The Royal Government of Cambodia has undertaken a series of broad-based reforms aimed at strengthening and diversifying the productive sector base and achieving economic/trade-related competitiveness growth. These strategic objectives are enshrined in the national development agenda, articulated by the Rectangular Strategy IV, the National Strategy Development Plan (2019-2023), the Cambodia Trade Integration Strategy Update (2019-2023), and the Cambodia e-commerce strategy which has been launched in November 2020. A common thread running through these policy instruments is the recognition of E-commerce as a driver of private sector growth, both from a domestic-market and international trade perspective.

The potential for e-commerce development is significant in Cambodia, promising to diversify the economy, provide new jobs, and increase financial inclusion, as well as contributing to improved lives and livelihoods. Cambodia has considerable advantages that could be leveraged to create ICT jobs and benefit the national economy. Yet E-commerce is relatively undeveloped compared to Cambodia’s neighbors and has not yet contributed to export diversification despite its potential in particular for agricultural commodities, handicrafts, and garments.

Some important considerations have been noticeably constrained the future growth in this sector, though. SMEs, in general, face a lot of challenges ranging from the lack of proper status, high transaction costs, to uncertainty related to incentives and regulations, and particularly e-commerce firms, IT start-ups and other segments in newly emerging areas. Remarkably, access to finance is reportedly the most burdensome and challenging for SMEs to find in the formal lending sector.

In this context, UNDP in collaboration with co-financing support from the Ministry of Commerce, Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF) and Khmer Enterprise jointly implementing a key components of Cambodia’s e-commerce acceleration project (Go4eCam) that aims to boost domestic and international opportunities for small and medium enterprises through a digital platform. Under this component, there are two initiatives: the MSMEs Incubation on Digitalisation Programme and the Innovation Challenge Programme. The Incubation programme focuses on improving the basic functionalities and capabilities of MSMEs in their entrepreneurship to uptake the e-commerce solution to sell online domestically and internationally. Meanwhile, the Innovation Challenge will offer 70 awards, with a maximum prize of up to USD 5,000 per awardee, through the Innovation Challenge modality aiming at helping those MSMEs with no and little access to formal lending and to demonstrate the benefits the SMEs could gain by going digital and by doing so, they could reach out to wider markets and clientele.

Regarding the implementation status, the Innovation Challenge programme runs in two cohorts. Cohort 1 has completed the selection process by identifying 30 awardees, who will take three months to complete their innovation projects. During their project implementation, the awardees will receive tailored business mentoring sessions, business-to-business webinar with the focus on cross-border e-commerce, and online trainings on e-commerce. In parallel, cohort 2 is calling for application until 15th May. It is expected that the remain 40 awardees will be identified through a complete selection process by the time the contract is onboarded.

To take this initiative forward, UNDP is currently seeking an International Consultant to provide further technical support to the implementation of the Innovation Challenge programme.

Through close coordination with UNDP’s Technical/Project Coordinator, the successfully selected consultant will be leading an Innovation Challenge initiative and working alongside with a UNDP’s recruited National Consultant in implementing this initiative adopting to UNDP Innovation Challenge modality, following a sequence of but not limited to the main activities as below,

1. With support from a National Consultant, lead the execution of innovative challenge following the agreed workplan, including but not limited to,

• Update the implementation workplan for the innovation challenge of both cohort 1 and cohort 2 in close consultation with UNDP technical team
• Develop a mentoring plan, including matching mentees-mentors, topics to be provided, and timeline. One mentee should meet with at least two different mentors on at least two priority topics based on their identified innovation project.
• Coordinate key experts to provide mentoring to the selected awardees based on their proposed innovation projects
• Develop a concept note for and conduct two business-to-business webinars as part of the implementation stage of the Innovation Challenge cohort 1 and cohort 2 respectively. The concept note should also include a proposed agenda, key topics/themes, national and/or international experts for each topic
• Establish partnership building with different experts, key players in e-commerce ecosystem to provide support Innovation Challenge Awardees.
• Review and coordinate contractual award agreements between awardees and UNDP. The contract review should carefully consider if the proposed deliverables are feasible and practically achievable.
• Review and finalise the Due Diligence report drafted by the National Consultant
• Work with UNDP communication team in close consultation with UNDP project team, MoC and KE to develop media contents using appropriate communication channels, including public discussions session to promote the visibility of the programme
• Organize and coordinate the relevant activities of the programme including public presentation and online training
• Review the selection report of Innovation Challenge cohort II (to be prepared by the National Consultant) documenting all the evaluation steps and scoring results to inform the Innovation Challenge committee to award the winners.
• Provide regular update status of all activity progresses and challenges to UNDP
• Coordinate and monitor the implementation of mentoring sessions conducting by mentors to selected SMEs based on the signed agreement and ToR between UNDP and SMEs with regularly update to UNDP, MoC and KE teams.
• Participate and provide inputs in monthly coordination meeting between UNDP and MoC/KE and other technical meeting platforms as relevant to the programme.

2. Produce a written final report upon completion of each cohort of Innovative Challenge of the Acceleration of Ecommerce and SMEs formalization (max 10 pages), describing the methodology, key achievements, list of stakeholders involved in programme, measurements against set KPIs, and the recommendation/suggestions/lessons learned that lead to improvement for the second cohort.

Interested offeror must read the Individual Consultant (IC) Procurement Notice, which can be viewed at https://procurement-notices.undp.org/view_notice.cfm?notice_id=90942 for more detail information about term of reference, instructions to offeror, and to download the documents to be submitted in the offer through online.

• Analytical skills, knowledge of SMEs or private sector ecosystem
• Strong analytical mind and understanding of business-related requirements and constraints, with a focus on addressing them through training and capacity development measures
• Ability to establish and maintain partnership and to work as a team with government partners, private sector, business association, and other relevant parties/development donors
• Be able to communicate with different stakeholders
• Ability to adapt to different circumstances and to changes in internal and external environments

Education:

• At least Bachelor’s degree in business administration, innovation and entrepreneurship, management, ecommerce, economic, or other related fields

Experiences:

• Minimum 2 years of combined working experience on entrepreneurship training programme, innovation challenge programme, digitalization, and ecommerce and other related fields.
• Proven experience in managing project activities and coordinating similar programmes for new start-up or SMEs, events organization, communications management, and partnerships building with entrepreneurs and stakeholders.
• Proven experience in providing or coordinating SMEs training and startup programme related to e-commerce SMEs
• Prior experience working with and coordinating with UN agencies, Government institutions, private sector or NGOs on similar assignment is an asset.

Language Requirements:

• Written and spoken English

Please be informed that we don’t accept application submitted via email.

 Interested individual offeror must submit the following documents/information to demonstrate their qualifications:

 1. Proposal: Letter of explaining why they are most suitable for the work

2. Financial proposal (Duly accomplished Letter of Confirmation of Interest and Availability using the template provided by UNDP)

3. Personal CV including past experience in similar projects and at least 3 references

Interested Offerors are required to submit application via UNDP jobsite system as the application screening and evaluation will be done through UNDP jobsite system. Please note that UNDP jobsite system allows only one uploading of application document, so please make sure that you merge all your documents into a single file. Your on-line applications submission will be acknowledged where an email address has been provided. If you do not receive an e-mail acknowledgement within 24 hours of submission, your application may not have been received. In such cases, please resubmit the application, if necessary. Please combine all your documents into one (1) single PDF document as the system only allows to upload maximum one document.

 Any request for clarification/additional information on this procurement notice shall be communicated in writing to UNDP office or send to email chanpisey.ky@undp.org and cc procurement.kh@undp.org . While the Procurement Unit would endeavor to provide information expeditiously, only requests receiving at least 5 working days prior to the submission deadline will be entertained. Any delay in providing such information will not be considered as a reason for extending the submission deadline. The UNDP's response (including an explanation of the query but without identifying the source of inquiry) will be posted in Individual Consultant (IC) Procurement Notice page as provided above. Therefore, all prospective Offerors are advised to visit the page regularly to make obtain update related to this Individual Consultant (IC) Procurement Notice