Consultancy to undertake and review ActionAid’s geographical footprint. At ActionAid

What we want to achieve

Through the Geographic Footprint (GF) review process, we aim to achieve two things:

• Primarily, we want to reduce as well as rationalize our long-term presence and partnerships to make these as strategic as possible within our financial envelope, as well as scale-up impact where we remain. This is in line to the 2020 Assembly Recommendations outlined in the Long-Term Finance and Funding Strategy (LTFFS), which requires us to adapt to our means in the context of reduced resources.
• Informed by the country entry, expansion and exit policy, as well as the new country operating models and Service sharing approach, we also want to consider entry/expansion into countries where there is compelling evidence that we can expand our impact and leverage without significant investment in already scarce resources.

Scope and Criteria

The scope of the review is global and applies to all the countries we work in. It is about ActionAid’s global footprint and which countries to be in around the world, in what form and for what strategic reasons. Building on the Country Models Review (CMR) self-assessments through which considerable data was collected about countries, the following criteria will be applied:

1. Ability to achieve greatest impact on the global level as well as local causes of poverty and injustice. We will carefully evaluate this against our current and future Organisational capacity, by identifying the niche and our value add to the cause of social justices and to our partners.
2. Availability of Resources for our mission including unrestricted funds associated with safeguarding the federation in the locations to work in, including our staff, our partners and the communities that we work with. This should also include our ability to provide assurance to our donors and be accountable in the federation through compliance to our policies and key systems.
3. Regional Balance and Bias to ensure ‘economies of scale’ and ability to leverage cross-country impact and learning.
4. ActionAid’s footprint should also reflect adequate presence in countries affluent enough to raise income for the rest of the federation.

Expected Deliverables

The Geographic footprint paper that was approved by the 2021 Assembly that outlines the process, principles and criteria to be followed for the review should be relied and the final output should demonstrate how these have been applied. In summary the following four outputs are expected.

• A report detailing our current footprint across countries and within the country to enable a comprehensive picture of where we are at present and why.
• Comprehensive fundraising performance and financial sustainability analysis of all our countries. The analysis conducted for our fundraising affiliates by the IWG and the CMR data we hold on programmatic countries will be relied on and updated where necessary.
• Programmatic review and analysis – CMR data that analysed all our contexts and alignment to our Strategy or ability to contribute to our Strategy may also be relied on. The CMR data that we hold includes the programmatic contextual factors such as feasibility for ActionAid to contribute in line with our SIF ambitions as well as balancing this with our programmatic capacity and positioning to work in that context.
• An AAI Assembly report recommending our future footprint with a view of reducing our current footprint, matching to our organisational capacity and resources to deliver the greatest impact.