Request for Expression of Interest (EOI) - Long Research and Practice Support for School Meals Accelerator Systems Transformation

The School Meals Accelerator, an independent entity hosted by WFP, was established to support countries expand, strengthen and sustain national school meal programmes. These programmes serve as an entry point for broader transformation across social, educational, nutritional, agricultural, and economic systems. 

Since its inception, the Accelerator has implemented a multi-year process of organisational and leadership development to enhance its ability to operate effectively in complex international contexts. This work has generated innovative approaches to development, organisational practice and learning. The Accelerator now seeks to deepen, extend, evaluate and refine these approaches through a long-term agreement.

To build on progress to date and support the initiative’s future direction, the Accelerator seeks to establish a long-term agreement with a university-based research and practice institution. The supplier will focus on advancing, applying, evaluating and refining systemic leadership and organisational approaches for large-scale  transformation in school meals and international development.

The Accelerator operates across diverse, multi-stakeholder environments involving governments, multilateral organisations, civil society, philanthropy and local delivery systems in multiple countries. Achieving impact at scale requires approaches that integrate systems thinking, leadership practice, organisational learning and adaptive development. These approaches strengthen the capacity of individuals, teams and institutions to work effectively in conditions of complexity and uncertainty.

Building on earlier phases of systems-oriented work, the service provider will further develop, test and refine emerging approaches through real-world implementation and learning. It will support iterative experimentation and continuous learning to advance new organisational practices, leadership models and implementation methods. These will be adapted and applied across different contexts to enable broader transformation. The Accelerator seeks a service provider(s) capable of embedded and co-productive action-research across organisational development, leadership practice, implementation support and applied research. The service provider is expected to combine:

1. Applied and experimental research
2. Systems thinking and systems transformation methodologies
3. Leadership and organisational development
4. A learning architecture aimed at strengthening individual and collective capacity for systems change
5. Developmental and systems-oriented evaluation approaches
6. Co-production, prototyping and refinement of transferable frameworks, tools, methodologies and organisation processes
7. Generation of practitioner and academic knowledge relevant to the international development and systems transformation.

The awarded service provider will be expected to support both the internal development of the Accelerator and the application of systemic leadership approaches across country-level implementation contexts.