Phase 1 activities are sequenced logically: outputs from earlier tasks feed directly into later ones. The timeline is indicative and may be adjusted with Programme Manager agreement as the project develops.

Task A.  Stakeholder mapping and lessons-learned review

Conduct a systematic mapping of the gender and social inclusion ecosystem across Liberia's target sectors. The mapping must not merely list actors — it must assess each institution's gender mainstreaming capacity, identify active coordination mechanisms and gaps, and extract operational decisions relevant to project design.

Coverage must include:

•      Government institutions: MoGCS, MoCI, MoA, MoL, NCD, NaFAA, LTEVTC, NIC;

•      Women's business networks, cooperatives, and producer associations across cassava, fisheries, and wood processing;

•      Organizations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) active in economic participation and advocacy;

•      Youth employment platforms and associations relevant to the target sectors;

•      Financial service providers — RCFIs, MFIs, VSLAs — assessed for gender-responsive product availability and borrower eligibility conditions;

•      TVET institutions — assessed for gender-responsive curriculum, disability-accessible infrastructure, and RPL availability;

•      Development partners, NGOs, and CSOs active in gender and social inclusion programming in the target sectors;

•      Private sector actors — processors, traders, agribusinesses — assessed for existing inclusive hiring and procurement practices.

The lessons-learned review must extract operational findings from:

•      CASTRAP: cooperative governance models, women's exclusion from HQCF processing and investment decisions, VSLA performance, BSO effectiveness;

•      RETRAP: rural enterprise inclusion approaches, mobility and infrastructure constraints affecting women's market participation;

•      STAR-P Gender Analysis: structural constraints documented for cassava, aquaculture, and wood — treated as primary evidence, providing the analytical starting point for this assignment;

•      EU GAP III and Liberia National Agricultural Gender Policy: operational requirements for this project's design and reporting;

•      UNDP gender strategy and programming: inclusive livelihood and enterprise models relevant to Liberia;

•      EU Team Europe Initiatives: Spotlight, TVET Youth Rising, Seeds4Liberia — for coordination potential and duplication risks.

The output is a structured reference document — not a one-time report — that will be actively used by the project team throughout implementation. It must include a gap and overlap matrix, a partnership recommendation list, and an institutional capacity summary per key partner organization.

Task B.  Holistic and sector-based gender and social inclusion analysis

Build on the stakeholder mapping,  lessons-learned review, and findings from ongoing sectoral market assessment[1] to conduct a primary-data gender analysis across cassava, aquaculture and wood processing value chains in targeted project counties. The analysis must fill specific evidence gaps and establish a project-calibrated baseline — not repeat what CASTRAP, RETRAP, and STAR-P already documented. This work will need to be conducted in close collaboration with the ILO, which has a key role to play in ensuring the inclusion of persons with disabilities (PWDs).

At minimum, the analysis will capture the following— disaggregated by sex, age, and disability status:

•      Participation rates and decision-making power at each value chain node, with specific attention to the shift from primary production to higher-value processing and commercial activities;

•      Ownership and control of productive assets: land, equipment, working capital, storage, digital tools;

•      Barriers to market access, enterprise formalization, financial services, skills development, and PPD participation — structural (legal, regulatory), social (norms, mobility, care burdens), and institutional;

•      Unpaid care burden distribution and its specific impact on women's time available for market activities — by value chain and project county;

•      GBV risks in value chain workplaces: cassava processing centres, wood workshops, fish landing sites, market spaces;

•      Male attitudes, household decision-making dynamics, and community-level entry points for behaviour change programming;

•      Youth-specific constraints: employment discrimination, skills access gaps, cooperative membership exclusions, start-up finance barriers;

•      PWD-specific constraints: attitudinal barriers, inaccessible infrastructure, exclusion from apprenticeship schemes and enterprise support;

•      Institutional gender mainstreaming capacity: per-organization capacity assessment for each key project partner.

Methods: structured enterprise surveys, KIIs, gender-disaggregated FGDs (conducted separately for men and women), participatory rural appraisal, secondary data synthesis. Sex, age, and disability disaggregation are mandatory minimum standards on all primary data.

Task C.  Gender Action Plan and Social Inclusion Strategy

Develop the project's primary gender accountability document — co-designed with project staff, ILO, government counterparts (NAaFA, MoA, MoCI, LCC, NIC, etc), and private sector partners. The GAP and Social Inclusion Strategy must be anchored in the evidence from Tasks A and B, and explicitly aligned with Liberia's National Gender Policy, National Agricultural Gender Policy, EU GAP III, CEDAW, SDG 5 and 8, ECOWAS Gender Policy, and AU GEWE.

The GAP and Social Inclusion Strategy will specify:

•      A gender equality objective with quantified targets and a theory of change from inputs to structural outcomes at individual, enterprise, and sector levels;

•      Activity-level gender integration specifications for all three project components — named responsibilities, milestones, budget considerations, and accountability mechanisms;

•      A Social Inclusion Strategy covering: youth economic empowerment with specific TVET and enterprise targets; PWD workplace inclusion aligned with CRPD requirements; male engagement and household-level behaviour change strategies;

•      A gender-responsive indicator framework measuring access, agency, and economic advancement — not only participation headcounts — aligned with EU GAP III, SDG 5 and 8, and the Liberia National Gender Policy monitoring system;

•      Budget considerations and resource mobilization recommendations for gender integration across all components;

•      A semi-annual monitoring and adaptive management mechanism: the GAP is a living document, with a formal annual revision each December.

The GAP will be submitted to the PSD Liberia Steering Committee for approval. It constitutes the primary reference for gender-related EU Delegation reporting throughout the project lifecycle.

Task D.  MEAL framework gender and inclusion integration

Before primary data collection begins, support the MEAL team (MEAL inception expert + MEAL manager) in integrating gender-responsive and disability-inclusive indicators into the project’s logical framework and MEAL plan. Indicators introduced after data collection has started cannot effectively capture baseline changes; this task must therefore be completed during the inception phase.

The MEAL integration must:

•      Establish mandatory sex, age, and disability disaggregation on all beneficiary data as a project-wide data quality standard;

•      Introduce three-dimension measurement — access, agency, and economic advancement — as the framework for all gender and inclusion indicators;

•      Specify data collection instruments and quality assurance protocols per indicator;

•      Define Year 1 gender-related targets aligned with GAP activity specifications;

•      Develop a data disaggregation protocol and audit all data collection instruments before field deployment.

Phase 2 activities are demand-driven and need-responsive within the agreed scope. The Expert will work in close coordination with component leads, value chain coordinators, and the ILO gender focal point throughout this phase.

Task E.  Technical advisory across all project components

Provide ongoing, embedded technical advisory — not periodic reviews. The Expert will actively participate in the design and quality assurance of project interventions, with the following non-negotiable gender requirements by area:

Task F.  Capacity building and awareness

Design and deliver a phased, audience-differentiated capacity-building programme. Begin each cohort with an institutional capacity baseline assessment — diagnosing starting points before designing content — and structure training to build toward independent application, not consultation dependency:

Task G.  Adaptive management and GAP revision

Lead semi-annual GESI progress reviews and the December 2026 and subsequent annual GAP revision processes. Each review will: assess indicator progress against targets; document operational lessons on what is and is not working; propose specific adaptations to GAP activities; and update inclusion targets based on enterprise and sector-level evidence.

The reviews will also need to take into account the inception work completed by the consortium partners in the cassava and wood processing sectors, in order to update and consolidate the GAP into a coherent and operational framework across all project components. The semi-annual reports will be timed to Steering Committee meetings for direct use in programme management decision-making.

Task H.  Synergies and coordination

Map and actively maintain coordination with complementary gender and inclusion initiatives operating in Liberia. Coordination means scheduled joint planning sessions, shared data, and co-designed activities — not one-way information-sharing. Priority coordination partners:

•      EU Spotlight Initiative — Liberia country programme;

•      TVET Youth Rising — curriculum and apprenticeship coordination;

•      ILO gender and labour rights programmes — decent work standards and GBV prevention;

•      UNDP gender and livelihoods programming — enterprise development models;

•      MoGCS and MoA gender units — national gender policy implementation;

•      P2P Initiative — EU Team Europe Initiative synergies.

General objective

The Gender and Social Inclusion Expert will design and operationalize the project's gender-transformative and socially inclusive approach across both phases — establishing the strategic architecture during inception and embedding it into live interventions during implementation — generating measurable change in women's economic agency, youth inclusion, and PWD participation within the project timeline and sustainable beyond it.

Specific objectives

All deliverables will be submitted in Microsoft Word and PDF formats. Documents must be free of tracked changes and comments before submission. PowerPoint presentations must be professional quality, audience-appropriate, and designed for direct use by the stated audience without consultant facilitation.

Phase 1 deliverables

Phase 2 deliverables

* The formats are indicative only and may be adjusted based on discussions with the consultant, the consortium partners, and the EUD.

The Expert will submit a detailed methodology proposal as part of D1 (Inception Report), for Programme Manager approval before fieldwork commences. The methodology must integrate all of the following:

•      A rights-based, participatory approach — women, youth, and PWDs as analytical contributors, not data subjects;

•      A market-oriented analytical lens — identifying commercially viable opportunities for women at each value chain node, not only documenting barriers;

•      Mixed quantitative and qualitative methods with mandatory sex, age, and disability disaggregation of all primary data;

•      An intersectional lens — gender, age, disability, geography, and economic status analysed in combination;

•      Separate FGDs for men and women — to surface household and community decision-making dynamics that mixed-group sessions suppress;

•      A male engagement methodology — identifying entry points for behaviour change at household and community level in each project county;

•      A theory-of-change framework tracking from inputs to structural changes in market participation, asset ownership, and decision-making power — not activity counts or attendance figures;

•      Coordination protocols with ILO gender specialists, the MEAL Manager, the aquaculture component lead, and complementary external initiatives;

•      An adaptive management mechanism enabling real-time updates to the GAP and GESI tools based on emerging evidence.

A methodology scoping session will be convened within the first week of mobilization — Expert, Programme Manager, ILO gender focal point, MEAL Manager, value chain coordinators, and aquaculture component lead — to confirm the approach, align timelines, and agree the detailed workplan for Phase 1.

The Expert will report directly to the Programme Manager, Expertise France Liberia, with technical coordination with the ILO gender focal point. Reporting requirements:

•      Phase 1: weekly brief (written, max. 1 page) to the Programme Manager on progress, emerging issues, and upcoming activities;

•      Phase 2: bi-weekly brief during active working periods;

•      All deliverables submitted to the Programme Manager for review and approval before finalization. MEAL deliverables reviewed jointly with the MEAL Manager;

•      Capacity-building sessions coordinated with the relevant component lead and approved at least 10 working days in advance;

•      Technical Advisory Notes (D7) submitted within 5 working days of receiving a formal request from the Programme Manager or component lead.

The consultancy covers two phases running from 1 May 2026 to 30 June 2027, with a total level of effort of approximately 52 working days. The distribution is:

•      Phase 1 — Inception (May–July 2026): approximately 22 working days, with the highest concentration of effort in May and June;

•      Phase 2 — Implementation support (August 2026–June 2027): approximately 30 working days, distributed across the period in a needs-based, adaptive manner, with expected peaks in September–October 2026 (capacity-building delivery) and November–December 2026 (GAP review);

•      The distribution of Phase 2 days may be adjusted by mutual agreement between the Expert and the Programme Manager, provided the total level of effort remains within the contracted maximum.