TERMS OF REFERENCE FOR CO-FACILITATION OF

THE

Market Development Interventions to Mainstream Gender in Prawn Cultivation in Household Ponds

  1. Introduction

Katalyst is a market development project that aims to contribute to increasing the income of poor men and women in rural areas. It does this by facilitating changes in services, inputs and product markets, which in turn increases the competitiveness of farmers and small enterprises.

Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the project lasted from 2002-2013. The current Phase 3 commenced in March 2014. The project currently works in the maize, vegetable, farmed fish, information channels, women’s economic empowerment, local agribusiness networks and capitalisation sectors.

Katalyst is co-funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the UK Government, and the Danish International Development Agency (Danida). It is implemented by Swisscontact under the umbrella of the Ministry of Commerce, Government of Bangladesh.

The Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) sector of Katalyst is responsible for ensuring gender participation in all its other sectors (maize, vegetable, farmed fish, information channels, local agribusiness networks).Through this co-facilitation contract, the WEE team is going to implement a targeted intervention to promote fresh water prawn (golda) farming practice amongst women farmers.

Katalyst has a rich history of working in the prawn sector. It has previously worked in areas with existing prawn hubs like Khulna, Bagerhat, Satkhira, Jessore and Narail. In this intervention, Katalyst plans to work with new and untapped areas depending on the feasibility of intervention to reach out toa large number of target women beneficiaries and the potential for increasing prawn production, productivity and establishing a strong market access for them.

On average a Bangladeshi prawn farmer can produce 200kg prawn per acre. In Thailand, 1,200kg is considered a reasonable level of productivity (field observation, NACA, 2007). This is more to do with production methods rather than any country-specific reason. If Bangladesh can improve its production methods, particularly those of small farmers, it stands to significantly increase productivity. Many of the poor can take advantage of growth in the prawn sector because lots of homestead women farmers already have land suitable for small-scale prawn cultivation.

However, plenty of market constraints exist in the market which hinders the growth potential of this sector. In accordance to that, Katalyst plans to work with relevant sector stakeholders to make a strong channel of input supply, HPL[1], financial services, improved cultivation techniques and methods and to expand the prawn farming in the untapped areas. Side by side, the intervention will provide the women farmers with better farming information and knowledge.

This ToR refers to the partnershipwith a co-facilitator who has a sound understanding and substantial experience in market development approach to continue and scale up intervention goals, measuring the impact of the activities and furnish an exit strategy.

  1. Approach

Katalyst’s approach is based on the premise that enhanced private and public sector business services, coupled with an improved enabling environment, leads to more competitive enterprises, sustainable economic growth, and poverty reduction. The project works indirectly, focusing on making sustainable changes to the market system. It partners with a wide range of private and public sector intermediaries who have long-term business interests and a mandate to work in a particular sector. In partnership with market players, Katalyst designs and implements interventions to address underlying market constraints, which harness market incentives to reach out to a large number of beneficiaries. Katalyst follows a rigorous monitoring and impact assessment system, which feeds information so as to better design future interventions.

  1. Background

One of the mandates for the Katalyst project is to mainstream gender in value chains of the sectors. The ultimate objective of gender mainstreaming is to achieve economic empowerment for women in their roles as farmers and unpaid labors. Since its inception, Katalyst has been working with selected rural and industrial sectors. One of the important valuechains that Katalyst works is farmed fish (prawn and fish).

In recent years, aquaculture has become more and more important for Bangladesh. It represents the second largest export industry for Bangladesh after garments with 97% of the shrimpproduced being exported, contributing about 4% to national GDP and employing approximately 1.2 million people for production, processing and marketing activities. Including their families, this sees approximately 4.8 million Bangladeshi people directly dependent on this sector for their livelihood. Roughly, half of around 160 million populations are women in Bangladesh. Approximately 85% of them live in the rural areas. Women are pre-dominant in homestead production in Bangladesh and plays important role in the rural economy and generates overwhelming impact on major macroeconomic objectives like women employment generation, poverty alleviation, human resources development and food security.

Freshwater prawn (Macrobrachiumrosenbergii) farming is currently considered one of the most important sub-sectors of Bangladesh. Development of freshwater prawn sub-sector during last two decades has attracted considerable attention for export potential. In Bangladesh, around 4.27 million households (20% of rural inhabitants) operate a homestead pond, covering an area of 265,000 ha. Commercial semi-intensive carp culture dominates in the pond aquaculture.

Bangladesh earns approx. US$400 million from export of prawn and shrimp, where the contribution of prawn is around 25%. Shrimp and prawn production concentrates mainly in the south and south-western Bangladesh in converted rice fields known as ‘gher’. These cover a total area of 244,000 ha. Estimated combined production of shrimp and prawn for 2010 stood at close to 98,000 tons. Around three-quarters of prawn farms are located in the southwest part of Bangladesh. This region emerges as is the most promising area for prawn culture for the availability of wild post larvae (PL), favourable resources and climatic conditions, availability of ponds, low lying agricultural land, warm climate, fertile soil, and cheap and abundant labor. In 2002, there were an estimated 10,5000 prawn farms in Bangladesh, of which 75,000 (71%) were located in the southwest covered 30,000 ha of land under prawn farming compared to 3,500 ha in the mid 1980s. At present, the prawn culture area has increased to an estimated 50,000 ha. Prawn cultivation has potentials to expand in new areas and to increase the pie of freshwater prawn in export earning.

Like other agricultural sub-sectors, male dominates in the freshwater prawn as well. However, presence of a moderately higher number of women is reported in prawn sub-sector as paid labour. Remarkable numbers of poor women are involved in collection of wild prawn PL from sea and rivers. Processing industry also employ significant women labour for beheading, cleaning, counting and peeling. Besides, many women are involved in cultivation at homestead pond/gher as unpaid family labour and performs wide range of works relevant to cultivation e.g. pond preparation, feeding, weeding, harvesting etc.In this regard the value addition of the women in the production is tangibly high.

Despite the enormous potential successful commercial culture faces a number of constraints includes high production costs, insufficient supply of quality PL, poor quality of feed, unavailability and poor quality of aqua-chemicals, water pollution and wide range of diseases. In addition, lack of quality PL impedes the growth and appears as one of the major bottlenecks for further expansion of prawn culture in Bangladesh. Over fishing, use of destructive gears, environmental degradation and pollution all together contributes to the decline of the availability of wild PL over recent years. Moreover, numbers of social constraints have also been accompanied with the prawn farming in Bangladesh. Prawn farmers are socially, economically and educationally disadvantaged and lacking their own financial resources, are heavily indebted to traders and middlemen.

Apart from the generic problems in the prawn sub-sector, field experience shows that the situation for women farmers engaged in subsistence extensive homestead prawn production (both in pond and gher) even is more critical. The pond productivity is lower compared to commercial production. Generally, women farmers lack initial investments, access to inputs, knowledge and information, and market as a result of lack awareness and visions of the traditional input distribution channels, financers and extension services. In addition, the women farmers lack commercial orientation, which limits their knowledge about actors and their functions.

There are number of stakeholders involved at different stages who could be the potential contributor to the benefits of women prawn farmers through providing inputs, information and credits, and linking them with markets. However, due to reasons at each end they cannot cater to the women farmers. These can be considered as underlying reasons, which are discussed below:

Low commercial orientation and investment ability of women prawn farmers: Prawn farming is resource intensive and needs higher initial investments. Costs of prawn production have increased significantly in recent years as a result of increased price of PL, feed and other inputs. In most cases, farmers sell their homestead productive resources to meet up initial investments for prawn production. They have less control over such resources and in the decision making process. On the other hand, women prawn farmers lack commercial orientation and limits their exposure to the actors providing credit services.

Lack appropriate loan products from the MFIs and banks and access to mainstream VC financing: Local moneylenders are the largest source of credits for small prawn farmers. They contribute around 45% of the total loan amount for the prawn sectors whereas the share of Banks and NGOs is 12% and10% respectively. Even the women prawn farmers do not have access to the VC financing often offered by the prawn traders (33%) because of their detachment from the formal prawn supply chain. The banks usually provide loan to the processors, prawn traders and large farmers against collateral and NGOs lack appropriate loan products targets the women prawn producers.

Traditional aqua-input distribution channels lack vision and capacity to cater women prawn farmers: Traditional aqua-input distribution channels couldn’t reach rural areas due to lack vision and capacity of the companies. In addition, high transaction cost of the input distribution system in a rural setup discourages the private companies to expand in remote rural areas. Generally, the reach of their distribution channels is up to sub-district levels and hardly to some semi-urban growth centers. The low mobility of women farmers also prohibits them from access to traditional input suppliers.

Depot lack vision to buy from women farmers and women farmers lack knowledge to linked with them: The depots do not buy from the women farmers and have no such vision even. Perhaps, the mobility and perceived capacity of women farmers contributes to this. On the other hand, the women farmers also have no knowledge about how to linked with them.

Inefficient public and private extension services cannot reach the women prawn farmers: The public and private extension service neither has capacity nor vision to reach the women prawn farmers. The public extension department lack adequate human resources. On the other hand, private extension services cannot foresee the value proposition.

Microfinance institutes cannot foresee the benefit of providing information and inputs for prawn farming as value added service:Most of the MFIs have linkage and relationship with most of the women farmers (may not be for farming purpose all the time) through providing micro credit. They can be a good source of information for the beneficiary farmers. However, they lack the capacity to provide to the farmers the quality information on cultivation techniques. Moreover, they do not foresee the benefit that providing agriculture relevant information can make the farmers better able to handle the loan and can ensure more income, which would eventually secure MFI’s loan.

Low mobility of women farmers: is an overriding constraint for the women contributes to all of the major symptoms relevant to women economic empowerment. It limits their opportunity to participate in mainstream market system. As a result, the women have less access to information, knowledge, inputs and markets.

  1. Vision for the prawn sector in accordance with WEE:

MFIs and NGO groups will be linked together to ease access to finance for small and medium women farmers. In accordance to that, Katalyst plans to work with relevant sector stakeholders to make a strong channel of input supply, HPL, financial services, improved cultivation techniques and methods and to expand the prawn farming in the untapped areas. Side by side, the intervention will provide them with better farming information and knowledge. Through these market development methods, homestead women prawn farmers will have increased yield of prawn which in turn will lead to increased income within their households. This will have an impact in the decision-making authority of women within their homes.

  1. Objectives

The overall objective of the project is to mainstream gender in prawn cultivation through creating access to information, knowledge, inputs and markets for the women farmers in order to achieve their economic empowerment. Specific objectives of this project are given below:

  1. Implement women integrated interventions in the prawn sector with potential actors from core value chain and support functions in the project area and facilitate effective linkage and working relationship to deliver project interventions.
  2. Understand the capacity and Identify capacity needs of the core actors in the system
  3. Develop a facilitation strategy to address the underlying constraints that prohibits women participation in prawn sector
  1. Scope of Work/ Major Intervention areas

The facilitation work allows the facilitator to facilitate linkage and capacity building activities around the market actors and the Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) to ensure women prawn farmers access to modern cultivation practices, inputs, credits and markets.In doing so, the facilitator work in four areas, as follows:

  1. To strengthenthe MFIs for improving the women prawn farmers’ access to information, input and market
  2. To strengthen the linkage between prawn nurseries and hatcheries for improving women prawn farmers’ access to quality HPL
  3. To promote women inclusive contract farming, and
  4. To influence PKSF/MRA (the apex body of the MFIs and the regulatory authority) for women inclusive programming

Thereby allowing women prawn farmers, to generate optimum profitability from homestead pond/gher and experience improved livelihood through improved access to and control over productive resources and participation in the decision-making process.

  1. Working Area

The proposed assignment primarily will focus on the major current and potential prawncultivating areas of the southern districts, but not to be limited to, Khulna, Bagerhat, Satkhira, Narail, Jessore, Jhenaidah, Bogra.

  1. Principles of Implementation

The co-facilitator will work as a practitioner of market development, aware of its temporary presence in the market and respecting the market development principles listed below.

  1. The facilitator must ground its work in a thorough understanding of market dynamics: the key issues in a market, why these are there, and what factors prevent market forces from triggering change.
  2. This understanding should be translated in a strategic framework specifying a clear vision for the market (where it should be heading, if interventions are effective) and a clear identification of intervention areas on which the facilitator should focus to make this vision become reality. Within those areas the co-facilitator will design specific interventions.
  3. The co-facilitator must continuously reassess the validity of its strategy for the market. Markets dynamics are subject to change and being engaged in a market should lead to further learning about the market and hence facilitation cannot be reduced to a linear process of planning and implementation
  4. Based on a thorough understanding of the market and on a thorough understanding of who has the right incentive to address the issues identified, the facilitator should identify entry points into the sector: private sector partners to work with or public institutions for policy related changes.
  5. Collaboration with a private sector partner must take the form of a ‘deal’, formalized in a contract/agreement. A deal with private sector partners will always be based on cost sharing and must contain a clear division of responsibility: where the private sector partner should take the lead and where the facilitator can provide technical support. “Each and Every contract” initiated by the co-facilitator must be formally vetted by the sector team; otherwise will be considered void.
  6. The facilitator should only assist a private sector partner in those areas where the private sector partner lacks the know how to work independently. Assistance should always be about engaging the private sector partner, work together with the private sector partner, give them exposure, make them learn and achieve. Assistance should never take the form of working on behalf of the private sector partner, even not to speed up the process. The pace of progress is to be determined by the private sector partner
  7. The facilitator should only assist the government sector partners in those areas where the lack efficiency in delivery or faces policy bottle necks, which hinder their service delivery. Assistance should be about engaging the government sector actors, give them exposure, make them learn and thereby achieve in terms of bringing about market driven changes in their service delivery. Assistance should never take the form of working on their behalf, not even to speed up the process, but rather it should be in the form of facilitating the changes and the pace of progress.
  1. Mode of Implementation

I)Co-facilitator Team Structure