Purpose Of Activity/Assignment

South Asia is home to over 600 million children and has the highest number of young people globally. South Asian countries are among the most vulnerable globally to the impacts of climate change.
Children are especially vulnerable to climate change due to their unique physiology and stage of development, and these impacts can last a lifetime, affecting their health, education, and overall development. As the risk of climate shocks increases over time will particularly be detrimental to vulnerable populations, especially children.

Children and families need a healthy and clean planet to survive and thrive. However, national climate policies often overlook children's unique needs, and vulnerabilities. Lack of age or gender-disaggregated data on their experiences further hinders effective policy design. To address this, the need to integrate children's needs throughout climate decision-making, including national plans is key. Climate financing is also crucial to expand investments in policies that strengthen children's and vulnerable populations’ ability to adapt, cope, and recover from climate change. Additionally, investing in making social protection systems more responsive to shocks, especially in this region, is crucial. Climate change is a major threat to children's rights.

UNICEF’s strategic objective and commitment focus on advocating for child-centered and child-sensitive climate policies, catalyzing transformational sectoral change through programming at scale to ensure that every child deserves a liveable planet, and equitable chance in life. UNICEF ROSA has made a strategic effort to leverage its evidence and advocacy to strengthen its climate action, and social policy agenda for children, through the development of a strategic guidance and framework for action to inform climate action and social policy agenda, and programming efforts.

UNICEF RO in South Asia is therefore seeking the services of a professional in social policy and climate action to provide technical support to the Regional Office (RO) to develop a comprehensive internal framework for South Asia that connects social policy and climate action by leveraging existing experience within the region and best practices from a global lens as a roadmap to guide UNICEF’s for internal efforts, and external programming.

Scope Of Work

This assignment aims to develop a strategic internal framework for the South Asia region that effectively integrates social policy and climate action priorities. By leveraging existing regional experience and analyzing global best practices, the consultancy will support in development a comprehensive internal framework document for the region. This framework will not only guide internal efforts but also guide UNICEF’s approach to external engagement with partners, engagement and fundraising efforts and inform strategic sectoral collaboration.

Main Deliverables

Note: This is a remote-based consultancy and no travel is required. Please submit your application along with the financial proposal. Applications without a financial proposal will not be considered.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

Education

• Masters degree in economics, Social Sciences, International Development, Public Administration, Public Policy, Social Policy or other relevant disciplines.
• A first university degree in economics, Social Sciences, International Development, Public Administration, Public Policy, Social Policy or other relevant disciplines.

Knowledge/Expertise/Skills And Competencies Required

• Over 10 years of relevant work experience in social policy, children’s rights, environmental and climate change issues, international development.
• Knowledge and working experience on climate change and social policy development, and analysis.
• Proven capacity to work with cross-functional teams in collating, managing, sharing knowledge and learning.
• Excellent analytical and writing skills, as well as advocacy skills.
• Publication record.
• Experience in working within UNICEF or other UN/international entities and/or familiarity with the work of UNICEF is an asset.
• Advanced level of English.