Duration: 6 Months

1. About FEMNET

The African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) is a panAfrican, feminist, and membership-based network based in Nairobi, Kenya, with over 800 individual and institutional members across 50 African countries and in the diaspora. FEMNET envisions a society where African women and girls thrive in dignity and well-being, free from patriarchal and neoliberal oppression and injustices.

Over the years, FEMNET has strategically positioned itself as a convener, organiser and facilitator of critical dialogues around women’s economic justice and rights; transformative women’s leadership; sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR); climate justice and natural resource governance, as well as ending all forms of violence and harmful/ discriminatory practices against women and girls.

FEMNET continues to be intentional in influencing decisions made at national, regional, and global levels, constantly ensuring that African women’s voices are amplified and their needs, priorities, and aspirations are prioritised in key policy dialogues and outcomes that have a direct and indirect impact on their lives. FEMNET mobilises African women to hold their governments accountable for their commitments to women’s rights and gender equality. For more information about FEMNET’s work, visit our website: www.femnet.org.

2. About the Project

Across the Global South, women, queer, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, Dalit, migrant, religious minorities and other historically marginalized communities are navigating intensified repression, surveillance, and shrinking civic space. Yet in the face of these threats, they are not only resisting – they are forging grounded feminist ways of surviving, connecting, and transforming their worlds. These practices are rooted in care, justice, memory, and everyday acts of collective endurance.

In response to this moment, a Global South feminist consortium – FEMNET (Africa), FLACSO (Latin America), the Arab Institute for Women (Arab region), and GenderSphere (Asia) – has come together to co-create a multilingual Global Learning Hub. Over four years, this Hub will serve as a generative space that connects diverse feminist knowledge systems and lived practices of change across movements and regions. The Global Learning Hub is Global Affairs Canada and IDRC’s strategic response to this moment. It addresses a critical gap: the need for sustained, Southern-led feminist knowledge-building that reflects the lived strategies, reflections, and resistance of WROs and LGBTQI+ groups. These actors have long driven transformative change, yet their insights remain under-documented, under-valued, and disconnected from policy discourse and funding architectures.

The Hub is anchored across the three interwoven pillars:

• Feminist Knowledge Synthesis and Translation: Elevating evidence from Women, Voice and Leadership (WVL) partners into creative, multilingual formats that inform advocacy and deepen intersectional analysis.
• Capacity Bridging: Supporting peer-led learning, participatory tools, and narrative, embodied methodologies to build collective resilience and strategic clarity.
• Community of Practice: Strengthening inclusive, transnational learning cultures that foster solidarity, reflection, and coordinated action.

The Global Learning Hub sees itself as a vital, inalienable part of a broader feminist learning ecosystem – one that includes regional hubs, implementing partners, and movement actors. It will not duplicate their roles, but rather weave, amplify, and integrate their contributions into a shared learning architecture.

Its transformative potential lies in reimagining learning as a feminist, political, and collective act – one that deepens practice, informs advocacy, and advances the leadership and rights of women, LBTQI+ people, and structurally excluded communities across the Global South. The outcomes progress from immediate changes (partners adopting the learning agenda, sustaining a community of practice, and synthesising and generating feminist knowledge on what works and doesn’t work to sustain feminist organising) to the intermediate shifts (ecosystem-wide alignment, stronger solidarities, and accountability). Together, these will lead to the outcome: a vibrant, feminist, multilingual Global Learning Hub that advances gender equality through evidence, knowledge-sharing and community-led learning.

3. Objective/ Purpose of Assignment

The goal of this assignment is to design, develop, deploy and maintain a dynamic, user-friendly multilingual digital platform that will serve simultaneously as:

• A knowledge repository – hosting resources, research, and tools generated during the programme and beyond;
• A community of practice – enabling women’s rights organisations, activists, and allies to connect, share experiences, and collaborate.
• An external website – to be accessed by other feminist organisation and movements, and funders/grantmakers – collating ‘what works’ for gender-transformation

4. Scope of Work and Terms of Reference

The selected developer/firm/collective will undertake the following:

4.1 Development of a Feminist-Centred User Interface and User Experience Platform:

• Develop a fully customised, responsive UI/UX platform that reflects the Global Learning Hub’s identity as a Global South feminist collective. The interface should align with the Hub’s visual brand, feminist values, and multilingual
• Co-design process with RWVL stakeholders to confirm content types, categories, and user flows.
• Develop user personas reflecting the diversity of RWVL participants and
• Wireframes and prototypes for all key templates (repository, forum, search, user profile).
• Feature intuitive navigation, user-friendly discussion fora, learner dashboards, accessible design standards, and a seamless sharing-learning experience for users across the Global South

4.2  Repository in WordPress or other Open-Source CMS/LMS

• Custom post types for resources, toolkits, research reports, videos, podcasts,
• Advanced search with multilingual capability (interface + content).
• Taxonomies: themes, regions, languages, types of content, programme
• Media optimisation and accessibility tagging (alt text, transcripts, captions).

4.3  Forum (Discourse or other open source discussion platform)

• Category structure based on thematic priorities of RWVL (e.g., leadership, advocacy, funding, safety, monitoring and evaluation).
• Moderation workflows, trust levels, and community guidelines aligned with RWVL’s feminist values.
• SSO from WordPress for a seamless
• Enable the housing of interactive content, quizzes, discussion forums, assignments, downloadable resources, facilitator led sessions, and blended-learning functionalities.
• Enable effective moderation

4.4  Integrations

• Multilingual plugin integrated across WP and
• Analytics that respect privacy
• CDN integration for global

4.5  Capacity & Performance

• Platform optimised for up to 2,500 maximum active users (combined WP + forum), including concurrent usage of up to 1000 people during live events or
• Repository to host at least 2,000 resources without performance
• Mobile-first and optimised for low bandwidth

4.6  Safety & Accessibility

• Compliance with global accessibility
• Feminist digital safety features: content moderation tools, flagging, spam filtering, clear community guidelines.
• Design approaches that reduce bandwidth costs while maintaining full data
• Security hardening (role-based permissions, 2FA for admins , daily backups).

4.7 Content Migration & Handover

• Documentation and training for WVL partner organisations on publishing and
• Following deployment, the consultant will provide four years of technical support, covering system updates, bug fixes, helpdesk assistance, performance monitoring, and minor feature enhancements. Regular maintenance should ensure the e-learning portal remains current, secure, and responsive to the Renewed Women Voice and Leadership partner’s evolving programmatic needs, including new cohorts, expanded learning modules, and additional digital resources.

5. Key Deliverables and Outputs

Work in coordination with the Global Learning Hub team to ensure that any other related tasks have achieved the set objectives.

• Developing a placeholder website to host key documents until a final website is developed
• Consultations to develop the design ethos and objectives of the learning platform
• Designing of the structure, architecture and detailed components of the website
• Piloting of the platform with key users
• Launch and maintenance over four years

6. Required Qualification, Skills and Competencies

The consultant/firm must demonstrate:

• Proven experience in WordPress, Discourse, Moodle LMS development, or other such open-source hosting-sharing-learning platforms
• Experience building large-scale e-learning systems (2,000+ users)
• UX/UI capabilities, including accessibility
• Demonstrated understanding of feminist principles is an added advantage

7. Duration of Assignment

FEMNET will contract the services for 6 months, with a possibility for extension based on mutual agreement and satisfaction

8. Expected Outcomes

Upon completion, The Global Learning Hub will have:

• A fully owned, scalable, secure feminist learning platform
• A customised UI/UX aligned with Global Learning Hub values
• No licensing fees or vendor dependency
• Ability to host 5,000+ learners
• Integrated certification and cohort-based learning workflows
• Complete data sovereignty
• A future-proof platform for programs, networks, and knowledge products

9. Liaison, Coordination and Reporting

The consultant will report to The Global Learning Hub’s Learning Lead and work closely with the Global Learning Hub team to fulfil the tasks while observing the dates stipulated under the duration of the assignment.

10. Selection of Consultant.

FEMNET shall contract the consultant. The contract will include a Withholding Tax (WHT) deduction in accordance with the laws of the country where FEMNET is headquartered. A WHT certificate will be issued to the consultant. Payment will be done through a bank transfer to the consultant bank account. FEMNET will not meet the costs of bank charges. The payment schedule will be agreed upon with the consultant upon successful selection. In the case of team/firm applicants, a designated assignment contract manager will serve as the primary contact between FEMNET and the team and will be responsible for all deliverables.

11. Intellectual Property Rights

The consultant expressly assigns to FEMNET any copyright arising from the outputs produced during the execution of the service contract. The consultant may not use, reproduce, disseminate, or authorise others to use, reproduce or disseminate any output produced under the service contract without prior consent from FEMNET.

12. Terms of Service

This is a non-staff contract; therefore, the consultant is not entitled to insurance, medical coverage, or any other benefits or conditions as an FEMNET staff member.

13. Application Process

Interested and qualified website developer/firm should submit their Expression of Interest via email to recruitment@femnet.or.ke with the subject line “FNT/EOI/20/2026: Development of the Global Learning Platform.’’

Submissions should include the following:

• Technical proposal
• Methodology and implementation plan
• Portfolio of similar work
• Team CVs with relevant experience
• Financial proposal aligned with costing structure
• At least two references

Deadline for submission of applications is 22nd June 2026

Please note: FEMNET is committed to prevention any type of unwanted behaviour including sexual harassment, exploitation, abuse, and lack of integrity as well as other ethical breaches. All staff and consultants are expected to share this commitment through our code of conduct and Safeguarding Policy. Offers of employment will be subject to satisfactory references and appropriate screening checks, which can include criminal records and fraud.

We welcome people from the widest possible diversity of backgrounds, culture and experience. We will make any practical adjustments to enable people with disability participate fully in an inclusive working environment. By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have given consent to the collection, use and/or disclosure of your data by us for the purposes set out in this job description.

Only complete applications will be reviewed and applicants who have been shortlisted will be contacted.