The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) contracted IFPRI to conduct a study of agricultural value chain finance (AVCF) in Vietnam. With the support of VietED, we conducted a randomized control trial testing an AVCF model in Son La province among coffee farmers. A randomized group of farmers received an offer to borrow money from the Lin Viet Post Bank with specific features tailored to the coffee growing cycle, while a control group of farmers did not receive offers. The buyer that VietED worked with is the Phuc Sinh coffee company.

Unfortunately, the loan product was not in high demand. Only 31 loans were made among the farmers receiving the offer, and so it is unlikely to continue. There are several potential reasons that the loan product was not popular among farmers—coffee prices have been high, which might mean farmers didn’t require capital; interest rates were increasing during the beginning of 2023 when the primary loans were made, which might have been a deciding factor (especially as informal lenders may not have realized that formal interest rates were rising); it could be that there was a lack of trust among the farmers (though several local information sessions were held, and we offered loans to all village heads).

The project is ending in June 2024 and we require an endline survey to understand impacts on farmers. In a “normal” RCT, we would re-survey all farmers; however, with only a small number of loans, it does not make sense to conduct a survey that re-surveys all farmers.

We also recognize the need to do some learning around the lack of demand for these loans. Therefore, we want to conduct some qualitative work among farmers who were reached by the information sessions, but did not decide to obtain loans. Since the reasons are likely to be nuanced, we want to conduct qualitative work among these farmers, to help us better understand how to build agricultural finance products in the future that might be in more demand. As such, this project could be of use to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, which is mandated to guide Viet Nam towards more sustainable agricultural production patterns, and it is likely that finance is necessary to do so.

Hence, we want to conduct the following activities to constitute the project endline:

1. 1. A short quantitative survey among a matched sample of approximately 75 farmers. These farmers would have also been surveyed during the baseline, and are in the villages of A, B,C, D, E,and F. The survey will be much shorter than the baseline survey conducted in 2022, and will focus on measurable outcomes.
   2. In the same villages, use lists of treatment groups (the groups that were offered loans) to develop small, ideally mixed gender focus groups to understand the factors that hindered loan take-up.
   3. Conduct a set of key informant interviews—including village heads, DARD officials, bank loan officials, and Phuc Sinh personnel—to help us develop an understanding of how they perceive prospects for agricultural finance in the relatively near future. We expect between 6 and 10 key informant interviews.

We seek an organization to conduct these activities. All of them are expected to be conducted in person, and as such field work plans should include protocols to mitigate the possible spread of COVID-19, including any of the following if appropriate: facemasks, distancing, outdoor interviews when possible, vaccination of survey staff if feasible, and possible testing of survey staff especially if coming from other areas.

A. The selected organization would be expected to perform the following tasks:

1. 1. Quantitative Survey
      • Provide comments on the survey developed by the IFPRI team, and translate the survey into Vietnamese.
      • Assist with obtaining IRB/research ethics approval from a Vietnamese ethics committee.
      • Program survey for electronic (phone or tablet based) data collection, and test programming
      • Hire and train enumerators, and conduct a small pilot as part of the survey
      • Conduct survey; sample list will be provided by IFPRI.
      • Clean data, provide final data and include discussion of survey work in final report.
   2. Qualitative Survey
      • Work with IFPRI to develop guides for focus groups and key informant interviews
      • Hire and train any enumerators necessary for qualitative survey work
      • Work with IFPRI on sampling for focus groups and to develop list of key informants
      • Transcribe, enter and translate data from qualitative survey into English
      • Include at least light analysis of findings from qualitative work in final report

B. Deliverables

1. 1. Quantitative survey
      • a. Final translated quantitative survey instrument
      • b. Programmed survey instrument
      • c. Raw dataset following survey conclusion
      • d. Cleaned quantitative dataset
   2. Qualitative survey
      • a. Final translated interview guides for focus groups and key informant interviews
      • b. Translated data from qualitative interviews
   3. Overall report
      • a. Short section on quantitative survey including list of households attempted, all attempts to contact, and any attrition from sample, including reasons; timing of survey; any observations about challenges or issues that arose during data collection
      • b. Section including details about the qualitative work, e.g. how it was completed, who was interviewed, etc., and some brief analysis of the qualitative data

C. Firm Qualifications

1. 1. The firm must have the ability to collect data in Vietnam.
   2. The firm must have experience collecting household survey data using electronic data collection, preferably with experience with agricultural households in the north of Vietnam.
   3. Experience in Son La province with ethnic minority households is preferred.
   4. Experience collecting household surveys for research projects is preferred.

D. Response to TOR

Please send a short proposal that includes plans for undertaking the survey work, an estimated timeline, and COVID-19 protocols, a proposed budget, and qualifications of the main team members in response to this Terms of Reference.

E. Timing

We do not anticipate the fieldwork taking a long time (e.g. more than two weeks), but it is important that it take place by the end of March for project finalization purposes.

Application Deadline: January 12, 2024