Gender & Humanitarian Specialist, P-3, Amman, Jordan ( - 6 months)

Contract

This is a P-3 contract. This kind of contract is known as Professional and Director staff. It is normally internationally recruited only. It's a staff contract. It usually requires 5 years of experience, depending on education.

Salary

The salary for this job should be between 104,359 USD and 136,650 USD.

Please keep in mind that the salary displayed here is an estimation by UN Talent based on the location and the type of contract. It may vary depending on the organization. The recruiter should be able to inform you about the exact salary range. In case the job description contains another salary information, please refer to this one.

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, a chance.

The Middle East and North Africa region continues to face multiple and complex conflicts. While men and boys are also victims of conflict and face specific challenges, the pre-existing gender inequalities and discrimination that face women and girls in MENA, increase their vulnerability and leave them disproportionately and differentially impacted by humanitarian crisis. Similarly, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread over the region, the situation for women and girls is disproportionally worse. Increasingly it is clear that UNICEF can play an important role in the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. Past years severe humanitarian situation in many of the region’s countries has increased the number of refugees and people living under refugee-like conditions as well as the number of internally displaced persons. Overall, 80% of this group are women and children. As such, even before COVID-19, the number of people living in vulnerable circumstances was already high but has increased during the pandemic.

Women and girls remain at higher risk of GBV, particularly domestic violence, sexual violence and exploitation, child marriage, and human trafficking. The Syria 2021 Humanitarian Needs Overview continue to identify child marriage as a major protection concern in all governorates in Syria and is amongst the top reasons for why children are separated from their care givers.

Moreover, humanitarian needs are especially pronounced for the increasing number of female-headed households due to losses of life of family members and limited access to income-generation and aid opportunities. Sudan’s Humanitarian Need Overview 2021 indicates that female-headed households are more likely to experience food insecurity. Girls and women are disproportionally affected by WASH issues that arise during humanitarian emergencies; forced to travel long distances to water points or latrines—with existing sanitation facilities often lacking privacy, lighting, or locks—they are at increased risk of sexual assault and harassment. Active conflicts, the resulting displacement and the lack of sufficient humanitarian assistance push education down the priority list equally for boys and girls, negatively affecting school enrollment and literacy rates for both genders.

On the other side, women’s participation in humanitarian action and peace processes is a central part of building a meaningful and lasting peace. This importance is manifested in international law through recognition of United Nations Security Council resolutions (UNSCR) 1325 in 2000 and 2242 in 2015, which established the importance of developing Women, Peace and Security (WPS) National Action Plan (NAP). In the region, women’s civil society have engaged in the WPS agenda at national and international level, for example multiple women’s rights organizations from MENA have testified in front of the Security Council highlighting the gender impact of conflict and occupation on the lives of women and girls in the region as well as the need to simultaneously protect women and girls from conflict-related gender-based violence.

Gender-responsive humanitarian action helps to ensure a more accurate understanding of a humanitarian situation, facilitates the design of more appropriate responses, highlights opportunities and resources within an affected community, and can provide a link between humanitarian assistance and long-term development. Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP) is “an active commitment to use power responsibly by taking account of, giving account to, and being held to account by the people humanitarian organizations seek to assist.”

In line with UNICEF’s commitment to IASC's principle, UNICEF is accountable to Affected Populations through ensuring safe, appropriate and equitable opportunities for girls, boys, women and men of all ages and abilities to decide on their humanitarian priorities, delivery mechanisms, more over to enable them to participate in all programmatic and implementation cycles. UNICEF MENARO is actively developing a localization framework that would consider gender dimensions and local partnerships. A recent addition to the CCC’s has been formulation of gender specific benchmarks to support gender responsive programming in humanitarian action.

Evaluations of humanitarian responses in MENA and other regions confirm that taking gender consistently into consideration from the preparedness phases, and even more importantly during the first planning steps at the beginning of an emergency, greatly mitigates the risk of having vulnerable categories of beneficiaries slipping through the mesh of the assistance net, and of unnecessarily put girls and women in danger.

How can you make a difference?

UNICEF MENARO is appointing a Gender and Humanitarian Specialist/Officer in order to strengthen the gender in humanitarian action agenda, ensure gender analysis isddressing the particular needs and capacities of women and girls in emergency settings and supporting the localization and APP agenda. Following recent guidance developed by HQ on Gender in Emergency and incorporating gender in CCC, EPP and HAC, the role is also to ensure meeting organizational standards across the region.

The key objectives of this position follow three main pillars;

1. Gender integration in country programs and humanitarian preparedness and response, through analysis and feedback to HAC, EPP, SitAns, HNO/HRP program target, design, delivery, monitoring and reporting, including identifying women led, girls-centered partnerships as per the IASC, EPP and the CCC Gender guidelines.

2. Supporting MENA humanitarian coordination and advocacy appropriate consultation and engagement platforms where women and girls can make informed decisions about their lives and contribute to design and implementation of sectoral interventions

3. Capacity development and knowledge management in contributing to a regional localization framework, strengthening capacity of humanitarian actors (including local civil society and implementing partners) and capturing lessons learned and gender results from humanitarian programming.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES and DUTIES & TASKS

• Support quality assurance of HAC, EPP, SitAns, HNO/HRP program target, design, delivery, monitoring and reporting,
• Research and develop country profiles for gender analysis in emergency and humanitarian situations, including conducting gender analysis at the onset of emergency response as a part of surge deployment where necessary. These documents could be used as reference for country offices whilst they work on their EPP’s as well as in emergency response – ensuring rapid gender analysis and adequate knowledge. The country profiles could also be used for fundraising aspects.
• Represent UNICEF in the Regional Gender in Humanitarian Work Group (GiHa) led by UN Women, OCHA and CARE and co-lead UNICEF’s particular contribution to the sub-working group on advocacy as well as knowledge management and the regional training for enhancing gender in humanitarian action by inviting key representatives from country-level structures, and CSOs, to facilitate sharing (and capturing) of best practices, cross-learning/cross-fertilization, as well as identifying and common concerns and lessons learning/sharing focus.
• Ensure technical support to country offices to translate gender analysis into key interventions for gender responsive programming
• Support, build capacity, rollout the implementation of MENA Gender in Humanitarian Action Tool (hardcopy and App for WASH, Education, Child Protection and H&N) for comprehensive integration of gender considerations into humanitarian programming and interventions.
• Improve monitoring and assessment of gender mainstreaming as part of routine humanitarian reporting, analysis and reporting of sex and age disaggregated data in line with CCC benchmarks.
• Collaborate with Gender focal point at Humanitarian section to support gender and humanitarian internal coordination at RO.
• Undertake country field missions to countries in humanitarian context conducted to systemically integrate and apply gender sensitive/responsive programming into their humanitarian action and strengthen accountability to affected populations approaches, with gender lenses at national and regional levels. This includes surge deployment to support responses when needed.

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

• Advanced university degree (Masters or higher) in Gender Studies, Human Rights or Humanitarian Action.
• Minimum five years of progressively responsible professional experience and demonstrated track record of having undertaken and led substantive programming and research on gender and development in key issue areas that are the focus of UNICEF’s Gender Action Plan.
• Experience in designing, implementing, managing, and delivering results-based programmes/projects on gender and development or any other cross cutting programme, especially at country/field level, experience in emergency response is an asset.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of Arabic is an asset.
• Technical and research skills in gender along with specific understanding of gendered dimension of humanitarian situations and emergency response.
• Ability to connect sectoral issues and programmatic approaches on gender; experience with this in emergency contexts an asset.
• Knowledge and experience integrating gender into humanitarian responses and programming, including needs assessment.
• Demonstrated experience in supporting research and analysis on gender.
• Knowledge and understanding of country/regional/global gender equality issues, specifically relating to children and women in emergency, and the current trends, methods and approaches. Familiarity and work experience in the country/region of preferred placement also an asset.
• Ability to contextualize and be able to translate the approaches into practicable ideas in complex environments where gender issues are often sensitive to raise within certain national contexts.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Level of initiative and independence in ability to undertake tasks while proactively seeking relevant input, cooperation, and guidance from key constituents.
• Ability to think outside the box, generate new ideas, approaches, or insights and develop innovative ways to undertake projects and initiatives, shape solutions to problems.
• Strategic thinker who can pull disparate ideas into a cohesive vision and plan.

For every Child, you demonstrate...

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

The UNICEF competencies required for this post are...

• Demonstrates Self Awareness and Ethical Awareness (1)

• Works Collaboratively with others (1)

• Builds and Maintains Partnerships (1)

• Innovates and Embraces Change (1)
• Thinks and Acts Strategically (1)
• Drive to achieve impactful results (1)
• Manages ambiguity and complexity (1)

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Mobility is a condition of international professional employment with UNICEF and an underlying premise of the international civil service. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

UNICEF appointments are subject to medical clearance. Issuance of a visa by the host country of the duty station, which will be facilitated by UNICEF, is required for IP positions. Appointments may also be subject to inoculation (vaccination) requirements, including against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid). Government employees that are considered for employment with UNICEF are normally required to resign from their government before taking up an assignment with UNICEF. UNICEF reserves the right to withdraw an offer of appointment, without compensation, if a visa or medical clearance is not obtained, or necessary inoculation requirements are not met, within a reasonable period for any reason.