Consultant (Performance Assessment)
WorldFish, Myanmar

WorldFish Myanmar is leading the Fish for Livelihoods (F4L) Activity funded by USAID. F4L aims to provide a means of ensuring the improved availability of diverse, safe, affordable nutrient-rich food, especially for women and young children from poor and vulnerable households. This will be achieved by ensuring that poor households have an increased ability to purchase accessible nutritious food due to improved incomes from entrepreneurial activities including improved small-scale aquaculture in the intervention areas and the strengthening of aquaculture market systems with attention to expanding opportunities for women and youth.

In addition, behavioral change work will prioritize nutrition-conscious household decisions by means of both home production and local markets. Specifically, it is expected that the adoption of fish culture technologies will contribute to improved food and nutrition security for poor households in several ways:

1. Generating income from fish culture which would be used to purchase nutritious food,
2. Creating alternative employment generating activities and increasing labor productivity,
3. Increasing available food supply and fish consumption.

The geographical areas to be covered include Kachin, Mandalay, Magway, Southern/Eastern Shan and Sagaing Regions/States.

The Activity has three main outputs:

1. Small-scale aquaculture production increased through strategic activities including improved land and water use, increased access to high quality inputs (feed, seed and equipment), capacity development and research into production, and access to credit.
2. Market-based system approaches (MSA) further developed and utilized to increase access to food safe fish and fish products by poor people. Capacity building will ensure that market systems function more effectively, sustainably and to the benefit of the poor.
3. Enhanced nutrition and WASH practices delivered via social behavior change communication (SBCC). Capacities developed into the production, processing and consumption of food safe aquaculture and other fish-based products

Consultancy Objective

Implementation of a designed methodology household survey on, productivity, income, market value chains and systems, food security and nutrition related to small-scale aquaculture development.

Performance assessment of F4L participants (direct beneficiaries) who received assistance from F4L Activity in the first three years (Oct 2019 to Sep 2022) of implementation. The assessment will target participants and compare their performance against indicators on gender, productivity, income, market value chains, food security and nutrition.

Scope of work

The population of interest are F4L participants who received assistance from F4L Activity since implementation began in October 2019. F4L Activity delivered a range of services (kind and in-kind) to participants including fish seed, fish feed, micro-credit, extension services, vegetable and fruit seeds, WASH material and hygiene kits among others.

The contractor (s) will be responsible for implementing the assessment according to the designed methodology, translating questionnaires into Burmese, data collection tools, fieldwork and data collection, data verification and cleaning and narrative fieldwork report. Throughout the assessment, the contract will be required to work in close consultation with WorldFish MEL Specialist, Deputy Chief of Party (DCoP) and Data Management Specialist (DMS) who will help to ensure that the data collection process will be met with the needs of the designed methodology and satisfied USAID requirements.

The present consultancy is scheduled for a two-month period in 2023 and is intended to conduct the performance (impact) assessment and drafting the report to be used by F4L. WorldFish will prioritize those organization/consultant (s) with experience of working with digital data application for data collection from the field, WorldFish recommended applications like CommCare or Kobo. The firm should have an experienced team of enumerators who are aware of the local context and speak both English and Burmese in addition to local dialects where required.

Outputs

The expected outputs are:

• Preliminary work plan and schedule detailing how you intend to carry out this work.
• Questions translated according to the local context and work nature.
• Tools and applications to be used in the assessment.
• Final database with the data, with proper documentation of the data collected.
• Excel spreadsheet with descriptive statistics, figures, and tables summarizing the results.
• Data Analysis with useful insights based on methodology and study design.
• A draft summary of the overall study findings, and present this

Job Rewards and Benefits