Overview : Planning plays an important role for service delivery and local development and since 2013 a number of initiatives has been taken to improve participation and people centered development. The overarching national framework for sectorial planning is the “National Comprehensive Development Plan” (NCDP). The NCDP takes a 20-year perspective and will be implemented in four successive 5-year Development Plans (DP). It’s undertaken by the Ministry of National Planning and Economic Development (MNPED), which is the central coordinating body for policy, planning, programming and budgeting. Over the past years, several initiatives of village and village tract level planning have been undertaken by different project and organizations, the most significant, in terms of financial volume and coverage being the National Community Driven Development program (NCDDP) implemented by the Department for Rural Development with support from the World Bank. An important challenge in the fast changing institutional and organizational landscape of the public sector in Myanmar, is to find ways and means of linking the national and state level policy and plans with the planning processes at the local level (township and below) and such a way that implementation at township level is based on local priorities yet contributes to national/state level objectives. To date little has been done to link, bottom-up, village and village tract level planning to the township level as well as higher level planning processes. The limited institutional coordination – vertical as well as horizontal - makes it difficult to get a comprehensive picture of both size and operations of public sector service delivery within a township. Another challenge in the context of local planning is the townships’ lack of experience and limited capacity in facilitating broader participation in development planning. Procedures and systems have not been developed sufficiently for establishing a comprehensive and integrated development planning process. Overall, the current framework of township planning, coordination of the committees, cross-sectoral coordination and management, needs to be further strengthened and integrated. From a strategic planning purpose the lack of overview of the total annual investments in a township (all capital and recurrent investments from both Union and state/region level budgets) is a challenge for inclusiveness and equity as well as policy development. A third challenge is institutionalization and operationalization of citizen’s participation in lieu of local representative governments. The township and village tract level committees established in 2013 (Township Development Support committee, Township Municipal Affairs committee and Village tract development support committee) foresee elected members representing citizens and interest groups. In reality those committees are often not representative and sometimes mistrusted by the citizens. The assignment UNDP now envisages builds on past work at the township level and the initiated reforms, with a view to prototype a more participatory and integrated way of township planning, that will allow learning by doing, will produce better consolidated and responsive township plans and will allow for drawing of lessons learnt that can support the policy direction the new government wish to take. On the bases of concrete support to planning processes in 2-3 townships that already benefit from the CDD program and with the aim to subject, as much as possible, the available discretional funds available at the township level to one planning process that also is responsive to request form lower levels, the UNDP will distill lessons for policy dialogue and up-scaling. Results will practically support policy considerations of the government of Myanmar for further decentralization of part of its service delivery functions to the local (township) level. NOTE: Proposal should be submitted to the Procurement Unit, UNDP Myanmar via email to bids.mm@undp.org no later than 17:00 hrs on Monday, 9 May 2016. Any request for clarification must be sent in writing, or by standard electronic communication to ei.cho.nyunt@undp.org . Procurement Unit will respond in writing or by standard electronic mail and will send written copies of the response, including an explanation of the query without identifying the source of inquiry, to all consultants. |