Slum Upgrading and Urban Regeneration Expert at UN-Habitat

Duties and Responsibilities
BACKGROUND

• The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-Habitat, is the United Nations agency for human settlements. It is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable communities, towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all. The main documents outlining the mandate of the organization are the Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements, Habitat Agenda, Istanbul Declaration on Human Settlements, the Declaration on Cities and Other Human Settlements in the New Millennium, and Resolution 56/206. Its activities contribute to the overall objective of the United Nations to reduce poverty and promote sustainable development within the context and the challenges of a rapidly urbanizing world.
• The overall aim of the assignment is to provide technical expertise on the successful implementation of the Participatory Slum Upgrading Programme (PSUP) in 79 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries and more than 160 cities, initiated by ACP Group of States and financed by the European Commission (EC). PSUP aims to triggering change to make a real difference in the lives of slum dwellers in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) regions and contribute to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG Target 11.1 as well as the implementation of the New Urban Agenda for inclusive and sustainable urbanization. PSUP seeks to tackle urban poverty through adaptive and pro-active measures and to enhance management of urbanization through assessment studies and strategic planning approaches for participatory and inclusive decision-making processes and up-scaled participatory slum upgrading.
• The PSUP is acknowledged for its approach aligned with the New Urban Agenda and the SDGs and tested in many ACP countries with many success stories, lessons to be learnt and opportunities for upscaling. In the past, globally often slum upgrading has been approached through a project-to-project basis and experience has shown that this approach is ineffective, because it rarely gained scale and/or replication. For making slum upgrading sustainable there is a current shift towards strategic and inclusive city-wide slum upgrading with pro-active measures which PSUP is implementing.

APPROACH

The Participatory Slum Upgrading Programme (PSUP) consists of six general programme criteria:

• Quality of the project design: the appropriateness of the suggested project objectives and underlying problems, the needs and priorities of the intended target groups and beneficiaries that the project is supposed to address and the adaptation to the physical and policy environment within it operates. This shall include the quality of the project preparation and design – the logic and completeness of the project planning process, and the internal logic and coherence of the project design.
• Achievement of the main objectives and effectiveness in the implementation of participatory slum upgrading projects: the assessment of expected results and impacts, including unintended ones, and then the comparison of intended and unintended consequences. The consequences shall be evaluated in relation to the overall goal and the objectives of the PSUP, and the respect countries'/cities' objectives.
• Efficiency of the implementation to date: to what extent funding, human, financial resources, regulatory, and/or administrative resources contributed to, or hindered, the achievement of the objectives and results. This also includes the ownership of the national and local governments to contribute to the programme implementation in line with national priorities and budgets.
• Sustainability of the effects: an analysis of the extent to which the results and impact are being, or are likely to be maintained over time, considering the multiplier effect of the planned slum upgrading activities and the extent to which the projects identified in PSUP are being or are likely to be financed and implemented (based also on the developed resource mobilization strategy).
• Key cross-cutting areas of interventions: for example, land, environment, gender, human rights, housing, basic urban services, urban planning, legislation, livelihoods and local economic development, inclusive governance etc. are combined and are taken care off in the programme design which leads to a strong project with multiplier effects.
• Coordination, complementation and coherence: the degree that the proposed pilot projects are coherent with national priorities and current efforts of the key local and national partners, with donors and EU policies and Member States, with the UN Country Teams, UNDAF and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers as well as UN-Habitat's Country Programme Documents (if in place). This shall include an assessment of the positioning of UN-Habitat within the overall context of donors in the field of urban development.
• The PSUP programme has come to an end with the closure of EC funds. Nevertheless, some countries are still maintaining activities supported by their own contribution to the programme. It will also be necessary to support other countries to raise some funds and develop additional projects in continuation of the PSUP but in a more transformative approach in the framework of the SDGs, the NUA and the Global Action Plan.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Under the guidance of the PSUP Programme Manager, below are the tasks of the consultant:

Research and technical work:

• Contribute to the review and formulation of integrated thematic as well as process-oriented guides for up-scaled participatory slum upgrading, with attention to Senegal, Mali, Madagascar, Cameroun, R. Congo, and potentially Guinea Conakry and Niger;
• Document approaches on community managed funds into a tool for replication;
• Conduct research and baseline studies on land management and tenure security in slums upgrading and adapt case studies for other countries;
• Document success stories on land readjustment, community mobilization, multisector coordination on financing slum upgrading and urban regeneration globally;
• Support implementation of land related projects in participating countries;

Slum upgrading activities implementation in Francophone Africa (Senegal, Mali, Madagascar, Cameroun, R. Congo, and potentially Guinea Conakry and Niger):

• Coordinate the implementation of slum upgrading activities and ensure timely delivery of all outputs until the end of the projects;
• Provide scaled technical work – revision of citywide strategy with land element integrated, slum upgrading and urban regeneration;
• Coordinate the implementation of the findings of the market studies
• Participate in missions to selected project countries, advise on designing, formulating and implementing up-scaling strategies at national and city levels;
• Contribute to the development of ToRs for multi-partner implementation frameworks aiming at having several partners engaged in the implementation of slump upgrading activities (national and local authorities, NGOs and CBOs, private sector -particularly local banks- academia and research and training institutions, international development partners and community structures);
• Contribute to technical work on citywide land management and tenure security as well as expertise to participatory land readjustment
• Resource mobilization efforts at country level – at least in 2 countries.
• Contribute to the reporting of the programme with focus on the selected countries, approaches and overall delivery of the programme

Qualifications/special skills

• Advanced University degree in a field relevant to development and urban planning, public policy, social sciences, international development, political science, or similar is required.
• A Bachelor’s degree with additional 2 years of qualifying experience in Slum Upgrading maybe accepted in lieu of Advanced University degree.
• A minimum of 5 years of international experience providing technical support and guidance to governments, non-governmental organizations, civil society and countries in the area of land, housing and shelter, slum upgrading and urban regeneration is required.

Languages

• Fluency in oral and written English and French is required.