessment and Mitigation”: Identifying, avoiding, reducing and compensating for the environmental, social and governance (ESG) impacts of an investment process is a vital element of earning and maintaining social license to operate. Identifying and assessing impacts – to women, men and communities – is a critical first step. Developing alternatives approaches that permit impact avoidance and mitigation is also central to impact management. Any impact assessment and management process must recognize that women usually perceive and are affected by impacts differently than men, and that communities are not homogenous.
“Establishment of Project-Specific Grievance Mechanisms”: Designing and implementing a functioning, effective, equitable, transparent, and accessible project-specific grievance mechanism for handling and resolving disputes is central to responsible investment and maintaining social license to operate.
“Gender Impact Assessment / Gender Analysis”: Impacts to women (and other marginalized groups, such as youth) can only be identified in most cases when focused upon with targeted emphasis and dedicated resources and expertise. Thorough assessment, identification, evaluation, analysis, and management of impacts ensures that women’s land and natural resources uses are seen and equitably acknowledged during an investment process. Specialized expertise is almost always required to perform these tasks.
“Land Valuation, Surveying, Mapping and Entitlement”: Identifying uses, resolving conflicting claims, establishing and demarcating boundaries, and formalizing rights to land and other natural resources may be required prior to the transfer of land rights or to change of land use. These activities, done in a participatory, inclusive, and transparent way, can help businesses earn local trust and can create needed certainty and an enabling environment for successful, responsible investments.
“Legal and Institutional Due Diligence, Risk Analysis/Policy Analysis”: Helping businesses to understand the legal, regulatory, and administrative operating environments, social contexts and other governance and compliance situations so they can operate in conformance with governance and social frameworks and avoid sanctions, disputes, delays, fines, penalties, and other barriers to smooth and responsible investment processes. This and the following services also call for the identification of risks to acceptable and functional social engagement, particularly with those vulnerable to exclusion such as women, youth, migrants and ethnic minorities.
“Monitoring and Evaluation”: Collecting, analyzing and reporting data on performance and impact reduces risk while providing clear targets for improvement. Additionally, good monitoring and reporting is required to ensure and demonstrate compliance with the terms and conditions of agreements between businesses and individuals/communities, with business policy and performance commitments, and with commodity and production process certification standards. The groups and methods used to conduct and communicate these processes, along with the content and accessibility of the outputs, are integral to the local perceptions and acceptance that can create and sustain social license to operate.
“Negotiations and Agreements”: Agreements with individuals (both women and men) and communities must be negotiated in a way that provides for a level playing field, the full and transparent exchange of information, an explanation of the benefits and costs that can accrue when land use is changed or land rights are transferred to others, and informed consent prior to the agreement coming into force. Sometimes agreements that affect land rights are made between businesses and government, which then requires separate agreements between the business (and sometimes the government) and the land users or rights-holders. Negotiating and creating these agreements requires specialized knowledge, communications skills, and drafting capabilities.
“Outgrower Support and Engagement”: Deciding to join a company’s supply chain through an outgrower farming arrangement requires land rights holders and users to change the way they use and benefit from their land. This change has the potential to impact a community in a variety of ways, including its land rights and uses, sources of income and livelihood, food security, and gender dynamics. It is critical that such changes are facilitated through measures that identify and mitigate risks and unlock opportunities to ensure these changes result in a net positive benefit for farmers and their communities. Such measures include but are not limited to: assessments to measure and mitigate impacts on land, livelihoods, food security, and gender; capacity building and training on business and financial management and agronomy; technical agronomic support; negotiation and contracting; and consultation and engagement.
“Social Impact Assessment and Mitigation”: Identifying, avoiding, reducing and compensating for the environmental, social and governance (ESG) impacts of an investment process is a vital element of earning and maintaining social license to operate. Identifying and assessing impacts – to women, men and communities – is a critical first step. Developing alternatives approaches that permit impact avoidance and mitigation is also central to impact management. Any impact assessment and management process must recognize that women usually perceive and are affected by impacts differently than men, and that communities are not homogenous.
“Stakeholder Mapping and Stakeholder/Community Consultation”: Identifying all affected parties and supporting a transparent exchange of information between the business and these parties, paying particular attention to reaching out and hearing from social groups vulnerable to exclusion. Businesses can use these processes to establish and maintain effective and robust dialogue with local people and groups, which is essential to establishing and maintaining a social license to operate.
“Other”:
The SLP will facilitate services that are related to social engagement but which do not fall neatly in the above categories. Businesses can simply say what they need and the Admin team will respond rapidly with an assessment of how they can help.
The SLP will expand this list of services in response to demand and feedback. Please contact us if you have any questions.Project location(s)
Please indicate the physical location where the services will be delivered, if possible please provide GPS co-ordinates.
This will allow the SLP to match the project to Service Providers that are operating or have experience in the project area.
Closing date
Please provide the UTC date and time that the ToR will close. This indicates to the Service Provider how much time they have to produce their Proposals.
Background
Please provide an overview of your operations to set the context for your project. This should include a basic overview of your operation and how this project fits in, whether this project is following up on previous work, and what issues you have had that required you to pursue this project.
Project overview
Please summarize the current needs you have for which you are requesting support. You will be given the opportunity to articulate discrete outcomes and activities later. This will provide more detail at a project level to indicates to the Service Provider whether they will be capable of completing the job.
Desired project starting date
Please indicate the date when you would like the project to begin. Please note that the SLP recommends, but does not require, that project start dates are a minimum of 45 business days from the ToR draft date, to allow sufficient time for providers to develop a Proposal, for Proposals to be evaluated and for contracting to be finalized.
Desired project closing date
Please indicate the date that you require the project to be completed. This is required for Service Providers that may have other projects that will require their time. Additionally, it provides the Service Providers with the timeline of the project to determine if they will be able to complete it in the required time.
Number of short-term outcomes of the project
Please select the correct number of short-term outcomes for your project and describe them below.
For example: Our company is better able to plan for inclusive and beneficial growth of our tea operations to meet the processing capacity of our new factory.
Number of long-term outcomes of the project
Please select the correct number of ideal long term outcomes and describe them below.
For example: Our company is able to identify an additional 2,000 farmers for our outgrower program.
Possible risks
Please indicate any possible risks that may arise if the project is not successfully implemented.
Possible follow on activities
Please list any next steps you are planning to take based on the outcomes of this project, if any. Click here for a description of each subject area.
Please select the number of activities this project will have
Please indicate the number of activities that the project would be broken up into.
Activity name
Please provide a descriptive name for the Activity.
Activity description
Please describe in detail the requirements of the activity. Please include the skills required, the proposed involved parties and any technical requirements that may be of concern for the Service Provider to successfully complete the task.
Activity duration
Please indicate an estimate of the time required to complete the task.
Expected deliverable(s)
Please indicate the type of deliverable you are expecting from the Service Provider once the activity has been completed. For example: Report, Presentation, Implementation Plan, etc.
For the remaining activity details, please upload a document providing name, description, expected duration and deliverables for each activity here
Please provide a document that describes the remaining activities for the Service Provider to understand the task at hand.
Describe the ideal project team
Please describe the ideal project team in terms of experience and qualifications for the different members of the team.
Currency selection
Please indicate the currency that you will be paying to the SLP to hold in escrow until the completion of the project.
Language selection
Please select the language in which the proposal, project correspondence and documents should be submitted.
Fee lower/upper limit
Please indicate the upper and lower level fee that you are willing to pay for the completion of this project.
Evaluation criteria
Please indicate the key criteria that you would like the Service Providers to be evaluated against when matching the ToR to Proposals. Best Value Approach is a combination of Experience, Qualification and Cost and is recommended by the SLP.
Budget requirements
Please indicate in what form you wish to receive the budget from the Service Provider. The major cost categories are: Personnel costs; Travel-related costs, including transportation and per diem for services conducted away from the home office; Other direct costs, such as cost of printing or communication; Indirect costs, including overheads.
Preferred payment structure
The SLP recommends that payment structures are milestone/deliverable based. Other payment structures are welcome, such as Time-based payments.
Preferred reporting processes
Please indicate the preferred reporting process that you would like the Service Provider to use. This decision will allow the Service Provider to report in the correct format and follow the correct processes from the start of the project. The SLP can help support reporting by providing suggestions on methodologies, reporting tools and indicators.
For technology as a preferred reporting process, a data collection / reporting tool could be used. For example, TMP’s Field Monitoring System – an open source monitoring and reporting system that makes use of android devices to collect and readily access data in the field, enabling participatory approaches to data management.
Desired frequency of reporting
Please indicate how often you would like the Service Provider to report progress on the project.
Additional submission guidelines
Please indicate any additional information that may be of interest to the Service Provider. For example: the different languages the proposal can be drafted in.
Additional documents
Please provide any additional documents that will aid the Service Provider in the Proposal process.
For Example: Previous work document, additional activity descriptions, proposed Gantt chart, additional information, data, etc.
How would you like your Terms of Reference to be distributed?
Please indicate where on the SLP you would like to advertise your ToR. You have two options:
“SLP Match”: The SLP panel of experts will match your ToR to potential Service Provider according to the information provided, such as service required and location, and allow several Service Provider to complete a Proposal.
“SLP Open”: This will allow your ToR to be visible to all Service Providers registered on the SLP. In making your ToR available on the SLP Open, you may receive Proposals that will not match the quality you are looking for, as opportunist Service Providers may attempt to apply.