Service Provider Profile Development Question Guide

Please indicate the geographic regions where you have performed work within the past seven (7) years and are currently performing work. This will allow the SLP to match you to geographically relevant projects. For example: Regions: Njombe, Mbeya Country: Tanzania

If Yes, if applicable, please indicate additional geographic regions where you do not currently work but would be willing to work if the opportunity arose. For example: Regions: Njombe, Mbeya Country: Tanzania. This will allow the SLP to match you to geographically relevant projects.

Please select the areas in which your organization is skilled. These skills do not necessarily need to have been applied within a land investment context. For instance, if you have conducted consultations as part of a foundation-funded effort to support Village Land Use Planning, this is relevant experience that you should consider in your response. These skills contain key words that will be used to match you to projects.

Please see an explanation of each skill below:

1. Legal and Institutional Due Diligence and 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 dialog; and enter into negotiations and resulting agreements 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.

4. Social and 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 communities.

5. Gender Impact Evaluation/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.

6. Outgrower Support and Engagement: Change of land use that calls for land users and rights-holders to change the way they use and benefit from their land creates impacts that affects women, men, and communities. These changes must be facilitated through engagement, consultation, and supporting measures that explain the scope and impact of the changes and provide the means for successful and rewarding livelihoods transitions and restoration. The support must be tailored to the new land use and sustained during its life.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Establishing 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.

11. 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.

Please list the location, funder, project objective, and two to three sentences describing the work conducted for each of your past experiences.

Please describe the challenges you have encountered and the strategies you deployed to address those challenges (responses should be brief, please describe in no more than 100 words).

Please indicate if you have conducted any kind of training related to the above listed skills and provide a short description.

This information will allow the SLP to match your organization to projects that require training expertise.

In your response, please consider trainings you delivered to community members, government actors, the private sector, to other NGOs/CSOs, and internally within your own organization.

The Admin Team may also use this information to contact you separately about training you can help develop and/or deliver for other service providers.

If yes, please provide the year, type of audience (for example, community members, government, private sector, NGO/CSOs), approximate number of participants, and a two (2) to three (3) sentence description of the training.

Alternatively, please indicate if your organization itself is a network organization, responsible for coordinating a number of member organizations. Generally, a network organization is a working arrangement in which the organization consists of many smaller organizations that work together to achieve a common goal coordinated by the central organization.

If Yes, example networks may include Tanzania Agricultural Non State Actors Forum (ANSAF), Tanzania Land Alliance (TALA), Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (Pelum) Association, Global Land Tool Network (GLTN), etc.

Example networks may include Tanzania Agricultural Non State Actors Forum (ANSAF), Tanzania Land Alliance (TALA), Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (Pelum) Association, Global Land Tool Network (GLTN), etc.

Please specify the types of people with whom your organization routinely works, and if applicable, where those groups are based. For example, smallholder sugar farmers in Kilombero, youth groups in Morogoro, etc.

If yes, please provide a two to three sentence overview of your general approach to engaging with the government. Then, please provide up to three (3) specific past experiences. For each specific experience, please provide the year, government department, and two to three sentences describing the objectives and outcomes of the engagement.

A PPP is a cooperative arrangement between two or more public and private sectors, typically of a long-term nature.

If Yes, for each specific experience, please provide the year and two to three sentences describing the objectives and outcomes of the engagement.

Please indicate how your organization is funded. If you are funded by multiple sources, please provide a representative list of your primary funders, up to five (5).

Please specify your organization’s yearly revenue in USD equivalent.
This will allow the SLP to better understand the size of your organization.

This information will allow the SLP to complete its due diligence on your organization.
Additionally, this information will indicate your organization’s level of risk relative to the cost of any proposed projects.

If yes, please describe the dispute(s) indicating key events, parties, dates and outcomes. Please indicate the steps you took to remedy such dispute(s), if any, and provide relevant documentation regarding the issue and its resolution. Please also upload any relevant documentation if applicable.

This could include evidence of registration as a public charity, non-profit organization, civil society organization, non-governmental organization, institution of higher learning, a center or think tank affiliated with such an institution, a partnership or sole proprietorship, corporation, or other legal entity.

You must have a bank account to make and accept payments via the platform.

Please provide confirmation that the information provided above was accurate to the best of your knowledge.

All information provided to the SLP will be audited and verified. Knowingly providing misinformation is strictly prohibited, and if done, your organization will be permanently banned from the use of the SLP.