Supply And Logistics Specialist at United Nations

Context
UNICEF East and Southern Africa (ESReginal office have the oversight role and responsibility for 21 countries with multiple challenges and complexity levels. The complexities include the fact that the countries in region have different income levels from middle to low income countries, from sessional to chronic emergencies as well as from man-made emergency to natural disasters. In addition to level 3 emergency due to Global COVID-19 pandemic, countries in ESA region are also dealing with other level 2 emergency i.e Southern Madagascar due to drought and level 3 emergencies i.e Northern Ethiopia due to conflict. Countries in the various emergency levels require additional supports from the regional office. UNICEF ESA regional office has prioritized below key strategic intervention areas for 2022-2025 for the region:

• Supply the work of Governments of ESA countries to increase the COVAX roll out.
• Supply countries demand planning and forecasting to ensure effectiveness to avoid wastage; improve sourcing of PPEs, syringes to match the planning of COVID -19 vaccines.
• Support the strengthening of the Government capacity building efforts to improve the Governments supply systems for effectiveness.
• Undertaking capacity gap analysis of the bottlenecks to efficient distribution of COVID vaccines in the ESA countries.
• The Supply Section at UNICEF ESARO is seeking donor support for the funding of a volunteer position for 2022 to provide critical support for the accelerated implementation of the COVID-19 Vaccine roll out in the ESA countries. The volunteer will support the Supply Section’s ability to ensure positive results for children in the ESAR ensuring the procurement of quality critical supplies, logistics for both regular and emergency countries.

Task description

• Under the direct supervision of the Regional Chief of Supply and Procurement, the VOLUNTEER will undertake among others the following tasks:
• Support country offices (COs) in COVID-19 vaccine procurement processes, including demand forecasting/planning and monitoring of vaccine(s) procured through the CO-VAX facility;
• In close collaboration with Health sections and other UN agencies, and based on the identified need, support COs to strengthen the supply and cold chain Management lo-gistics for the effective deployment of COVID-19 vaccines.
• Liaise with UNICEF Health section and Supply Division to support the vaccine logistics teams at COs and in Ministries of Healths (MOHs) to streamline Planning, ordering, ar-rival of vaccine, storage, distribution and consumables (e.g. reverse logistics supplies, AD syringes, safety boxes, finger markers etc.) through international or national pro-curement and shipment mechanisms.
• Support Governments MOHS to enhance capacity for proper storage and stock moni-toring/Management of vaccines and consumables.
• In collaboration with the COs, support the engagement with MoH to apply appropriate logistical strategies (e.g. pre-positioning) to ensure vaccines equity especially in hard to reach locations.
• Support UNICEF work in technical working groups on logistics and follow up on action points related to Supply and Logistics on Vaccines and cold chain Management
• Undertake travel to National, County and Sub County level EPI facilities to monitor vaccines as and when required.
• Provide frequent and regular updates/reports to the COVAX coordination team on all aspects of COVID-19 Vaccines Logistics and Supply and contribute updates for situa-tion reports.
• Support COVAX response review assessment teams with information pertaining to Supply and Logistics cold chain aspects of the response.
• Conduct Covid-19 supplies end user monitoring in collaboration with Governments MOHs; including monitoring and tracking the expiry of vaccines in countries to avoid wastage.