Consultant for final evaluation

BACKGROUNDS The context Vietnam has a large natural resource of ingredients with more than 40,000 species which can be used as raw materials for phyto-pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and food industry. 95% of Vietnamese remedies, including over 1,760 medicinal products, rely on natural resource base. Vietnam also produces up to 40,000 tons of raw medicinal materials annually. Additionally significant amount of natural resource ingredients is being imported from overseas, China and India, most of them illegally and of low quality, though many of those plant species are available in Vietnam. In reality, the supply of natural ingredients in Vietnam is declining due to (a) ineffective management of natural resources, (b) lack of incentives to encourage smallholders to harvest products sustainably, ad (c) weak linkages between players on both of upstream and downstream of the value chain that uses natural ingredients. On the other hand, the demand for natural ingredients in national and international market is increasing, amplifying the trend towards decreasing resource base. BioTrade Initiative refers to those activities of collection, production, transformation, and commercialization of goods and services derived from native biodiversity under the criteria of environmental, social and economic sustainability. Launched since 1996 by UNCTAD, the BioTrade Initiative has been promoting sustainable BioTrade in support of the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Initiative has developed a unique portfolio of regional and country programmes. Since 2016, Helvetas Germany had been running the Project of ‘Scaling up of Ethical BioTrade Initiatives within Phyto-pharmaceutical Sector in Vietnam’ to promote Biotrade initiatives in phyto-pharmaceutical sector in Vietnam. With this project, Helvetas Germany wants to upscale the sustainable Ethical Biotrade (EBT) business model to the natural ingredient sector of Vietnam so that the country becomes an internationally recognized supplier of natural ingredients to phyto-pharmaceutical, cosmetic and food supplement industries. The Project The Project is funded by European Union, implemented by Helvetas Vietnam and Center for Rural Economy Development (CRED) – within 4.5 years (April 2016 - September 2020) on four following components:

Component 1: Promote the application of production practices that comply with ethical Biotrade standards. These standards are seen as a fundamental ground for sustainable production and exploitation of materials from natural resources;
Component 2: Increase consumers’ awareness as to the need for, and the value of, products that have been made as per ethical Biotrade standards;
Component 3: Support for performance improvement of value chains that uses natural ingredients as raw materials;
Component 4: Facilitate for improvement of enabling policy environment. The project area depends on the particular areas of resources, from which the participating companies source input supplies.

The project performance: The project was expected to complete in September 2020, including an extension period of 6 months. It has established a portfolio of multiple private business partners, building up various value chains of different products that are compliant with Biotrade principles. In addition, communication activities have brought about significant impact of consumers’ awareness as to Biotrade values, and that selected local governments have been supported to improve enabling policies conducive to Biotrade production and consumption. However, being a relatively new concept, the effort to build up a Biotrade natural ingredient sector remains challenging. An evaluation to access the project’s performance and achievements vis-à-vis the project’s overall objectives and impacts generated on various sub-national level beneficiaries is required, this is also the purpose of this final evaluation consultancy. OBJECTIVES The objectives of the Final Evaluation is to review the performance of the Project, analyse the achievement up to now, against the log-frame and assess the implementation strategy applied by projects. The Final Evaluation will generate lessons learnt and provide recommendations for future approaches of donors and implementers in EBT sector to ensure maximum impacts and sustainability and the way to achieve them. The Final Evaluation therefore has the following specific objectives:

Review the project outputs and outcomes, assess progress against project implementation plans and log frames, assess effectiveness and efficiency of the portfolio.
Review and assess: o The relevance of the project in the concrete development context of the project localities and other enabling factors, including market situation and participation by international players; o The effectiveness and efficiency of project in respect to its investment, the mechanism to partner with local governments for delivery of interventions; o The impact of the project on the sector and communities in the lights of Biotrade value and standards; o The sustainability of the project in terms of production and consumption. Assess the potential for further replication of Biotrade natural ingredient production model in Vietnam.
Review the strategy applied by project including (i) the market development aspects (including market linkages); (ii) partnership and influencing strategy to related stakeholders (such as government authority, the private sector and civil society);

Lessons and Recommendations: Generate lessons learnt and provide clear recommendations for relevant stakeholders for future development projects with regards to Ethical Biotrade. TEAM AND QUALIFICATIONS The evaluation may be comprised of more than one consultant. The main responsibilities of the team leader are: Ø Develop the methodology for the review based on providing a robust evidence-base, and where appropriate administering a short simple questionnaire, which will be tested and fine-tuned appropriate. Ø Provide overall strategic guidance and be responsible for the overall Final Evaluation process Ø Allocate tasks to the team members Ø Supervise and guide the team members in implementing their tasks and be responsible for theoverall quality control of the report Ø Coordinate with partners Ø Write the Final Evaluation final report The team leader should have the following experience: Ø Excellent experience of evaluating private sector development programmes and experience of providing strategic guidance to programmes based on result-based evaluations, especially at national scale; Ø Considerable and proven experience in both implementing and evaluating value chains and in the implementation of making market works for the poor approach and methodology; Ø Real-life experience in directly working with the private sector businesses of all scales. Ø In-depth understanding and experience in brand development, product development, high standard management system and procedure development for private companies, of various scales. Ø Thorough understanding the economic behaviour and motivation of the private sector and private businesses in participation in and development of value chains in different industries. Insight knowledge and experience of constraints faced by local enterprises, of various scales, in Vietnam, including both cultural and context issues. Ø Knowledge of a number of the commodity value chains. Ø Considerable experience and knowledge of working within Vietnam on market systems approaches. Ø Experienced on project management and implementation. Ø Experience of agribusiness in Vietnam and the region would be a distinct advantage. Ø Very good communication skills. Ø Capable to work in a multi-cultural environment, especially with ethnic minority groups. Ø Fluent in English (writing, speaking) and Vietnamese. Other team’s members should be: Ø A specialist on evaluation of development programmes and an understanding of evidence based evaluations. Ø Experience and deep knowledge on agriculture, market development and small agribusiness in Vietnam. Ø Experience in farmer groups, community based organizations and capacity development at the farm level. Ø Experienced on project management and implementation. Ø Knowledge of a number of the commodity value chains. Ø Fluent in English and Vietnamese (writing, speaking) Ø Very good communication skills. SUGGESTED TIME: Total time frame suggested for this evaluation package is 01 month (from Sept 1-30th 2020) for all following tasks:

Contract signing;
Review of project documents and current situation;
Discuss with project officer to agree on work schedule & inputs;
Desk review (Project design documents, Progress Reports, baseline studies, market researches, technical documents, socio-economic reports) to collect primary data/information;
Evaluation design & finalization (tools, check-list, detail plan in fields, agenda).
Field work.
Data Analysis & Power Point Presentation.
Report writing and submission of first draft.
Revise reporting addressing comments of Helvetas.
Finalization and Submission of the final version.

Candidates, who are interested in this work, please send your CV and technical/financial proposal to: tuan.nguyen@helvetas.org by Sept 1, 2020. ToR here