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UNICEF is the world’s largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, ...
Job Number: 528214
Locations: Africa: Kenya
Work Type : Temporary Appointment
For every child, opportunity
The Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO) provides oversight, quality assurance and technical assistance to 21 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa. Additionally, ESARO builds partnerships and generates evidences to support UNICEF programming in the region and the wider global education community.
Under the cross-cutting element – adolescent skills and employability - of the pillars of ESARO Education Section’s work, the Regional Office will focus on supporting Country Offices to accelerate programming on adolescent skills and employability and to enhance more integrated and robust second decade programming in the region.
How can you make a difference?
Under the general supervision of the Regional Education Adviser, the Education Specialist is expected to provide solid technical assistance, quality assurance and knowledge building to ESAR countries to support the improvement and acceleration of adolescent skills and employability in the region, including strong integrated adolescent programming at secondary-age education, STEM opportunities and alternative pathways, particularly for out-of-school adolescents.
Major duties and responsibilities:
Key expected results:
To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…
For every Child, you demonstrate...
UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, and Accountability (CRITA) and core competencies in Communication, Working with People and Drive for Results.
The functional competencies required for this post are Leading & Supervising, Formulating Strategies & Concepts, Analyzing, Relating & Networking, Deciding & Initiating Action, and Applying Technical Expertise.
TERMS OF REFERENCE FOR INDIVIDUAL CONTRACTORS/ CONSULTANTS
Background and Justification
UNICEF is increasingly working with governments to make public resources work better for children in the Eastern and Southern Africa region (ESAR). Under the programme stream known as public finance for children (PF4C), UNICEF’s engagement can be broadly organized into three areas:
Much of the work centers around measuring and monitoring government investment, mainly through the use of budget briefs. In 2015, UNICEF’s Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa (ESARO) began encouraging country offices to develop budget briefs. Through the region-wide initiative, the number of budget briefs produced increased significantly. While just two country offices produced a total of six briefs in fiscal year 2015, this included 19 offices and around 90 briefs in fiscal year 2018. Reflecting the utility and impact of these products, the Regional Priorities (2018-21) formalized the requirement for all offices to develop annual budget briefs as a minimum standard to support engagement in public financial management (PFM) processes.This recommendation is also endorsed by the RMT. All published briefs are available on the ESARO budget brief website.
While budget briefs now routinely cover child protection, education, health, social protection and WASH sectors, very little work has been done on nutrition. To date, only three offices have attempted to develop budget briefs for nutrition. These include Tanzania in 2016, Angola in 2018 and Malawi in 2019.
At the same time, there have been very few attempts to measure spending on nutrition using other public finance tools in ESAR. For example, UNICEF Tanzania recently published a Public Expenditure Review (PER) of nutrition in 2018, which was only the second PER ever conducted globally on nutrition – the first was also supported by UNICEF Tanzania in 2014. At the same time, only a limited number of governments have produced rapid nutrition budget analyses through the Scaling up Nutrition (SUN) Movement. Further, the existing reports are not actionable, since they present very scant information and analysis of investment trends and do not offer recommendations for improving the transparency, impact or amount of resources directed to nutrition services.
The lack of routine measurement of investment in nutrition is especially worrisome given the increasing malnutrition levels facing children in the region. Based on the latest available estimates, more than one out of every three children in ESAR are stunted, on average, which affects close to 30 million children.[1] Given the severe impacts of malnutrition on children, and the critical role of government investment in addressing the underlying challenges, it is an urgent priority to develop a tool that can be readily used by UNICEF and partners to routinely monitor investment in and progress on nutrition.
Annual Work Plan, Objectives and Deliverables
Annual work plan areas covered
This consultancy will support the following components of the regional 2019 Annual Work plan:
Nutrition DE Key deliverable #2 “At least 5 regional strategies, plans, guidance and frameworks for accelerated stunting reduction are developed and/or up-dated” and
Nutrition GRP Key deliverable # 3 “At least 4 knowledge products are developed including innovative approaches, good practice and lessons learned, and their results are disseminated”.
Objectives
Under the guidance and oversight of the Nutrition Specialist and the Social Policy Specialist in ESARO, the overall objective of this assignment is to develop budget brief guidelines for the nutrition sector. Specific objectives include:
Develop a methodology for conducting a rapid nutrition budget analysis: This will begin with a comprehensive desk review of existing public finance tools and guidelines that assess investment in nutrition. Among others, this will include the budget briefs and PERs developed by UNICEF (as mentioned earlier), the SUN three-step approach to nutrition budget analysis and country reports, World Bank related documentation and those of other partners available and globally. The review will summarize the methodological approaches used to identify different types of nutrition spending, the structure of presenting the information, the specific types of figures and tables that are produced, and the recommendations that are offered. A proposal will then be developed based on this information. This should address key issues, such as:
Draft nutrition budget brief guidelines and companion Excel template: The consultant will incorporate and adapt the information from the agreed proposal into the structure of UNICEF ESARO’s budget brief guidelines for other sectors. With the assistance of the social policy team in ESARO, the consultant will also develop a draft Excel-based tool that will be used to produce all figures for the budget brief.
Test the draft guidelines and Excel template in two ESAR countries: The consultant will travel to and work with the nutrition and social policy teams in two country offices that have already requested TA support from ESARO as part of the Compact requests to develop a nutrition budget brief.
Finalize the guidelines and Excel template: Based on the experiences and lessons from the two country applications, the consultant will update and finalize the guidelines and the Excel template.
Desired competencies, technical background and experience
Administrative issues
The Consultant will work remotely and will perform all tasks using her/his own computer. Travel will be expected to Nairobi during the inception period for 3 days and to 2 Countries in ESARO region (Zimbabwe and Madagascar) for a total of 10 days of travel for both trips.
Conditions
The contract will be established for 50 working days over a period of 7 months. She/he will be jointly supervised by the Nutrition Specialist and Social Policy Specialist in ESARO. As per UNICEF DFAM policy, payment is made against approved deliverables. No advance payment is allowed unless in exceptional circumstances against bank guarantee, subject to a maximum of 30 per cent of the total contract value in cases where advance purchases, for example for supplies or travel, may be necessary. The candidate selected will be governed by and subject to UNICEF’s General Terms and Conditions for individual contracts.
Background and Justification
An Evaluability Assessment (EA) is being led by UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO)’s Evaluation Section, in support of UNICEF ESARO’s Public and Private Partnership (PPP) Team to assess the extent to which their Business for Results (B4R) and other private sector engagement activities and approaches can be evaluated in a meaningful, credible and reliable way. The regional PPP Team aims to develop regional private sector engagement/partnerships as well as support country offices, in building and managing private sector engagement/partnerships that generate meaningful impact and results for child rights. Such partnerships have financial and non-financial components and are developed in close coordination with country offices, regional sections and relevant headquarters (HQ) teams. In order to achieve high impact and high return-on-investment partnerships, the regional PPP Team provides capacity strengthening to country offices and holds a light oversight role. The regional PPP Team is particularly interested in increasing the evaluability to answer the following question: what is the non-financial value of private partnerships, and how do we measure their contributions to achieving results in child rights?
The regional PPP Team’s work is guided by the UNICEF Private Sector IMPACT Plan 2018-2021 (the IMPACT Plan), as well as the newly developed Business for Results (B4R) approach. The IMPACT Plan was developed in support of UNICEF Strategic Plan 2018-2021 and in recognition that the private sector plays a crucial role in UNICEF’s ability to deliver results for children (in raising revenue and making progress on child rights agenda). The IMPACT Plan is led by the Division of Private Fundraising and Partnerships (PFP) at UNICEF Headquarters (HQ) and lays out a vision and key strategies for private sector fundraising and partnerships across UNICEF. In parallel, support for the Strategic Plan and the IMPACT Plan, UNICEF developed a key corporate approach Business for Results (B4R) in 2018 that recognizes the business sector’s growing role in impact on children and families and in achievement of outcomes for children and the SDGs. B4R looks to go beyond engagement and partnership with private sector for resource mobilization and procurement – it seeks for systematic and strategic engagement of businesses to maximize their power and potential in accelerating programmatic progress and to bring a new dimension of expertise, innovation and impact at scale.
B4R and related private sector engagement approaches will be at the centre of this EA. The regional PPP team’s role in B4R is to support country offices (COs) in determining how to engage with business programmatically and promote business respect and support for child rights for the larger purpose of enhancing programme effectiveness and achieving positive outcomes for children. Through this Evaluability Assessment and following evaluations, the regional PPP Team hopes to explicitly identify and gather data on non-financial value-add of private partnerships (i.e. beyond their monetary contributions); and use the information gathered to strategically engage the private sector and strengthen the role and contribution of private sector engagement in promoting child rights and making progress on UNICEF’s agendas and programmes.
The B4R approach is in its early stages of operationalization and it is an opportune time to conduct an EA. The intention of this EA is to strategically embed evaluative thinking in B4R’s planning and implementation, to strengthen its results-based management and promote evidence-driven decision-making. Findings from the EA can be used to support planning and enable the regional PPP Team to establish systems and mechanisms to collect meaningful data from early stages. Furthermore, EA findings can support the PPP Team in developing a consistent and harmonious approach when guiding the COs on how to be more strategic in engaging private sector and how to integrate private partnerships from planning stages to the end of programme cycles.
Onboarding a consultant to conduct this EA in line with an upcoming training on private sector engagement in February 2020 being held for the staff of ESARO and Kenya CO can also strengthen UNICEF ESARO’s thinking on evaluability. Introducing evaluation during this training can provide attendees with a foundation to integrate evaluation in their private sector engagement from early stages, further increasing coherence and streamlining of evaluation activities and key indicators across the region.
Most importantly, the EA will allow the regional PPP Team to adjust the operationalization of B4R as needed to ensure availability of relevant data and build capacity to establish evaluations to systematically determine the non-financial value of private partnerships and assess how private sector engagement contributes to child rights.
Scope of Work
The purpose of this EA is to assess, and provide recommendations on, the extent to which the B4R initiative and related private sector engagement approaches can be readily and reliably measured, monitored and evaluated, particularly in relation to their non-financial value and contribution in achieving UNICEF’s programmatic results and promoting child rights.
The findings from this EA will be used to make clear and strengthen the UNICEF ESARO’s PPP Team’s monitoring and evaluation goals and agendas in relation to the B4R and related private sector engagement approaches and increase evaluation readiness by identifying necessary conditions required to collect quality and meaningful evaluation data to inform future programming and decision-making.
The UNICEF ESARO’s PPP Team is the primary users of the EA findings; however, the EA findings will also be of benefit to the Regional Management Team (RMT) and CO PPP staff in ESAR. In addition, the findings and lessons learned from this EA and future evaluations can be shared at the global (e.g. the PFP Division in HQ) and regional (e.g. PPP teams in other regions) levels to inform their evaluations and evidence generating activities.
Objective 1: Assess the clarity, relevance and coherence of the B4R initiative and related private sector engagement approaches, including its Theory of Change (ToC) and its alignment to the ESAR context and UNICEF Strategic Plan.
Objective 2: Assess the availability, adequacy and validity of the indicators, tools and systems for monitoring, measuring and verifying results.
Objective 3: Assess the conduciveness of context and adequacy of resources and capacity, including but not limited to human and financial resources, to meet the expected results.
Objective 4: Provide guidance and recommendations on tools and approaches to support the evaluation of the B4R and related private sector engagement approaches with a view to measure results for children.
The EA will focus on the evaluability of B4R (as the primary private sector engagement approach). However, the EA will also explore any precursors of B4R as well as other private sector engagement approaches similar to B4R used by external agencies (e.g. other UN agencies, international NGOs, etc.), in consultation with the regional PPP Team.
The EA will take a regional scope of covering the Eastern and Southern Africa Region with an understanding that a number of COs (to be determined by the regional PPP Team) may be consulted or involved to get an understanding of how COs have integrated the B4R and related approaches in their programmes, as well as to get a direction on how best the regional PPP Team can support COs in operationalizing B4R and in increasing evaluability at the country level.
Lastly, the EA will assess how key cross-sectoral priorities, sustainability, equity, innovation, gender equality and humanitarian action, can be integrated into the B4R and related private sector engagement approaches and their future evaluations.
The evaluability assessment will be managed by the Evaluation Section of UNICEF EASARO and will be conducted in close collaboration with the regional PPP Team. This approach has the objective to actively promote (i) ownership, (ii) instill evaluative thinking in planning and implementation, and (iii) accountability for results in relation to the evaluations of B4R and related private sector engagement approaches.
The evaluability assessment will involve discussions with key internal and external stakeholders including RMT, CO PPP staff and PFP Division at HQ and other development agencies, as well as an extensive desk review of key documents. This review will cover Theory of change, results frameworks and other sources of information. This review will culminate into drawing of conclusions and making recommendations.
The EA will be conducted over the course of 30 days, between February and May 2020. The assignment will require travel to Nairobi on two occasions, once during the inception phase (5 days in Kenya) and once during the validation phase (3 days in Kenya).
Background and Justification
Dadaab Refugee camp was first established in 1991 to accommodate refugees fleeing civil conflict in Somalia. A second influx of asylum seekers arrived in 2011, when over 130,000 Somalis left their homes due to devastating drought and famine. In April 2016 the Government announced that Dadaab Refugee Camp would be closed. A tripartite agreement between the Government of Kenya, Federal Government of Somalia and UNHCR was signed to guide organized, dignified and voluntary return to Somalia. Between 2016 and April 2019, nearly 78,874 (50% female) refugees have voluntarily repatriated from Kenya to Somalia. During this period, an unknown number of refugees also left Dadaab for Somalia spontaneously without participating in the voluntary repatriation procedure (without the facilitation of UNHCR and the Government).
Due to continued insecurity in Somalia a number of Somalis have become internally displaced or have crossed the border to Kenya. The suspension of registration and refugee status determination procedures for all nationalities, including Somalis seeking refuge in Dadaab, has resulted in the non-registration of asylum seekers in Dadaab. UNHCR and partners estimate that as of 1st July 2019, there are over 15,302 unregistered asylum seekers in Dadaab, 62% children. Non-registration and suspension of refugee status determination procedures has exposed children to multiple vulnerabilities and limits the extent of services such children are able to access. Child protection partners have reported that unregistered children are sometimes compelled to work (child labour) to survive. Some of the unregistered children are fostered by relatives and clan members who are equally constrained due to inadequate resources such as food and shelter.
In view of the above, UNICEF foresees the need to better understand the risks and vulnerabilities faced by unregistered children in Dadaab, with a view to make evidence-based recommendations on how the situation of these children can be addressed to inform advocacy strategies that, in collaboration with UNHCR and other partners, can be used for high level engagement with relevant Government authorities.
UNICEF would like to recruit a qualified consultant to develop the methodology and to undertake the assessment of the situation of un-registered children in Dadaab.
Scope of the work
The main objective of this assessment is to deepen understanding and knowledge on the needs of unregistered children in Dadaab refugee camp to inform the response plan that is evidence-based, participatory and in the best interest of children.
Based on the assessment, the consultant will also develop an advocacy strategy for advocacy for unregistered children targeting government, donors and other stakeholders.
Achieving the above will require the consultant to:
Under the overall guidance of the Chief, Child Protection, and the technical support of the Child Protection in Emergencies Specialist, the Consultant is to achieve the below outputs/deliverables:
Payment Schedule
Required qualifications, desired competencies, technical background and experience
Education
Relevant Experience
The consultant should demonstrate at least five years of relevant experience in:
Additional Knowledge of the consultant
The consultant should demonstrate understanding of:
Child protection system in Kenya (including in Dadaab refugee camp would be an advantage).
Competencies of consultant
Skills
Ability to write for a general audience of government policy makers, donors, child rights advocates and service providers.
Application
Interested candidates are required to submit technical proposal with separate financial proposals (including translation costs) within the deadline.
Financial Proposal
The Currency of the proposal shall be in Kenya Shillings or US Dollars.
The financial proposal should be realistic. The Budget should be itemized in detail by activities to be undertaken, and clearly reflect the professional charges (fees) to be paid to different levels of professionals per day as stated above, including all travel related costs.
Conditions
As per UNICEF policy, payment is made against approved deliverables. No advance payment is allowed unless in exceptional circumstances against bank guarantee, subject to a maximum of 30 per cent of the total contract value in cases where advance purchases, for example for supplies or travel, may be necessary.
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