Government of Georgia and the World Bank jointly developed a new investment project in Georgia’s rural sector – Georgia Resilient Agriculture, Irrigation, and Land (GRAIL) Project. The total cost of the Project is 138,600 mil EURO which is equally split (50/50) between IBRD and the State budget of the Government of Georgia. The Project is planned to be implemented for six years.
Objective of the Georgia Resilient Agriculture, Irrigation, and Land project (GRAIL) Project is to: (a) improve irrigation, and drainage services, and agricultural production in project areas; and (b) strengthen national irrigation and land management institutional capacity for climate resilient planning. In addition to infrastructure investments, the project shall support institutional strengthening of key implementation agencies, which include the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture (MEPA), the “Georgian Amelioration” Limited Liability Company (GA), the National Environment Agency (NEA), the Agricultural Rural Development Agency (RDA), and the Land Management Agency (LMA).
One of the key goals of the GRAIL project is to orient irrigation service delivery to customer needs, through improved performance monitoring and enhanced communication with farmers. Accordingly, subcomponent 1.3 of the GRAIL project is focused on institutional reform in irrigation, and more specifically, on improving the performance and capacity of GA.
GA recognizes that these performance and capacity improvements cannot be achieved simply through the application of standard technical and managerial techniques but will need a parallel effort on transforming the internal culture and the informal work environment within the organization. Therefore, the GRAIL project design includes support for an innovative approach for effecting positive changes in staff behavior and organizational culture of GA. This approach, called Field-Level Leadership (FLL) is based on a multi-agent model of leadership development and aims at creating a broad cadre of change champions at all levels in the organization. The FLL activities are designed to be part of the institutional strengthening component of the GRAIL project.
The FLL approach is aimed at identifying and supporting field-level public officials whose internal values are strongly aligned with the underlying values of the development projects. This approach, first developed and implemented in the public service departments of the Government of Tamil Nadu in southern India, has demonstrated positive changes in the attitude and behavior of public agency officials, and significantly improved project performance. The key elements of the approach are:
- creating a safe space for open dialog, for the officials (various ranks) of the project implementing agencies;
- encouraging the optimistic and entrepreneurial individuals emerge from this process of dialog and introspection, and self-organize themselves into informal groups; and
- encouraging these informal groups of change leaders to explore process improvements, better community outreach, and taking on self-assigned results targets.
The Consultant shall be responsible for providing the FLL coaches training, developing FLL curriculum for GA, and supporting the newly-trained FLL Coaches in conducting the initial workshops, in alignment with the GRAIL project activities and objectives.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture of Georgia now invites eligible consulting firms ("Consultants") to indicate their interest in providing the Services. Interested Consultants should provide information demonstrating that they have the required qualifications and relevant experience to perform the Services. Expression of interest should cover, but not limited to: corporate profile, years in business, experience relevant to the project activities, key staff resources, and core business.
The shortlisting criteria is:
- The Consultant shall have direct and significant experience of curriculum development and implementation of FLL (or equivalent approaches) in at least 8 different public agencies in the area of water, irrigation and agriculture.
Note: the MEPA reserves it’s right to verify submitted references and use obtained information for evaluation purposes.
The attention of interested Consultants is drawn to Section III, paragraphs, 3.14, 3.16, and 3.17 of the World Bank’s “Procurement Regulations for IPF Borrowers” July 2016, revised February 2025 (“Procurement Regulations”), setting forth the World Bank’s policy on conflict of interest.
A Consultant will be selected in accordance with the Consultants Qualifications-based Selection (CQS) method set out in the Procurement Regulations: Approved Selection Methods: Consulting Services under IBRD Loans and IDA Credits & Grants by World Bank Borrowers
Consultants may associate with other firms. (Please take into account that form of association acceptable for the World Bank is either sub-consultancy or Joint-Venture and submission must clearly indicate the nature of the association. The experience of sub-consultants will not be taken into account while evaluating the corporate experience of the consultant).
Experience in the projects relevant to the assignment should be submitted in the Form N1 uploaded at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NaYoSd_zCVJUr3AXewqbaM_a9eLff2FU/view?usp=drive_link
ToR for the assignment can be found at the following link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/117E9qxLc7qcYpqH-QcR6a4FyKz1UiCh4/view?usp=sharing
Further information can be obtained at the address below during office hours from 10:00 a.m. to 17:00 p.m. at Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture of Georgia, Phone number: +99532 2378038, Mr. Ioseb Tchonkadze, Procurement Consultant.
Expressions of interest must be submitted in English in a written form to the email addresses below by April 17, 2025, at 16:00 (Georgian local time).
E-mail To: Lali.Durmishidze@mepa.gov.ge; Rusudan.manjgaladze@mepa.gov.ge; Mariam.bakhtadze@mepa.gov.ge; iosebtchonkadze@gmail.com;
Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture of Georgia
32, Marshal Gelovani Ave, Tbilisi, Georgia
Tel.: +99532 2378038