Consultancy: Poverty and Equity Mapping Data Consultant, (International Consultancy) -Home based with UNICEF Iraq

Contract

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UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child, inclusion

Purpose of Activity/Assignment:

UNICEF works in Iraq to save children’s lives, defend their rights, and help them fulfill their potential by supporting the Government of Iraq in realizing the rights of all Iraq’s children to survival, development, protection, and participation, and the creation of an enabling environment to ensure strengthened accountabilities for children with an equity approach.

With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), nations agreed to end extreme child poverty for the first time in history. The SDGs call for multidimensional child poverty – a measure of poverty that goes beyond income – to be halved by 2030, building a world in which all children have what they need to survive, thrive, and fulfil their potential. In addition, UNICEF Iraq Country Programme, 2020-2024, calls for stronger evidence to accelerate the progress toward sustainable and inclusive development. Therefore, to ensure evidence-based planning, UNICEF Iraq is looking for an international consultant to provide technical support and assistance for timely, accurate, and age/gender-specific disaggregation for child poverty-related data, including monitoring of socio-economic trends and the country’s wider policy, economic or institutional context, to facilitate planning and to draw conclusions about the impact of programmes or policies.

Under the general guidance and direction of the Chief Social Policy, the consultant will work to improve (a) evidence generation, policy, and practice on child poverty; (b) key child-related indicators are readily accessible by key stakeholders and are gender-specific and equity focused, and c) support the collection of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) and other key social development indicators (through MICS or other surveys) to improve national planning. This encompasses both direct programme work with government at federal and local levels and development partners as well as linkages and support to teams working on education, health, child protection, humanitarian response, nutrition, water and sanitation

Scope of Work:

Deliverables

1. Improving data on child poverty & vulnerability for increased use for policy and social protection programme action

• Development of the methodology and conceptual framework for child poverty for Cost of Basic Needs (CBN) and further development of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).
• Estimate child monetary and multidimensional poverty using the latest micro-data set of the Iraq Household Socioeconomic Survey and Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS).
• Estimate the Adolescent Development Index using the latest micro-data set, e.g., MICS.
• Support the analysis of the Social Protection Baseline and enplane assessment to produce statistics.
• Support the analysis of the Iraq Household Socioeconomic Survey to produce child-related statistics for baseline to guide local planning.
• Develop a concept note on Small Area Estimates, SMEs and contribute to the development of a report
• Play a statistical quality control roll in the development of poverty estimations across programmes and sections with a social protection lens

2. Data analysis, dissemination and advocacy

• Support strengthening SDGs data collection and reporting in Iraq to inform UNICEF programmes and initiatives to support building national capacity on SDGs data collection, compilation, and reporting. This would include strengthening survey-based instruments, exploring the use of administrative data, and promoting innovative means for generating data.
• Support innovative ways to best serve UNICEF’s in-house child-related data and information that is needed at country, regional and global levels.
• Support dissemination of data estimates and other products to maximize the use for advocacy, programming and planning purpose.
• Respond to ad hoc requests for data analysis (global, regional, country levels)

3. Strengthening Programme Management

• Develop concept notes for project(s) implementation, including partner coordination around data-related projects.
• Work with sector colleagues to manage and coordinate technical support around data-related concerns and initiatives.
• Support Section's coordination according to the supervisor’s request and in line to donor requirements

Duration of the assignment: 88 days

Travel: This is a remote consultancy

Recruitment qualifications:

• An advanced university (Master’s level) degree or its equivalent in the field of data sciences, statistics, economics, or development economics
• Minimum 5 years of professional experience in data analysis, data cleaning, data modeling, research, and economics.
• Track record of previous work on Small Area Estimates. (Candidates do not need to apply if this requisite is not met).
• Experience in handling large, national-level data sets, including microdata of MICS, and Household Socioeconomic Surveys.
• Experience in developing data analytical frameworks and indices, especially for large surveys and studies.
• Experience in the measurement of poverty estimation using the cost of basic needs and multidimensional poverty approaches.
• Ability to triangulate data from different microdata sets.
• Proven experience in STATA, SPSS,.
• Previous work with UNICEF would be an asset as it would be previous work on Small Area Estimates and Child Poverty.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

For every Child, you demonstrate…

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS).

Payment of professional fees will be based on submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures, and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws.

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.