Consultancy Services for Commercial Agriculture Development Project, Package-B

Project Description

Commercial Agriculture Development Project aimed to reduce poverty in the rural communities of 11 eastern development districts through equitable and sustainable commercialization of agriculture. The Project followed a new and innovative approach. It gave the increased emphasis to the promotion of community services and social orientation of the poor and disadvantaged communities to help them take advantage of what CADP offering. It also emphasized the development of market‐focused practices, production / market linkages and reorientation of services towards the private sector. Considering the nature and special feature, the Project identified the need to support Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives as Executing Agency (EA), specially the Department of Agriculture (DOA) as Implementing Agency (IA), to implement the Commercial Agriculture Development Project. The critical areas where the IA has insufficient capacity are in product processing and marketing, market infrastructure development, agribusiness and market chain development, establishment of an input‐output based monitoring system at community, district/local authority level; management of project training and mainstreaming of gender and disadvantaged people into community development processes. It also indicates the limited experience of DOA in promoting the participatory and social inclusion services.

Assignment Description

The scope of the project was to support EA/IA in the smooth implementation of CADP to attain its outputs. The Consultant mobilized experts in the fields of capacity building and institutional and organizational development of primary stakeholders; participatory development and social inclusion; agribusiness development; market chain development; assisted in CAF management, assisted in the empowerment of primary stakeholders to access the CAF resources; awareness raising; establishment of monitoring framework; participation of stakeholders in monitoring and evaluation; market information system development at regional and local level; environment assessment/management. A multidisciplinary team was placed to impart such expertise and mix of skills. The experts worked on a team spirit and served to collectively accomplish the objectives of the assignment. The scope for this assignment included all five components of the CADP. In total 14 experts were fielded to achieve project outputs in increased public and private investment in commercial agriculture, inclusion of poor and semi commercial stakeholders in commercial agriculture, timely provisioning of market information to farmers, and enhancing of capacity of project partners in supporting farmers. Overall guidance and leadership was provided by an international Team Leader / Project Management and Market Chain Development. Of the 14 experts 8 experts were stationed at Biratnagar; whereas, 6 experts (social inclusion and agribusiness development) stationed at subregional level. The total length of the consulting service was 531.5 person months till December 2012.