Capabilities
Project-Cycle Management
UPi and its technical partners work collaboratively to provide short-term and long-term technical assistance across different stages of the project cycle focusing on the following principles:
- Strengthen and empower our clients’ stakeholders
- Mobilize the right experts to find the right and innovative solutions
- Facilitate evidence-based decision-making.
Our job is first and foremost to understand the bigger picture of how an individual assignment contributes to our client’s overall business goals. We provide project managers, support functions, and advisors for programs/projects design, management, and monitoring and evaluation. Our programs/projects activities include:
- Needs assessment & project development
- Strategic Planning & Results-based Management
- Financial modeling
- Feasibility studies
- Environmental and social safeguard (ESS) studies
- Procurement Management
- Third-party monitoring
- Impact evaluation.
Market Linkages
At UPi, we believe in market-oriented approaches to solving development problems, particularly extreme poverty amongst smallholder farmers who need action not mere talking points about their ‘potential.’ The goal of facilitating market linkages is for smallholders’ transition from subsistence to commercial farming.
Using the value chain approach, UPi provides short-term and/or long-term advisory services to address the major constraints and opportunities faced by farmers, local collectors, processors, wholesalers, retailers, and other businesses at multiple levels and points along a given value chain.
Some of the key activities for market linkages include producer organization, building relationships (up and down streams), matching demand and supply, warehousing, setting up transportation systems, contract management, total quality control, export development, and supply and marketing management.
Women’s Economic Development
Entrepreneurship and enterprise development are the cornerstones of socioeconomic transformation in Africa even though sustainability, competitiveness, and profitability continue to plague micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).
Driven by our passion for social inclusion, we break barriers that prevent women entrepreneurs from entering more profitable, traditionally male-dominated sectors. Using gender empowerment approaches, we focus on push-and-pull factors holding women back from entering male-dominated sectors.
Using Women’s Enterprise Development (WED) tools, UPi and its partners implement strategies that help open up male-dominated sectors of the economy including:
- Mentorship initiatives
- Providing early exposure to and training in male-dominated sectors
- Enhancing women education
- Increasing access to capital and loans
- Strengthen support system.
Financial Advisory Services
UPi leverages blended development financing focusing on private and public actors, particularly impact investors. Access to finance in developing regions has been identified as the largest barrier to MSMEs’ success. This outweighs corruption, access to electricity, political stability, and tax rate. Using innovative financial assessment, planning, and management tools and resources, UPi accompanies POs and MSMEs to navigate twists and turns, as well as ups and downs of their business activities, ensuring that they acquire the requisite financial capital that enables them to be competitive, profitable and sustainable. Our Financial Advisory Services also extend to facilitating relationships for Public-Private Partnerships, ensuring that African governments can access private capital necessary for large-scale infrastructure projects.