Request for Proposals: Producer Unit Rescoping Pilot Full project Endline Evaluation Consultancy

Request for Proposals: Producer Unit Rescoping Pilot Full project Endline Evaluation Consultancy

Applications Deadline: 30th June 2025

Location: Global, with pilots in Telangana India and Punjab, Pakistan

Start Date: 1st August 2025

End Date: 28th February 2026

Description

Better Cotton is the world's largest cotton sustainability programme. Our mission: to help cotton communities survive and thrive, while protecting and restoring the environment. In difficult times, we are meeting the challenge head on. Through our network of field-level partners we have provided training on more sustainable farming practices to more than 2.9 million cotton farmers in 26 countries. More than a fifth of the world's cotton is now grown under the Better Cotton Standard and our membership network includes more than 2,400 members.

Background & Purpose

We are seeking proposals from skilled organisations interested in supporting Better Cotton with a full end of pilot evaluation of a structural, organisational pilot project that aimed to trial a new, landscape based approach to implementing the Better Cotton system at the farm level.

In smallholder and medium farm contexts, Better Cotton currently licenses at Producer Unit Level. A Producer Unit is a group of farmers – typically around 3000-3500 voluntarily participating cotton farmers in a smallholder context. This group is administered through a farmer list which names the participating farmers and includes some key data on those farmers (name, village name, total area of farmland, area under cotton cultivation, type of irrigation used, years within the producer unit, contact number, etc). This list is not only used by our Programme Partners to invite participants to capacity strengthening and training activities, but also for sampling for data to serve both auditing and monitoring, evaluation and learning purposes. In practice, however, there are many challenges with that list-based approach (like time and cost intensive efforts required for data collection, monitoring and maintaining large data sets, reporting data to better cotton in specific templates).

Under a Producer Unit Rescoping Project (PURE), the approach is tested whereas all cotton farming households within a defined geographic unit are to be considered as Better Cotton farmers, as opposed to a selected list-based approach.

The objectives of the PURE pilot are to improve the effectiveness of the overall Better Cotton programme by supporting more holistic, community-based approaches and hence ensure longer-term and more effective field-level sustainability impact. Such a change however requires key adjustments on how our programmatic, capacity strengthening, MEL and assurance teams operate. This is what these two pilot projects in 2 separate countries and set-up tested.

Scope of Work

We expect the consultancy to be carried out in a collaborative manner with the Better Cotton Team as well as with our Programme Partners in India and Pakistan who are implementing the pilot project.

The overall objective of the project evaluation are to:

-Evaluate project outcomes and objectives against the KPIs and baseline findings

-Identify the both the drivers of success and the challenges faced

-Compare the cost-effectiveness of the conceptual approaches with the actual ground implementation of the project

We thank all applicants for their interest; however only shortlisted applicants will be contacted.

Better Cotton is committed to good practice and transparency in the management of natural, human and financial resources. All applications will be reviewed under the principles and subject to Better Cotton's policies on equal opportunity, non-discrimination, anti-bribery & corruption and conflict of interest.