National Consultant-Development of gender responsive budgeting toolkit for Budget Directorate in the Ministry of Finance (MoF) to analyze sectors’ budget from gender perspective and provide

Contract

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Background

Gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies and programmes, in all areas and at all levels. The objective is to ensure that women and men benefit equally, and that inequality is not perpetuated. GRB means allocating resources in response to the capacities, constraints and needs of women and men, girls and boys.

Gender gaps persist in education, employment, entrepreneurship and public life opportunities and outcomes. Public sector institutions and systems can spearhead transformation of the norms, policies and practices that shape government planning, budgeting and performance monitoring. However, public sector institutions and systems often overlook gender equality or only allocate the tiniest budget . This has meant lost opportunities for progress in fulfilling gender equality commitments; or, at times has resulted in negative impacts on women and increased gender inequalities. Gender budgeting involves using the tools, techniques and procedures of the budget cycle in a systematic way to promote equality.

Ethiopia has declared its unequivocal commitment to the development of women with the announcement of the National Women Policy in 1993 and formulated the 1995 constitution that explicitly describes efforts to address challenges women face as well as commitments needed to ensure women’s equal participation and benefits. Ethiopia is also a signatory to several international as well as regional commitments such as the Beijing Platform of Action, Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the AU strategy for Gender Equality and Women Empowerment and the Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa. The responsibility of financing aspects of such regional and

international commitments of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) lies within the Ministry of Finance.

Moreover, the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance (MoF) is mandated to prepare and allocate budget, initiate external economic cooperation, mobilize external resources, and design and execute fiscal and other policies. The MoF also establishes a system of budgeting, accounting disbursement and internal auditing for the federal government and follow up their implementation. In addition, through its Gender Directorate, the MoF manages the national financial system to ensure women are equally benefitting from macro-economic policies and interventions. The directorate has the mandate of reviewing budget request documents, attending budget related discussions and forwarding its comments on the proposed budget requests. In this view, the Ministry of Finance has developed its Gender Equality Strategy (2021-2026).

The government of Ethiopia has laid out an ambitious Ten-Year Development Plan which has a specific section to protect women’s rights, safeguard their security, ensure their participation and benefit from economic development. To achieve the goals of the plan, it is crucial to ensure adequate resource is allocated for gender equality. Among the foreseeable challenges of financing for gender equality are lack of appropriate institutional arrangements to implement gender-responsive budgeting and limited expertise in gender analysis and gender mainstreaming. Annually at the beginning of budget process, the MoF circulates a Budget Call Circular (BCC), an official notice or instruction. The purpose of the circular is to instruct sectoral Ministries on how they must submit their demands for budgets for the coming year.

Leveraging on this mandate, it is important for the MoF to explicitly require sectoral Ministries to submit budget requests together with Gender Budget Statements and use Gender Budget Statements as an important criterion for budget negotiations. BCCs can be made gender-responsive by: stating explicitly that gender must be reflected in submissions through preparation of Gender Budget Statements, requiring that all relevant indicators be included, making a requirement for new projects and programmes to explicitly indicate gender implications. When these requirements are explicitly stated in the BCC, it creates an incentive for the Ministries to do budgeting in a gender-responsive manner. Incorporating these requirements will enhance the MoF’s delivery of its mandate of ensuring gender equality projects are adequately financed and ultimately ensure the Government of Ethiopia achieves its Ten Years Development Plan. A Pathway to Prosperity.

UN Women advocates for and aids the achievement of gender responsive public institutions and administration, in areas including budget reform, service delivery, and the decentralization of resources and services from the national to the local level. UN Women Ethiopia Country Office (ECO) in partnership with MoF organized a south-south experience sharing consultation in Rwanda in 2019, one of the outcomes of the consultation was the expressed willingness to emulate and adopt the Rwanda’s Gender Budget Statement (GBS) by Ethiopia as one of the best practices. The GBS is already piloted by the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture and Federal Job creation. In implementing its Strategic Note (2021-2025)

and in response to challenges identified from the gender gap analysis of public finance management (PFM) conducted in collaboration with MoF, UN Women ECO through its National Planning and Gender Responsive Budgeting Unit, aims to strengthen the capacities of policy makers, budget planners, gender officers’ implementers and CSO advocates.

Building on the ongoing initiatives, UN Women Ethiopia jointly with the MoF propose to develop a step-by step toolkit that guides the MoF to review sectoral Ministries budget in response to BCCs and ensure they are gender responsive. To this end, UN Women Ethiopia seeks to recruit a national consultant to develop a toolkit and provide training using the toolkit that will guide gender analysis of BCC submissions together with the use of gender budget statement and ensure they are gender responsive.

Duties and Responsibilities

The National consultant will accomplish the following tasks:

Phase 1

• Review international and national documents and frameworks on gender responsive budgeting and the budget process of the country
• Develop standard and contextualized step by step gender responsive budget analysis toolkit that guides MoF’s review of Budget Call Circular (BCC) submission and entry point for the use of the Gender Budget Statement (GBS)
• Explore entry points to integrate GRB in the budget process at regional level
• Present inception report including the draft outline of the toolkit
• Revise the inception report based on comments from the inception workshop including UN Women and MoF
• Conduct consultation meeting with MoF various directorates and other relevant stakeholders
• Present the draft toolkit at a validation workshop
• Revise the toolkit based on comments and inputs from the validation workshop and UN Women
• Finalize and submit the toolkit in English
• Translate the finalized toolkit into Amharic

Phase 2

• Plan, design, and prepare training schedule on gender responsive budget process using the toolkit developed
• Provide training for MoF Budget, M&E, Gender Directorates and other relevant directorates and organize learning activities
• Prepare pre and post evaluation questionnaires to evaluate the knowledge of participants before and after the training
• Gathers feedback from trainees daily and if necessary, after each session
• Develop detailed training report and submit for review
• Revise the training report and submit the final one

Deliverables:

• Amharic and English toolkit on gender responsive budget
• Inception Report (which includes understanding of ToR, proposed methodology, outline of the toolkit, deliverables and schedule as the main components)
• Inception workshop report
• Minutes of consultations
• Validation workshop report
• Training for three days
• Training report
• Final toolkit in English and Amharic

Competencies

Core Values/Guiding Principles

Integrity:

• Demonstrate consistency in upholding and promoting the values of UN Women in actions and decisions, in line with the UN Code of Conduct

Professionalism:

• Demonstrate professional competence and expert knowledge of the pertinent substantive areas of work

Cultural sensitivity and valuing diversity:

• Demonstrate an appreciation of the multicultural nature of the organization and the diversity of its staff. Demonstrate an international outlook, appreciating difference in values and learning from cultural diversity

Core Competencies

Ethics and Values:

• Demonstrate and safeguard ethics and integrity

Organizational Awareness:

• Demonstrate corporate knowledge and sound judgment

Development and Innovation:

• Take charge of self-development and take initiative

Work in teams:

• Demonstrate ability to work in a multicultural, multiethnic environment and to maintain effective working relations with people of different national and cultural backgrounds

Communicating and Information Sharing:

• Facilitate and encourage open communication and strive for effective communication

Self-management and Emotional Intelligence:

• Stay composed and positive even in difficult moments, handle tense situations with diplomacy and tact, and have a consistent behavior towards others

Conflict Management:

• Surface conflicts and address them proactively acknowledging different feelings and views and directing energy towards a mutually acceptable solution

Continuous Learning and Knowledge Sharing:

• Encourage learning and sharing of knowledge

Appropriate and Transparent Decision Making:

• Demonstrate informed and transparent decision making

Functional Competencies

• Ability to work with minimal supervision
• Evidence of having undertaken similar assignments
• Experience on gender budget analysis and development of guiding toolkits
• High level written and oral communications skills in Amharic and English
• Result-oriented, team player, exhibiting high levels of enthusiasm for gender equality, diplomacy and integrity
• Demonstrate excellent interpersonal and professional skills in interacting with government and development partners
• Skills in providing trainings for government officials

Required Skills and Experience

Education:

• Master’s degree in Gender, Economics, International Studies or other relevant Social Science fields;

Experience:

• At least 10 years professional experience in the stated qualifications
• Comprehensive and documented knowledge of issues related to the budget process with in MoF and the issue of gender responsive budgeting within government.
• Experience on toolkit and manual development, training and facilitation skills for top government officials.
• Knowledge of training methods and techniques
• Experience working with the United Nations will be considered an advantage

Language Requirements: Amharic and English

Application:

• All applications must include (as an attachment) a completed UN Women Personal History form (P-11) which can be downloaded from http://www.unwomen.org/about-us/employment.
• Kindly note that the system will only allow one attachment and candidates are required to include in the P-11 form links for their previously published reports and articles completed within the last two years. Applications without the completed UN Women P-11 form will be treated as incomplete and will not be considered for further assessment.

At UN Women, we are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment of mutual respect. UN Women recruits, employs, trains, compensates, and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, ability, national origin, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, competence, integrity and organizational need.

If you need any reasonable accommodation to support your participation in the recruitment and selection process, please include this information in your application.

UN Women has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UN Women, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to UN Women’s policies and procedures and the standards of conduct expected of UN Women personnel 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.)