Chemonics- Request For Proposals (RFP): Tourism SME Training and Assistance Activity عودة إلى الفرص

Background

The USAID-funded Visit Tunisia Activity is a 5-year project designed to enhance Tunisia’s tourism potential, with the goal of generating revenue and jobs, particularly for women and youth, and for populations in underserved regions of the country. The overall vision behind USAID’s investment in Tunisia’s tourism sector is to capitalize on Tunisia’s natural, cultural, heritage and historical sites to develop a more diversified and high-quality tourism sector that contributes to broad-based economic growth. The project will seek to achieve the following four objectives:

• Objective 1: Enhance Tunisia’s competitiveness as a tourism destination.
• Objective 2: Increase tourism-related investments and revenue.
• Objective 3: Improve the enabling environment for sustained growth in the tourism sector.
• Objective 4: Private sector engagement to expand the offer and quality of alternative tourism.

The tourism sector continues to grow, opening up many avenues for entrepreneurs who are interested in entering the market. SMEs are a vital part of the Tunisia’s tourism industry and an engine for economic growth. Thus, building the capacity of the tourism SME sector, ensures visitors are provided with a more authentic experience and sustainable tourism model and will enable Tunisia to re-emerge as a destination that caters to a more high-yielding visitor during this period of recovery.

Many entrepreneurs have seen a gap in the sector and are encountering many challenges that affect negatively their profitability and sustainability such as:

• Increasing Costs and reducing revenue – inflation, cost of raw materials, insurance costs.
• Undifferentiated products or services – selling undifferentiated products or services in a highly competitive marketplace.
• Narrow markets and weak branding– need a business model to attract both the domestic and international tourist markets and also a strong branding to attract new customers.
• Lacking market research – more thorough market needed as the tourism industry is highly competitive.
• Need to embrace digitalization need to digitize elements of business (work processes, communication and marketing tools,  ..) that absorb unnecessary resources.
• Keeping up to date – need to keep up to date with tourism trends by networking and via social media.
• Talent and skill shortage – losing skilled employees to larger competitors.

Accordingly, to address these challenges, USAID Visit Tunisia will support SMEs in the tourism sector to help them develop into successful businessess and achieve sustainable growth.

Scope of Work

The USAID Visit Tunisia business enabling environment team working for sustained growth in the tourism sector is aware of the positive effect of tourism SMEs on strengthening the tourism sector and improving the product offerings of tourism providers…. Since a key component of tourism recovery is the SME sector, Tourism SME Training and Assistance program is designed to provide business training and customized technical assistance to SMEs to upgrade operation standards, establish new market linkages and improve profitability especially that the tourism sector continues to grow, and new opportunities are offered for entrepreneurs who are interested in entering the market.

This activity will provide direct support for tourism SMEs, prioritizing those businesses located in the six (6) Visit Tunisia priority areas: (Tabarka/Ain Draham, Kairouan, Gabes, Tozeur, Tataouine and Kebili/Douz) through a curated combination of capacity building, direct technical support, targeted small grant support, mentorship, and access to a dedicated SME Learning Hub.

The subcontractor is required to design, prepare, implement and report on capacity building workshops and programs with technical mentoring to identify bespoke support interventions. The selected subcontractor will implement a 6-phased program as follows:

Phase I: SME Capacity Building Workshops

Phase II: Tourism SME Direct Technical Assistance

Phase III: Other Technical Assistance in collaboration with VT components

Phase IV: Tourism SME Grant Support Program

Phase V: Tourism Mentorship Support

Phase VI: Tourism SME Learning Hub

(More details on the below attached file).

RFP-VT-2022-006_Tourism SME Training and Assistance Activity