The Lao PDR Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) has been designed to support the central, provincial and district authorities in the effective promotion, regulation and enforcement of foreign, domestic and public investments. Main target areas include governance of natural resources (SDG 15), poverty reduction (SDG 1), enhancing development of human capital (SDG 8), minimizing impact on the environment (SDG 15), adapting to climate change (SDG13), promoting clean energy investment (SDG7), supporting a diversified economy and providing a fair distribution of benefits to the population (SDG 5), and promoting partnership through knowledge exchange (SDG17).

Initiated in 2009, the PEI programme has transformed into what the government now calls the “PEI approach” that addresses poverty reduction and environmental protection by supporting the Government’s national socio-economic planning and strategy formulation processes. The programme also focused on building investment regulatory tools and the knowledge to assess, measure and enforce financial, social and environmental obligations of developers. Another aspect includes strengthening Lao PDR’s National Assembly’s ability to deliver their constitutional oversight role on investment quality.

The Improving Quality Investment for Achieving Sustainable Development Goals in Lao PDR (June 2018 – May 2020) will build on the package of tools already established by the PEI Programme while further expanding the PEI’s Approach and tools to other important institutions that play a role in investment regulatory compliance. The objective of the project is to strengthen coordination of government’s regulatory capacity to coordinate and promote higher quality investment, improvement the ease-of-doing business, transparency, accountability, and effectiveness of investment management for achieving the sustainable development goals in Lao PDR.

National Consultant will responsible for developing investment compliance database concept, support the recruitment of the consultancy firm to develop investment database, periodically monitoring the development of the database and final check the database function to ensure the smooth and quality of the database.

Under the overall supervision of the National Project Director, UNDP Project Analyst, the local consultant will perform the following tasks:

• Conducts desk review and data collection to study the existing monitoring mechanism of different government agencies such as Investment Promote Department, Ministry of Energy and Mine, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Environment and Natural Resource, and other relevant agencies. Targeting investment concession projects in every main investment sectors;
• Develops the sustainable and practical investment joint monitoring mechanism which involve all relevant government agencies led by Investment Promotion Department. The mechanism envisages the guideline of conducting effective monitoring, monitoring form, monitoring report template and other essential components. The monitoring mechanism should consider the ability to be replicated at provincial level;
• Conducts training on the investment join monitoring to the government officials, and led the pilot of joint monitoring base on the developed mechanism;
• Reviews and enhance the reporting template and reporting mechanism for the investors to report their implementation for IPD;
• Provides guidance and advise on developing monitoring function in investment compliance database both site-monitoring and reports from investors base on the monitoring report and report template; 

The consultant is expected to deliver the followings outputs in Lao and English.

• The sustainable joint monitoring mechanisms including step-by-step how to prepare and conduct effective joint monitoring (pre-mission preparation to reporting step after mission);
• Monitoring Form;
• Reporting template;
• Training on the monitoring mechanism;
• Pilot Joint monitoring and report