Scope of Work - USAID/Kenya

Short Text Message Service

OVERVIEW:

The United States Agency for International Development  (USAID) office in Nairobi Kenya,  is a US Government Agency that gives assistance in social, economic and humanitarian activities in Kenya. The executive office within USAID/Kenya manages the day to day administrative tasks and operations that support USAID development programs in Kenya and in East and parts of Central Africa.

PURPOSE

USAID/Kenya requires the services of qualified Internet electronic communications services provider to provide robust short text messaging (SMS) service that will adequately provide prompt on demand SMS service to USAID Nairobi employees based in Nairobi Kenya. The requested service should have high availability of at least 99.99 so as to guarantee the service and and smooth operations at all times.

STATEMENT OF WORK

The short text message service (SMS) system should be able to send SMS to mobile phones within Kenya.

The SMS service should provide for three administrative accounts and four operator accounts. All these accounts should access the application through a secure web interface. The administrative accounts should be able to facilitate user management capability and creation of at least sixty SMS groups and including the capability to nest groups.

The application should be able to scale up and support at a minimum one thousand mobile lines. The required minimum performance of the application is transmission of at least two messages per second.

The application should be able to keep security logs of all operator and system administrator activities as well as application performance logs.

The application should be able to generate various reports including but not limited to all text reports of SMS texts, delivery and non-delivery reports of messages including times when messages were sent or when message delivery failures occurred.

The system shall enforce standard information systems security policies such as strong password policy, access control and proper use procedures.  

USAID requires the service to be operational and accessible at an availability level of 99.99%.

Service Monitoring

The service should provide USAID Systems administrator with various monitoring tools, at a minimum periodic alerts by SMS and or email should be available including on demand status tests of the system to verify its availability status.

Contractor Capability

The contractor shall include a narrative to demonstrate capability in the following four areas.

Ø  (1) Technical Capability – Applicants shall demonstrate their technical capability in provisioning secure Internet managed bulk SMS service on a high availability basis. Proof of capability in having provisioned similar services to a large enterprise is required. Proven ability to provision short text messaging service using a variety of telecom techniques and tools, relational databases, SMS gateways, business logic middleware software, application servers to achieve a high quality of service is required. USAID may require to carry out a test to assess the contractor capability.

30 points

Ø  (2) Past Performance – The applicants shall be required to submit information on similar tasks carried out in the past three years.  USAID will asses past performance based on background checks where such messaging service has been provisioned.  Scopes of work for such tasks must be provided.  All the necessary terms of reference and the contact information of the organizations where the services were provided must be submitted.  This information may be presented in short paragraph form.

40 points

Ø  (4) Project Financial and Management- The applicants shall demonstrate knowledge of sound management, operations management, project planning,  ability to handle logistical issues and the ability to transact with bank credits.

30 points

Award Criteria

USAID will choose the best technical proposal that meets or exceeds our specifications.

Deliverables

The contractor shall provide the required bulk short text messaging service through industry standard telecom techniques and protocols,  databases, middleware business logic and standard SMS gateway servers including interfaces to provision messaging service on a high availability basis that results in timely SMS delivery to USAID emplyees. Any channel equipment, services, telecom interfaces and software used must meet approved local telecommunication regulatory requirements.

The contractor shall provide USAID with any unique or proprietary equipment, or software, or telecom interface use and access capability. 

The contractor shall provide any test tools that may include proprietary hardware, software or telecom protocols or service, account details for use or monitoring / use of the messaging service, devices, message queues, message flow,  latency and message throughput.

The contractor shall provide contact details and professional qualifications of all personnel needed to operate and provision the messaging service; additionally the contractor shall articulate the operations of their help desk ensuring that escalation procedures are well defined. The contractor shall clearly articulate how their 24 X 7 service support center operates and provide the necessary capability to access the support center.

The contractor shall guarantee adequacy of their application and data backups for recovery of the application and data in the event of failure or disaster.

Warranty

The contractor shall provide a twelve months warranty for any proprietary equipment or software that may need to be supplied under this contract. The warranty shall cover maintenance, repair and/or replacement of any failing parts, service aspects of the components.

Delivery

The USAID Contracting Officer's Technical Representative (COTR) in charge of this activity will receive, inspect and certify any equipment including documentation, configurations and copies of all software.

Deployment / Installation

The contractor shall install any client side proprietary Internet messaging infrastructure necessary to operate this service and hand over all the necessary information to the USAID / Kenya Systems Administrator. The contractor shall also install any proprietary client side tools needed to make the required Internet messaging service fully operational.

Training

The contractor shall provide on the job training or instruction material necessary to fully use and manage the service from the USAID end.

Delivery Period

The contractor shall commence work immediately upon signing the contract with USAID for the provision of the messaging service. The contractor shall provide the service for a period of twelve months.  

Completion and Termination. The contract is expected to be for a one year period with the possibility of extension depending on performance, take note that USAID can terminate the contract at any time due to nonperformance.