Tư vấn Đánh giá Cuối kỳ (CARE International Vietnam)

Title: Project Final Evaluation
Location: Ha Noi and Lai Chau province
Duration: November 2023 – April 2024
Reporting to: Portfolio manager and MEAL Lead

Background

Founded in 1945, CARE is a leading humanitarian organisation fighting global poverty and providing lifesaving assistance in emergencies. In over 100 countries and territories around the world, CARE places special focus on working alongside poor women and girls because, equipped with the proper resources, they have the power to help lift whole families and entire communities out of poverty. To learn more, visit www.careinternational.org.

CARE International in Vietnam is a creative and dynamic organisation that has been working with Vietnamese and international partner organisations since 1989 in over 300 projects. We recognise that the key to achieving equitable development outcomes lies in addressing deeply rooted, structural underlying causes of poverty and injustices contributing to the exclusion and vulnerability of particular groups in society. Our long-term program goal in Vietnam is that poor and marginalised ethnic minority and urban people of all genders, particularly women, equitably benefit from development. To learn more, visit www.care.org.vn.

Project information

Vietnam generally is a food secure country as it produces enough rice to feed the whole population. However, access to food is not equal to everybody. Despite the high food export figures, many groups are still facing poverty and intermittent food shortages. In Vietnam, ethnic minorities account for 14.6% of the population but 52% of the poor. As food security is inherently linked to poverty, ethnic minorities are among the most vulnerable groups, especially regarding the four dimensions of food security as defined by FAO: Food availability, Food access, Utilization, and Stability.

Nutritional issues and access to food

Food availability for remote ethnic minorities is conditioned by their access to land, water, labour and capital to produce food. 52.7% of ethnic minorities depend on agriculture and forest use for their living3. While forests and forest resources are critical food and income sources for more than 10 million ethnic minorities, a significant proportion of forestland is controlled by state-owned corporates. In place where people have land for cultivation, the productivity is often low and unstable. CARE’s experience with value chain projects in Northwestern provinces of Son La, Lai Chau and Dien Bien shows a prolonged issue of poor production capacity among ethnic minority farmers. In the target location of Tan Uyen district, Lai Chau province, farmers rely on rain-fed rice cultivation; of which over 50% of rice paddy fields can only grow one crop annually. They do not have access to extension services as well as quality inputs for agricultural production. In addition, the oldfashioned cultivation practices in a changing climate and degrading environment significantly limit EM farmers’ capacity to produce enough food for consumption. This also challenges their ability to earn income or cash – a key determinant of the access to food.

Climate change for most vulnerable people

Poor households, or those just above the poverty line, are often the most vulnerable to climate change and natural hazards. Even a small event can easily make them fall back into poverty or get into debt. Natural disasters also contribute to widening gaps between people’s living standards, with growing numbers of people losing key assets such as their homes due to the increased frequency and intensity of climate events. In northwestern provinces where CARE operates, high precipitation in the rainy season often causes landslides and flash floods, resulting in loss of agricultural land and crop failure. This is even exacerbated by increasing deforestation and crop-planting on marginal steep land. It is observed that in Lai Chau province, extreme weather events such as cold weather, flooding and hail is occurring more frequently and causing more damage in the past five years. However, few ethnic minorities have knowledge or training on how to adapt to the changing climate and natural hazards. During a cold spell in 2016, Northern mountainous provinces, particularly Lai Chau, experienced a large-scale damage including cattle, young rice and vegetables. For example, Tan Uyen district lost nearly 1,000 cattle. An important reason for such loss is the lack of access to weather and climate information and if it is received, often not useful, accurate, timely or understandable for farmers to take necessary preventions such as providing sheds to protect cattle from the cold.

Within ethnic minority groups, the burden of poverty tends to fall more heavily on women. CARE’s programming experience shows that they are affected by multiple gender-based barriers to economic empowerment, including a lack of decision-making power and voice within the household, community, and market; lack of access to economic assets (including land and capital); lack of recognition from value chain actors and service providers; lack of information about policies, programs, market, climate, and agriculture; gender-based violence; and high workloads. Research by CARE in Lai Chau province found that within ethnic minority households, women accept their imbalanced workload and the associated lack of recognition. While women and men report joint decision-making on household finances and farming practices, husbands most often have final decision-making power on livelihoods and important spending. Women often have limited mobility, low literacy rates and a lack of knowledge of the Vietnamese language.

As part of CARE’s long-term program on Remote Ethnic Minority Women, the Enhancement of Food Security for Ethnic Minorities in Northern Vietnam (EFSEM) project strengthensfood security for ethnic minority smallholder farmers in Lai Chau province in the Northwest region of Vietnam.

This project is part of a multi-country program on gender and climate change funded by the L’Oréal Foundation, implemented in Vietnam, India, Equator and Madagascar.

The main objective of the project is to enhance food security among ethnic minority women and their families through agricultural livelihood diversification and climate resilience. To achieve this goal, the project has developed several climate-resilient livelihood models, which include improving agricultural productivity, enhancing women’s capacity to cope with climate shocks and their participation in climate change and disaster risk reduction planning. The proposed project aims to reach at least 1,000 ethnic minority women, ultimately benefiting 4,500 people.

In total, the project has reached around 900 households through different key components:

Climate-resilient farming models

614 households are provided technical training, loan funding and developed the risk mitigation plan for their models

Home garden to boost nutrition

189 households are supported fund and technical training to grow their home garden

Financial inclusion through VSLA

Over 800 members of gather in 42 groups to make savings and to take loans to finance both their living and farming activities

Environmental friendly solution for waste management

247 households are supported with tools and technical training to make bio-fertilizer

Rationale and purpose

The EFSEM project is going to phase out after 3 years’ implementation and close all its activities by April 2024. CVN and our partners are commissioning an independent evaluation to understand the project’s impacts/outcomes and key lessons learned. The OECD/DAC criteria shall be used as the guideline for the project final evaluation to look through the project relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability, potential and observed impacts. Furthermore, the progress against baseline indicators and targets will be measured.

The project's lessons will inform other interventions, including CARE Vietnam's upcoming phases with CARE France to pursue funding from AFD and L'Oreal Foundation under the She Grows the Future program.

Therefore, CARE Viet Nam is seeking a team of independent evaluators or a firm to undertake the Project final evaluation to ensure an objective view and assessment.

Key evaluation objectives

The final project evaluation shall:

1) Assess the project relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, and certain impact based on the OECD criteria.

2) Draw out lessons and recommendations for the provincial authorities, CARE and concerned stakeholders to inform for the development of the new phases in the areas

Key evaluation questions

1. To what extent are EFSEM‘s methodologies and adaptivenessto the findings from the Midterm review aligned and relevant to the existing context (changes and new opportunities), local program and development plan)?

2. What results have been achieved in comparison with the project baseline values, and the targets in the log frame? What are the factors contributing to or limiting the result achievement?

3. At what level the value-for-money approach is applied to ensure the project targets?

4. What are the (potential) impacts the project created or contributed to at this stage? What should be leveraged in the following phases?

5. How sustainable and enduring are the project results, strategy, and approach likely to be?

6. What are the key lessons learned and recommendations for future similar projects at CARE Vietnam?

Evaluation methodology

The Evaluation should apply a mixed-method approach using desk review, qualitative and quantitative data from primary and secondary sources, and data triangulation.
The Evaluation process should be participatory, incorporating a cross-section of key stakeholders.
The sample size should be representative. All data and findings should be disaggregated by sex and ethnicity.
The evaluation methodology will be presented to the CARE and partner for validation and commencing.
The evaluation consultant should conduct the evaluation with careful consideration of the utility of the evaluation and bearing in mind the following principles:
- Ethical research principles.
- Judgments should be made relative to context (the evaluation will draw conclusions and identify trends taking into consideration the role of and interplay with context);
- Strong utility focus (user engagement) in planning and implementing the final evaluation (respecting time constraints);
- Using/building on previous assessments (baseline, MTR and other studies).
- Attention to equality and rights in all aspects of the evaluation.

Scope of work

Desk review: Analysis of existing and relevant documents.
Develop a Final Evaluation proposal including methodology, sample size calculation, and sampling strategy, data collection tools, detailed fieldwork plan, analysis plan, quality control plan, and timeframes for key management inputs and decisions.
Field data collection process:
- Developing the qualitative interview tools in accordance with the key informant types in the design. The tools will need to be approved by CVN team before commencing.
- Conducting all the expected qualitative interviews on the field.
Data analysis and interpretation using relevant software for the qualitative interviews.
Producing codebook and good quotation document.
Consolidating all the quantitative and qualitative data analysis results to develop the full report and a presentation on research key findings (PowerPoint format).
Conduct the debriefing for CARE and project staff on the results of evaluation results.

Selection criteria

The evaluator can be a team of Vietnam national or international experts with relevant education and working experience.

Required attributes:

a. Proven capacity and extensive experience in management and conduct of evaluations, including strong analytical skills and experience in evaluating Sustainable livelihood, Nutrition and food security, Disaster risk reduction, Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation projects.

b. Sound experience working with ethnic minority women

c. Demonstrated written communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex concepts in plain English and develop relevant, useful recommendations

Preferred attributes:

d. Experience with the Climate resilience livelihood interventions

Application procedure

Interested candidates should submit the following documents in English, clearly stating the title of the Terms of Reference to email: procurement3@care.org.vn before 9AM on 4 October 2023.

Applications including:

CVs/profile
Technical proposal
Financial proposal
Samples of work

CARE is an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse workforce. Women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.

For further details about this job position, please see HERE.