TOR
Local Economic Potential and Future scenarios
for the municipalities of
Jashore and Shibganj

Background

Swisscontact was established in 1959 as an independent organisation by prominent individuals from the worlds of commerce and science in Switzerland. It is exclusively involved in international cooperation and since 1961 has carried out its own and mandated projects. Since it was founded, Swisscontact has maintained close ties with the private sector. Currently, Swisscontact is active in 35 countries with a workforce of over 1,200 people, implementing 110 projects. The organisation is based in Zurich. Swisscontact concentrates on four core areas of private sector development:

  • Skills Development
  • SME Promotion
  • Financial Services
  • Resource Efficiency

The Swisscontact Bangladesh Office is based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. As per the Mission of Swisscontact, SARO has the mandate to develop and maintain the Foundation’s portfolio of development projects in South Asia. 

Prabriddhi – Local Economic Development (LED)

Bangladesh’s economy has been steadily growing over the last three decades with GDP growth rates above 5% for the last 10 years. The 7th FYP recognizes that the rural development has contributed significantly to this economic development and supported Bangladesh’s ambition to reach the status of “middle-income” country. However, not all regions of Bangladesh were able to benefit from the economic transformation. Decentralization was also an important element of the 7th FYP, correcting partially the unequal distribution of these benefits. Democratically elected Local Government Institutions (LGIs) at union, Upazilla and municipal level were expected to reinforce this trend. Since a few years however the decentralization process has slowed down, but new concepts such as Local Economic Development (LED) have entered the sphere of the local government mission. The LED approach helps select the best commodities / sectors according to the natural and human resources of given areas, revitalizing the decentralization process.  It is within this context that Prabriddhi has been designed.

Local Economic Development is indeed, the capacity of an urban or rural territory to create a competitive advantage for its enterprises through a broad set of activities and improve the economic well-being of its people and workers. LED is essentially participatory short-term planning, bottom-up designed, owned and delivered, relying on public-private collaboration with an iterative, transparent and open-ended process.

The Local Economic Development (LED) project, branded as Prabriddhi, funded by SDC and implemented by Swisscontact Bangladesh has started an 18-month long pilot or inception phase in August 2018 in two selected municipalities of Bangladesh, where it has two broad objectives:

  • test the capacity of municipality level institutions and the feasibility of the LED process through municipalities;
  • based on the pilot experiences, design a scale up phase of the project with a national level anchor.

Click here to download the full ToR

Deadline: 1 November 2018 before 5:00 pm