Consultancy Service for Development of M&E System for PPI compacts

TERMS OF REFERENCE

Development of M&E system for PPI compacts

About IDH

IDH, The Sustainable Trade Initiative (“IDH”) (www.idhtrade.org [1]) accelerates and up-scales sustainable trade by building impact oriented coalitions of front running companies, civil society, governments, knowledge institutions and other stakeholders in several commodity sectors. We convene the interests, strengths and knowledge of public and private partners in sustainability commodity programs that aim to mainstream international and domestic commodity markets. We jointly formulate strategic intervention plans with public and private partners and we co-invest with partners in activities that generate public goods.

About landscape program and PPI compact development in Vietnam

The agricultural development in the Central Highlands contributed greatly to exports and economic growth in Vietnam. Thanks to economic liberalization, government leadership, and rises in the world prices, Vietnam became the world’s second largest coffee, the biggest pepper exporter globally. However, the intensive agricultural development and climate change have brought also considerable environmental challenges. Issues such as deforestation, groundwater depletion, soil degradation and etc will need to be addressed at a landscape scale to sustain high production and trade into the future and to allow for future economic prosperity in the region. There seems to be a compelling business case for supply chains, Vietnamese government and local farmers to tackle these challenges collectively.

IDH, JDE, and partners are looking to establish a first Verified Sourcing Area (VSA) readiness pilot for coffee in Vietnam. Up to now, many co-funding projects have been funded by JDE, IDH, trading partners and local authorities in Vietnam to pilot 3 Protection – Production – Inclusion (PPI) Compacts in Dak Lak and Lam Dong provinces. To transit from those 3 PPI compacts to a full VSA readiness pilot at scale, at district level, a number of activities need to be undertaken, including developing a monitoring and evaluation framework for progress monitoring and verification mechanism on the PPI Compacts targets.

Objective of the assignment: develop a sound, effective and cost saving M&E system with sound verification mechanism for PPI compact in Di Linh district, Lam Dong province

Deliverables:

• An overview of existing information systems managed by Di Linh district and key companies in the districts (including but not limited to LDC, ACOM, etc):

  • what are indicators, including but not limited to the indicators already listed in the PPI compacts, such as land use change, agriculture and forest, water management, agrochemical management…),

  • what are means of data collection, what is frequency of data collection, what data is used for and what level it is collected (farm, commune, district?)

  • Is there any data not available compared to the targets for PPI Compact, and is there other data that can serve as proxy?

  • what is current verification mechanism, what is reliability of data, what is the quality of the data, e.g. are there quality control mechanisms in place?

  • discuss on the sharing mechanism (how sensitive is the data and how likely is the company to share the data)

  • what is expected from public sector and other partners for private sector to share/verify data along with them

• An overview of other systems: such as GCP, Terra-I by CIAT…

• Design of an M&E system, with the following consideration:

  • What existing information can be used from public and private systems

  • What need to be improved/added in the existing public data system

  • Agree on the consistent M&E system managed by public sector and verified by all related stakeholders via a VSA panel, making it transparently and online tracked

• Estimation of set up and operational cost of this M&E system, also considering of any business case for this system

Budget for the service

All the costs, including consultant fees, travel of consultants, hotel & per diem, workshops/meetings are based on the EU-UN cost norms.

Timeline: This assignment needs to be delivered not later than August 2020

Proposal guidelines

In the proposal, please provide the following:

1. A succinct, well-documented approach

2. Inclusion of a budget with a break-down of man days/rate per consultant

3. If you work in a team a clear description of the project team, relevant experience of team members and time allocation per team member

4. Statement of experience (only experience from the suggested team members is relevant)

Selection criteria & procedure

Knowledge/Expertise and Experiences required profile:

• The consultant must have at least master degree with at least 10-year experiences in working with the relevant topics, especially on economic/econometric analysis, understanding M&E and statistical systems of local governments and etc

• The consultant needs to be able to negotiate with public and private sector on the alignment and data sharing mechanism

• Excellent command in English and Vietnamese (for Vietnamese expert team members)

• Having understanding of Central Highland region, coffee and pepper sectors is privileged.

Procedure

The procedure will be as follows:

• TOR has been advertised and circulated to potential consultant

• Interested parties submit a proposal to IDH.

• Evaluation of the proposals by an evaluation committee including representatives of IDH. The evaluation committee will shortlist the proposals based on the selection, criteria and exclusion as stated in this Terms of Reference.

• potential candidates will be invited for interview within 2 weeks after the submission deadline.

• The potential candidate might be required to revise the Proposal before decision on selection of consultancy is made.

• Inception meeting with the selected consultant to discuss and finalize the proposal before the contract signed.

Grounds for exclusion

Tenderers shall be excluded from participation in a procurement procedure if:

• They are bankrupt or being wound up, are having their affairs administered by the courts, have entered into an arrangement with creditors, have suspended business activities, are subject of proceedings concerning those matters, or are in any analogous situation arising from a similar procedure provided for in national legislation or regulations;

• They or persons having powers of representation, decision-making or control over them have been convicted of an offence concerning their professional conduct by a judgment which has the force of res judicata;

• They have been guilty of grave professional misconduct proven by any means which the IDH can justify;

• They have not fulfilled obligations relating to the payment of social security contributions or the payment of taxes in accordance with the legal provisions of the country in which they are established, or with those of the Netherlands or those of the country where the contract is to be performed;

• They or persons having powers of representation, decision making of control over them have been the subject of a judgment which has the force of res judicata for fraud, corruption, involvement in a criminal organization, money laundering or any other illegal activity, where such illegal activity is detrimental to the MFA’s financial interests.

• Tenderers must confirm in writing that they are not in one of the situations as listed above.

• Tenderers shall not make use of child labor or forced labor and/or practice discrimination and they shall respect the right to freedom of association and the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining, in accordance with the core conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO).

Evaluation Method

All the applications received will be reviewed by IDH Vietnam. The short-listed candidates will be invited for interview and after that the potential candidates might be requested to submit the revised proposal. A final decision will be made after maximum 2 week to award the contract to the tenderer who best meets all the criteria specified.

Confidentiality

The Tenderer will ensure that all its contacts with IDH, with regards to the Tender, during the tender procedure take place exclusively in writing by e-mail to IDH Vietnam via [email protected] [2]. The Tenderer is thus explicitly prohibited, to prevent discrimination of the other Tenderers and to ensure the diligence of the procedure, to have any contact whatsoever regarding the tender with any other persons of IDH than the person stated in the first sentence of this paragraph.

The documents provided by or on behalf of IDH will be handled with confidentiality. The Tenderer will also impose a duty of confidentiality on any parties that it engages. Any breach of the duty of confidentiality by the Tenderer or its engaged third parties will give IDH grounds for exclusion of the

Tenderer, without requiring any prior written or verbal warning.

All information, documents and other requested or provided data submitted by the Tenderers will be handled with due care and confidentiality by IDH. The provided information will after evaluation by IDH be filed as confidential. The provided information will not be returned to the Tenderer.

Contact information

For questions about this position, please contact Mr. Hao at [email protected] [3]

Interested consultant should send CV and proposal including technical and financial proposal to [email protected] [4]

We encourage applicants to respond as soon as possible, latest by 30^th April 2020.