Homegrown School Feeding Specialist, Consultant

🚩 JOB TITLE: Homegrown School Feeding Specialist

📢 TYPE OF CONTRACT: CST Level II

📌UNIT/DIVISION: Regional Bureau for Western Africa (RBD) - Programme Support Unit

➡️ DUTY STATION (City, Country): Dakar, Senegal

⏰ DURATION: 11 months

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:

The World Food Programme (WFP) is the world's largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide. With over 60 years' experience in School Feeding, WFP has a trajectory of working with more than 100 countries to set up sustainable national school feeding programmes. Today, millions of children living in poor and vulnerable communities do not have regular access to the nutritious food they need to stay healthy and thrive. This affects their physical and mental development and can keep them from finishing school and building the strong future they deserve.

WFP advocates for the universal adoption of school feeding programmes as a safety net that helps increase children’s access to education and learning opportunities and strengthens their health and nutrition status. WFP focuses increasingly on assisting the countries to establish and maintain high quality nationally owned programmes. In countries still requiring WFP’s operational support, it implements high quality school feeding programmes with clear hand over strategies.

As the largest humanitarian agency, WFP implements programmes in more than 40 countries in response to armed conflict, natural disasters and food and financial crises. Reaching universal coverage of school feeding programmes will require the development of context-specific approaches to promote access of children to school meal programmes, particularly in fragile emergency and crisis context. For this purpose, WFP is designing a, conflict environments (acute and / or protracted conflicts) and Internally Displaced Person (IDP)/refugee settings.

REGIONAL CONTEXT

WFP’s Regional Bureau for Western Africa (RBD) provides strategic guidance, technical support and direction to WFP operations and activities in 19 countries. Building on its expertise in food security, procurement, logistics, small holder farmers and school feeding, WFP works with governments to develop national policies and strategies for Home Grown School Feeding programmes, and to design or implement such initiatives directly where needed. The schools provide local farmers with a predictable outlet for their products, leading to a stable income, more investments and higher productivity. The children enjoy healthy, diversified food; this makes it more likely that they will stay in school, perform better and improve their adult job prospects. At the community level, Home Grown School Feeding initiatives promote nutrition education and better eating habits and encourage the diversification of production with a special emphasis on local crops. Community involvement, in turn, enhances the sustainability of programmes. However, despite over a decade of work, Home-Grown School Feeding programmes are still not implemented at scale. The incumbent will support WFP in the RBD region to deploy its significant expertise in this area to ensure that the connection between school feeding and local agricultural production is a reality, in line with WFP’s School Feeding Strategy 2020-2030 and the Regional Implementation Plan 2021-2025.

ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES:

Under the supervision of the Regional School Feeding Advisor, the consultant will be responsible for the following duties:

• Provide guidance and support to Country Offices staff for the design and implementation of home-grown school feeding, with focus on the economic empowerment of women and the integration of Homegrown School Feeding into national food system frameworks.
• Operationalize the Homegrown School Feeding Framework for RBD's Country Offices staff, considering WFP’s local and regional food procurement policy and WFP’s Smallholder Agricultural Market Support (SAMS) guidance framework.
• Support the country capacity strengthening agenda with a focus on Homegrown School Feeding by national governments.
• Support Country Offices to include Homegrown School Feeding relevant indicators in their Monitoring & Evaluation frameworks and/or to design the tools necessary to measure results.
• Promote and recommend the usage of suitable digital solution for each context and target group, such as e-commerce, price monitoring etc.
• Work with relevant units at the Regional Bureau and Headquarters level to support the development of guidance on quality control solutions for fresh products.
• Collaborate and coordinate closely with the Regional Bureau's SAMS, Cash Based Transfers, Gender, Procurement, Resilience and Food Safety and Quality on Homegrown School Feeding.
• Foster collaboration with strategic external partners.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:

Education: Advanced degree in Agriculture, Food Security, Development Economics or relevant field or First University degree with additional years of related work experience and/or training courses.

Experience: 6 years or more relevant experience with School Feeding Programmes with cash based or local procurement components. Experience working with WFP is an asset. Experience working in the West African region is an asset.

Knowledge & Skills: Proven capacity to provide tailored technical support to Country Offices on Homegrown School Feeding programme design and implementation. Proven capacity to produce high quality guidance, training material and written reports. Capacity to represent the School Based Service in meetings internally and with partners. Ability to think creatively and strategically, ability to work autonomously. Capacity to work in a multi-cultural environment, excellent writing skills, project management.

Languages: Fluency (level C) French. Intermediate knowledge (level B) English.

Deadline for application: 8 June 2022

All employment decisions are made on the basis of organizational needs, job requirements, merit, and individual qualifications. WFP is committed to providing an inclusive work environment free of sexual exploitation and abuse, all forms of discrimination, any kind of harassment, sexual harassment, and abuse of authority. Therefore, all selected candidates will undergo rigorous reference and background checks.

No appointment under any kind of contract will be offered to members of the UN Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ), International Civil Service Commission (ICSC), FAO Finance Committee, WFP External Auditor, WFP Audit Committee, Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) and other similar bodies within the United Nations system with oversight responsibilities over WFP, both during their service and within three years of ceasing that service.