Call for Applications: Development of a Training Curriculum for Traditional Leaders and Custodians of Culture on Women’s Political Participation, Voice, and Agency in Nigeria

1. Background

The CGIAR Gender Equality and Inclusion (GEI) Accelerator works to build an enabling environment for gender equality and social inclusion research and programming within food, land, and water systems. Its work addresses systemic, complex, and deeply entrenched social inequalities and gender disparities that limit women's access to resources, voice, and decision-making power.

A potential entry point for expanding women’s political and civic participation in many communities is engaging traditional leaders and custodians of culture, who play a central role in community governance and decision-making. These leaders help set the social and cultural norms present in communities and have potential to advance more progressive views of women as leaders, decision-makers, and key community focal points. In line with the GEI Accelerator’s objective of advancing women’s leadership and closing gender gaps in decision-making, IFPRI is issuing this call for applications to develop a training curriculum for traditional leaders and custodians of culture in Nigeria. This assignment aims to translate that objective into a practical resource that can shift how community leaders identify and act on opportunities to support women's voice, agency, and leadership.

2. Objective

The goal of this assignment is to develop a training curriculum targeting traditional leaders and custodians of culture–including both male and female leaders. The curriculum should be vetted across different regions of the country, including regions affected by conflict, to ensure it is broadly applicable and locally credible throughout Nigeria.

The curriculum has two core purposes:

• To help traditional leaders identify barriers and opportunities for enhancing women’s voice and agency in community governance, decision-making, and the pursuit of collective objectives; and

• To help traditional leaders identify effective means of overcoming those barriers, involving engagement with both men and women community members, so as to support women to take on formal and informal leadership roles and express their voice and opinions in the community.

The resulting curriculum will equip influential local leaders with practical tools, participatory approaches, and advocacy strategies that encourage and support the political participation, voice, agency, and formal and informal leadership of women community members.

3. Scope of Work

The selected applicant will lead the curriculum development process. IFPRI will contribute evidence synthesis and relevant expertise and examples from approaches used in other countries and offer specific feedback on proposed programming at key stages during its development. Specific activities include:

• Draft a training curriculum for traditional leaders and custodians of culture, addressing the two purposes outlined in Section 2.

• Incorporate evidence synthesis and comparative examples provided by IFPRI, including approaches used in other country contexts.

• Vet the draft curriculum across different regions of Nigeria, including regions affected by conflict, to test its relevance and applicability outside a single geographic or cultural context.

• Revise the curriculum based on regional vetting feedback and complementary input from IFPRI.

• Produce a curriculum, suitable to serve as a credible foundation for future piloting and impact evaluation, and clean enough to be formally posted on CGIAR’s website as a curriculum.

The curriculum should be a training of appropriate length for the time availability of traditional leaders – shorter than a multi-session curriculum – but rich in content and well-conceptualized.

4. Deliverables

• Brief inception plan, laying out timeline and process for developing curriculum, including which experts will be engaged and how they will work with the project team

• Proposed outline of training curriculum content

• Version 1.0 training curriculum for traditional leaders and custodians of culture, addressing the two purposes outlined in Section 2, to be used in the vetting process

• Version 2.0 of the training curriculum, reflecting input from regional vetting with actual leaders

5. Timeline

August - November 2026

6. Eligibility and Required Qualifications

This call is open to organizations (e.g., NGOs, civil society organizations, research or implementing partners) with demonstrated capacity in the following areas:

• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering training programming in Nigeria, including on gender-related themes.

• Established relationships with traditional leader networks and cultural custodians across multiple regions of Nigeria

• Prior experience engaging traditional and religious leaders on community-level gender programming.

• Experience collaborating with research institutions on evidence-informed program design

7. Application Requirements

Please upload the CVs of proposed team members, an estimated budget and a cover letter detailing relevant experience. All supporting documents shall be submitted as one pdf to the application section indicating CV or Resume by August 4, 2026