Consultancy Assignment
An interactive, searchable online platform for mapping, profiling, and connecting consumer-focused organizations operating within food systems — enabling coordination, advocacy, and evidence-based policy engagement.
Background
Consumer actors in the food sector — including civil society organizations, advocacy groups, food safety agencies, media bodies, and policy influencers — play a critical role in shaping food systems. Despite their significance, there is currently no centralized, structured understanding of who these actors are, how they operate, what they focus on, or how they relate to one another.
"There is no centralized, structured understanding of who these actors are, how they operate and their areas of specialization." — Terms of Reference
This gap prevents meaningful coordination, limits policy influence, and makes it difficult for new entrants to the sector to identify partners or understand the existing landscape. The platform directly addresses this by creating a structured, searchable, and self-maintained registry of these organizations.
Objective
The platform has three interlocking purposes that together produce a sustainable, living knowledge base of the food sector consumer organization ecosystem.
Identify and profile all organizations engaged in consumer protection, food safety, advocacy, and policy influencing within food systems — capturing their mandate, focus areas, and operational models.
Conduct structured SWOT analyses per organization, scoring influence levels and collaboration potential to produce a rich analytical picture of the sector's institutional landscape.
Provide a searchable, filterable public directory where any stakeholder can find relevant organizations by thematic area, geography, type, or keyword — promoting coordination and learning.
Power an analytics dashboard with visual reports — charts, thematic distributions, regional breakdowns — and support export of findings as CSV, Excel, and formatted PDF reports.
Allow organizations to register, maintain, and update their own profiles through a guided multi-step onboarding flow, with admin validation before profiles go live.
A full role-based access control system ensures data quality through admin approvals, audit logging of all actions, and secure authentication for every user type.
Users
Scope of Work
The platform is delivered as a fully functional web application with the following core feature areas, each built and deployed as a discrete, tested sprint.
| Sprint | Feature | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Project Setup & Database | Server environment, folder structure, all 19 MySQL tables, API endpoint shells, app_manager.php, and .htaccess configuration. |
| 2 | Landing Page | Public homepage with hero section, live stats bar, featured organizations, thematic tag cloud, and skeleton loaders — all driven by API data. |
| 3 | Registration Flow | Account creation, email verification, and a 7-step guided organization profile submission form with dynamic partnership and programme fields. |
| 4 | Login & Auth | Secure login for all user types, PHP session management, token-based API auth, password reset flow, and role-based redirect on login. |
| 5 | Organization Dashboard | Logged-in org user's home — profile status, completeness indicator, admin feedback panel, and SWOT summary if shared by admin. |
| 6 | Profile Management | Tabbed profile editor allowing org users to update each section independently via AJAX, with file upload management and unsaved-change warnings. |
| 7 | Public Directory & Search | AJAX-powered, filterable, paginated directory of all active organizations with keyword search, autocomplete, active filter pills, and shareable URLs. |
| 8 | Public Org Profile Page | Full public profile per organization — all details, thematic tags, partnerships, programmes, related organizations, and a print-friendly view. |
| 9 | Admin Panel — Core | Admin dashboard, full organization management table, and approval workflow (Approve / Return for Revision / Reject) with automated email notifications. |
| 10 | SWOT Assessment | Admin SWOT entry per organization — four quadrants, influence and collaboration scores, internal notes, and a toggle to share summary with the org user. |
| 11 | Analytics & Reports | Five Chart.js charts (org type, thematic distribution, region, monthly trends, influence scores) plus CSV, Excel, and PDF exports with filters. |
| 12 | Settings & Taxonomy | Admin management of all lookup data (thematic areas, org types, regions), site settings, editable email templates, and the full audit log viewer. |
| 13 | Testing & Deployment | Security audit, cross-browser and responsive testing, production server provisioning, SSL, database backup configuration, and admin handover. |
Technical Architecture
The platform follows a clean separation between frontend and backend. All pages are standard PHP files that include a central app_manager.php for session management and authentication guards. On page load, Bootstrap layouts render with skeleton placeholders while jQuery AJAX calls fetch data from grouped REST API endpoint files. Each endpoint file operates independently — a fatal error in one feature group cannot affect any other part of the platform.
Error isolation by design: the API is split into 9 independent endpoint files — auth.php, register.php, organizations.php, admin_orgs.php, thematic.php, swot.php, documents.php, reports.php, settings.php — each wrapped in a top-level try/catch. A problem in one endpoint returns clean JSON and never brings down the rest.
Deliverables
In alignment with the Terms of Reference, the consultancy delivers the following outputs by end of the engagement:
Methodology
The platform is built using an agile delivery methodology. Each sprint corresponds to a single, self-contained feature. A feature is built completely, tested against a defined checklist, and deployed to the live server before development begins on the next feature. This approach ensures: