UNDP Jobs - 48112- Targets and Indicators for Disaster Risk Reduction

Targets and Indicators for Disaster Risk Reduction in the Post-2015 Development Goals: Calibration, Field Testing and Implementation

Location :

MAPUTO, MOZAMBIQUE

Type of Contract :

Individual Contract

Starting Date :

Application Deadline :

07-Aug-14 (Midnight New York, USA)

Post Level :

National Consultant

Duration of Initial Contract :

Languages Required :

English Portuguese

Expected Duration of Assignment :

42 days

UNDP is committed to achieving workforce diversity in terms of gender, nationality and culture. Individuals from minority groups, indigenous groups and persons with disabilities are equally encouraged to apply. All applications will be treated with the strictest confidence. UNDP does not tolerate sexual exploitation and abuse, any kind of harassment, including sexual harassment, and discrimination. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks.

Background

As the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA) are coming to an end in 2015, discussions on measuring progress, defining new goals, targets and indicators and addressing key challenges and issues of the previous framework are advancing at a fast pace.

While there have been some progress in certain areas, for example, risk assessment or early warning system, some of the key challenges include the failure of such frameworks to significantly reduce the impact of disasters on society and the economy. The relationship between disaster risk and development has been increasingly recognized during the last decade.

Disasters can reverse development gains and often have a devastating impact on poor people preventing them from building their resilience while development, for example, in risk prone areas, might create new risk. Nexus between disaster and development is required for the successor of both development and DRR frameworks.

Though disasters were addressed in the Millennium Declaration, targets and indicators to monitor impact and progress were not reflected in the MDGs. The HFA monitor has been able to offer an input analysis of countries’ progress in managing disaster risk.

The current HFA monitor, however, does not provide objective benchmark because of the lack of clear criteria for evaluating progress and relatively ambiguous indicator structures.

The discussions on Post-2015 MDG and Post-2015 HFA thus present two avenues for the integration of disaster risk management in sustainable development goals - along with the growing development discourse on the importance of including disaster risk reduction in development process.

Process: Targets and Indicators Discussions and proposals on designing targets and indicators for addressing disaster risk management in the post-2015 development agenda are informed by key processes and agreements including the Millennium Declaration, the 2010 MDG Summit and the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20).

This includes reports from the UN System Task Team, the High-Level Panel, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the Global Compact, the UNDG Global Conversation and the reports of the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development and the Experts Committee on Sustainable Finance.

Upcoming key milestones expected to further shape such discussions include the launch of the intergovernmental negotiations in September 2014, the synthesis report of the SG and the large Summit of Heads of State and Government that conclude the last phase of the intergovernmental work in 2015.

To facilitate the development of the successor arrangement of the HFA (informally referred to as HFA2), UNISDR launched a number of stakeholder consultations (regional, national and thematic) culminating in the 2013 Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction; this marked the end of the first phase of the post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction consultation.

A new round of consultations has since been initiated which will feed into the inter-governmental process and ultimately the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in March 2015 in Sendai, Japan.

Building on the past and ongoing processes, on July 18-19 2013, UNDP, UNISDR, UNICEF and GFDRR organized a technical meeting on targets and indicators for addressing disaster risk management in the post-2015 development agenda in New York (see Annex I for July Meeting Report).

Meeting co-leads, UNDP, UNISDR and UNICEF, highlighted a set of needs including the need to start bridging discussions on sustainability and poverty agendas; to establish concrete disaster risk reduction measures in the post-2015 development agenda; the need for the proposed indicators to be both politically acceptable and operationally feasible and to link post-2015 development agenda discussions to the UNISDR-led consultations on the successor to the HFA, especially while designing targets and indicators.

Informed by these consultations, the UNISDR has led a multi-stakeholder initiative to propose a new framework of indicators (Annex II UNISDR to share final version) that will allow the objective monitoring of countries’ and other stakeholders’ efforts to effectively manage disaster risk.

This initiative is work in progress, and thus the next step is to critically examine/pilot at country level the targets and indicators developed so far, test their validity and ensure they are both anchored in existing national priorities and adjusted to the country context.

The indicators are expected to measure the target, provide a political steer of action, include a broader resilience approach and consider ending ‘crisis-induced poverty’.

Duties and Responsibilities

The joint piloting of targets and indicators will take place in five selected pilot countries to ascertain their feasibility in the different country contexts. In consultation with UNISDR, UNDP Regional Centres, UNDP Country Offices and where possible discussions with national governments, five countries have been selected: Armenia, Indonesia, Mozambique, Nepal and Paraguay.

It is expected that each of these pilots will not only help refine the existing proposals on targets and indicators related to DRR but also help develop a constituency of support to advocate for disaster risk reduction related concerns in post-2015 development agenda.

It is expected that in each of the pilot countries, the process will be rolled out in three consecutive steps:

A start-up consultation workshop (see Annex II for Mozambique Workshop Report);
A secondary source research;
A close-out workshop at the national level.

Three start-up consultation workshops will be taking place in Armenia, Mozambique and Paraguay in April 2014.

The objective of the workshops is to:

Take stock of the experience of measuring progress of DRR policies against MDGs and HFA;
Reaffirm the need for integrating DRR concerns in post-2015 development framework;
Examine/test proposals on targets and indicators for DRR in SDGs (from ODI work in 2012-13, proposals from New York and forthcoming London workshops) and for the HFA2 and discuss their relevance and practical application in each country.

As the workshops are taking place in May 2014 (7-8 May in Mozambique), UNDP and UNISDR are seeking to hire a team of up to two national consultants in these countries (Armenia, Mozambique and Paraguay) to: Conduct secondary source research to understand the viability of targets and indicators developed for the above workshop. The consultant(s) are expected to lead this exercise over a period of two to three months (May – July 2014) in each country.

The exercise requires the consultant(s) to:

Test targets and indicators proposed for SDG and HFA2 (Most indicators of HFA2 is focused on policy progress);
Identify data availability to set up baselines against selected indicators and to monitor and assess progress globally;
Present capacities to continually collect and analyze data at the national and sub-national levels, as well as the capacity available in the UN system to support implementation and monitoring efforts;
Identify challenges for missing data and propose alternatives;
Analyze the experience of monitoring progress against MDGs and HFA;
Assess the challenges associated with monitoring implementation;
Assess the scope for disaggregation of the indicators to consider the impact of disasters on the most vulnerable, as well as the scope for disaggregation of the indicators by age and gender and at the local and district levels;
Conduct a set of stakeholder interviews to gather national views on the utility of the targets and indicators;
Synthesis existing reviews of disaster data sets, taking the perspective of their utility in a post-2015 development goals setting and HFA2 indicator mechanism.

The objective is to critically examine the national indicators developed to date, to assess their validity and specificity and that they are anchored in existing national priorities, and create baseline data for proposed targets and indicators.

Competencies

Functional Competencies:

Excellent analytical writing skills in Portuguese and English;
Strong track record in disaster risk assessment and model-based projections of disaster trends;
Experience in working with government departments on planning and monitoring, and in conducting qualitative research on political processes;
Access to national actors and data sets in line with country selections;
Strong understanding of the post-2015 development process;
Excellent quality control procedures and a track record of delivering high quality technical summaries to multiple audiences;
Self-motivated, good sense of humor combined with seriousness on quality and timeliness of work;
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, team oriented work style, interest and experience of working in multi-cultural environment.

Required Skills and Experience

Education:

At least a Masters’ Degree in Disaster Management, Geography or Environmental Sciences with a very good knowledge of statistics and public policy.

Experience:

A minimum of 5 years experience in the fields of Disaster Management, Planning, and Monitoring with/within the public sector.

Language:

Excellent written and spoken Portuguese and very good communication skills in English.