With more than 35 years of experience, Cowater International is Canada’s global leader in management consulting services specialising in international development. We have managed the implementation of over 2500 projects in more than 95 countries around the globe. We work with governments, partner organisations, communities and civil society to design and implement sustainable solutions that generate lasting social, economic and environmental impacts.

The objectives of the GREAT 2 Program are:

Objective 1 – Ethnic minority women living in Son La and Lao Cai, have improved economic benefits.

Objective 2 – Ethnic minority women living in Son La and Lao Cai, have increased confidence and social status, including more balanced workloads and greater decision-making within the home, workplace, and community.    

Objective 3 – Ethnic minority women and household members living in Son La and Lao Cai benefit from more gender-responsive, inclusive, and effective provincial and national policies, plans, strategies, and programs.

The program is in its second five-year phase and GREAT 2 will continue its focus on agriculture and tourism, identifying specific sectors that lend themselves to opportunities for women’s economic empowerment and work with multiple stakeholders to address constraints, generate opportunities, drive market growth and increase productive value of the sector. A limited number of agriculture sectors will be targeted, in addition to tourism. Cross-sector strategies such as women, access to finance, digital transformation, policy advocacy and behaviour change will complement the sector strategies.

We are looking for a service provider (an individual consultant or a consultancy firm) who can provide high quality training in areas of communications and promotion for our partners with details as described below. There may be further opportunities to work with us in other areas of communications if the service provider has qualified competencies. In detail:

Overall, it is expected that lead partners and businesses in the supported value chains will understand and be better equipped to develop and use evidence-based and intervention logics based stories of change to promote their work and, in particular, their contributions to inclusive business development and women’s economic empowerment. Training will be designed to support communication and promotion of partner activities as well as their contribution to the GREAT program and its goals.

Partners will be equipped with the necessary skills to design and develop transcripts of a story of change and to develop action plans to implement this as part of the intervention activities. This will include, but not be limited to: 1. Documenting improvements to the business and production process by taking photos, shooting videos and obtaining other qualitative evidences such as quotes; 2. Using the documented evidence to construct a compelling story of change according to the design and expected transcript; 3. Promote the stories of change and the materials through various channels.

Training 1 – TOT training for GREAT lead partners in effective communications for GREAT-supported activities, including basics of photography skills, stories of change writing skills and social media
1. Objectives
– To equip lead partners of GREAT with the communications guidelines and communications skills including photography, writing stories of change and social media
– To serve as a TOT training for lead partners, so that they will be able to co-facilitate training on the development of their communications plan in the second training with the participation of their co-facilitating partners such as businesses, cooperatives and collective groups

2. Key participants: Lead partners of the GREAT program

3. Location: Lao Cai and Son La

4. Duration: 2 days in each province (excluding travel)

5. Time: November/December 2024

6. Outcomes:
– Lead partners will take a lead role in developing and implementing communications and promotion plans and supporting their market partners and stakeholders to contrite to those plans and to the generation of products and materials in support of those plans. This lead role requires partners to:
– Understand and develop a compelling story structure based on project intervention logics
– Understand the use and value of evidence-based story development to convey and promote the results (including women’s economic empowerment results) of their work with GREAT to development peers and stakeholders
– Understand the information and evidence requirements to support the construction of high quality transcripts and generation of insightful photos, videos and anecdotes / quotes

At the end of the training, participants should be able to:
– understand and apply the program’s communication guidelines across all channels for their GREAT-replated communications activities
– be able to create clear, consistent, and impactful messages aligned with the GREAT communications guidelines
– be able to capture high-quality photos that effectively communicate the project’s messages and constantly use photography as a means of visual storytelling
– understand the basics of writing stories of change and social media to effectively communicate the project’s impact
– be able to co-facilitate the training on the development of their communications plan in the second training

Training 2 – Training for GREAT beneficiary partners (businesses, cooperatives, collective groups) in effective communications for GREAT-supported activities, including basics of photography skills, stories of change writing skills and social media, with co-facilitation of GREAT lead partners

1. Objectives
– To equip beneficiary partners of the GREAT program with skills and capacity to showcase stories of impact and change resulting from their collaboration with the project and/or new practices introduced
– To develop and action a simple media communication and promotion plan for each beneficiary partner (including photo, information and data collection plan, stories to be developed, how and when to publish them, etc.)

2. Key participants: GREAT lead partners and their beneficiary partners

3. Location: Lao Cai and Son La

4. Duration: 2 days in each province (excluding travel)

5. Time: March 2025

6. Outcomes:
– Participants will have improved skills and ability to show case and communicate how their businesses, activities and/or communities have been positively impacted by changes introduced with the support of the GREAT program through photography and compelling stories, including the development of a communication and promotion plan of each partner (including photo, information and data collection plan, stories to be developed, how and when to publish them, etc.)
– These stories can be used to showcase business and community activities and promoted to other communities and/or business partners.

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS
Please submit your proposal to aus4equalityrecruitment@gmail.com by 5 pm (Hanoi time) 30 September 2024 specifying the position you are applying for in the email title. The proposal should include:
– Cover letter addressing the selection criteria (maximum 2 pages)
– CV of individual applicant/Portfolio of the organisation including demonstration of past relevant experience in the past five years
– Quotation for the assignment