General

The purpose of the project is to contribute to rural poverty reduction in the areas of intervention. Its development objective is to deepen the effectiveness, efficiency and relevance of public investments from central, regional and local governments to improve the well-being of the rural population and increase the value of their natural, physical, human, social and financial assets.Specific objectives include:(a) Strengthening the capabilities and skills of groups and associations of poor rural people to participate fully in local development and increase productivity and competitiveness, including full access to citizenship; (b) Transferring funds to groups of organized rural families and associations of rural men and women to enable them to competitively: (i) improve their natural resources and human settlements; (ii) access grant funding to carry out profitable business ventures in a wide range of initiatives; and (iii) mobilize savings and provide access to microinsurance, especially for rural women; (c) Improving the management capacity of local governments to meet the relevant demand of poor rural people, in order to promote self-development and leverage resources available to municipalities working with the project; (d) Strengthening the institutional capacity of the implementing agency to: deepen a territorial and micro watershed approach; mobilize additional private investment to complement project investments adequately; implement an intercultural approach; institute monitoring and evaluation (M&E) mechanisms; introduce a gender dimension into its projects; and further strengthen its operational capacity at the district level.The project is in compliance with IFAD policies on: (i) targeting, by focusing activities on poor rural people; (ii) gender, through positive discrimination measures and capacity-building of women's groups; (iii) middle-income countries (MICs), by building knowledge management and supporting South-South cooperation; (iv) rural finance, by supporting access to banking services and building financial assets; (v) rural enterprise, by reducing the limitations and inequities facing poor rural people in investing in small- and medium-sizedenterprises; (vi) indigenous peoples, by assisting communities in fully exploiting their traditional knowledge, culture, governance systems and natural resources; (vii) land, by respecting the land interests of rural people and promoting participatory land-use planning and management at the local level; (viii) private sectordevelopment, by strengthening the capacity of poor rural people and their organizations to deal with new market forces and partner with the private sector on fair and equitable conditions; and (ix) climate change, by furthering the use of climate analysis as an instrument of social and environmental assessment to seekmeasures to reduce or eliminate risks.

General

Oxfam Novib# Lobby and Advocacy Team has decided to invest in programme development, one of the focus this year is on strengtheningOxfam# GROW campaign . An Action Plan was developed in March 2014 # initial work involves different countries in Asia region linking local campaign strategies to national, regional and global campaign strategies of GROW. This global GROW programme will build on on-going GROW national campaigns in Asian countries, the South Asia and Southeast Asia GROW regional campaigns and advocacy work at the international level. A Core Group has been set up to deliver the Action Plan in close coordination with Oxfam Novib Regional Manager for Asia and the head of the Lobby and Advocacy Team. The evolving programme areas are focused on 3 themes (with knowledge management as cross cutting): right to food/food justice, land governance, and climate adaptation. So far, concept notes have been developed already defining the (1) regional (East Asia and South Asia) GROW campaign strategies targeting national governments and regional institutions (ASEAN, Asian Development Bank); (2) global Right to Food influencing work (involving 3 Asian countries), and (3) land governance advocacy in the Mekong Region. The consultant is expected to use these regional programme ideas in helping country and regional Oxfam teams identify local/national to regional/global campaign strategies which is core to her/his task towards designing the global GROW programme framework. This global framework (programme summary/cpncept note) will be used in contacting and exploring partnership with external donors.