UN WOMEN Jobs - 66141- UN Women National/International Consultant: Needs

UN Women National/International Consultant: Needs Assessment and Action Plan Development to Address Gender-based Violence in Selected Locations

Advertised on behalf of

UN WOMEN

Location :

Home-based, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Type of Contract :

Individual Contract

Starting Date :

01-Jun-2016

Application Deadline :

22-May-16 (Midnight New York, USA)

Post Level :

International Consultant

Duration of Initial Contract :

58 Days in a period of three and a half months

Languages Required :

English

Expected Duration of Assignment :

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

In April 2016 UN Women has officially launched a three-year programme “Standards and Engagement for Ending Violence against Women and Domestic Violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina” that is financially supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). The programme aims to strengthen the institutional and social response mechanisms to violence against women and domestic violence in BiH by contributing to the implementation of the Istanbul Convention.

The programme builds on the work done in the past years in partnership with the Gender Mechanisms, relevant institutions and CSOs at the legal, policy and strategic level as well as the support provided to improve services for survivors and to prevent violence against women and girls, with a strong focus on engaging men and boys.

The current programme has two main components that are focusing on protection of survivors and prevention of violence against women and domestic violence. Under the first component, the program aims to enhance availability, access and quality of services utilizing a multi-sectorial approach to address violence against women and domestic violence in BiH. This will be realised by providing support to service providers in line with the requirements of the Istanbul Convention, with a strong focus on capacity development of relevant service providers in selected communities.

Under the second component, there will be a strong focus on working with women, men and youth to address and understand gender roles through awareness campaigning and educational activities. In addition, key media actors and outlets will be engaged in advocacy, research and capacity building towards improving gender sensitive reporting and preventing violence against women and girls.

Duties and Responsibilities

Development objective

UN Women is currently in the inception phase of the program and this consultant will contribute to the development of concrete baseline studies and Action Plans to address gender-based violence in the selected locations where the project will be implemented.

Immediate objective

UN Women in Bosnia and Herzegovina invites applications from qualified National or International Consultants to:

Develop a baseline assessment of local/cantonal capacities and resources to protect and prevent violence against women and domestic violence in each of the selected locations. Good practices and lessons learnt from past experiences will be also included;
On the basis of the baseline report, develop an Action Plan in collaboration with relevant institutions for enhancing the system to protect and prevent violence against women and domestic violence in each selected location. The Action Plan will contain also a detailed monitoring and evaluation plan with relevant indicators to measure the progress in each location;
The project will be implemented in at least six selected locations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Assessment and action plans should be developed against the requirements of the Istanbul Convention – Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence.

Outputs

The selected consultant shall be responsible for the following deliverables:

Baseline assessment of local/cantonal capacities and resources to protect and prevent violence against women and domestic violence in each selected location. Baseline assessment should encompass following elements:

Services that are provided to women victims of violence in following institutions: police, centre for social work, office for free legal aid, NGOs, health centre and by local government. Assessment should focus on:
Availability of services required by the Istanbul convention (most notably psychological counselling, financial assistance, housing, education, training, assistance in finding employment, shelters, SOS hotlines, specific assistance to victims of rape);
Accessibility by the survivors. The consultant will assess if the services are accessible by women with disabilities and other marginalized groups such as Roma women, or rural women;
Quality of the services including allocation of appropriate human resources, level of education of the professionals on violence against women and gender based violence, available trainings. Assessed quality of services should encompass information from both service providers and beneficiaries of those services.

The consultant will assess if appropriate financial resources were allocated for adequate provision of these services and from which sources.
Additionally, the consultant will assess the availability, accessibility and quality of the services provided to perpetrators of violence against women and domestic violence.

Governing structures. The Consultant will assess if there is any domestic violence/violence against women co-ordinating body established in the targeted locations as required by the Istanbul convention. Assessment will focus on its membership, any protocols/documents regulating its work, functioning of the coordination body focusing on the regularity of their meetings and ability to address the issues that are in the scope of their work. The consultant will assess to which extent a multi-sectorial approach is in place;
Prevention activities. Assessment should include information about any awareness raising campaign, formal or informal educational activities particularly with youth or children on issues such as gender stereotypes, violence against women and/or gender equality, violence against children as well as any activities that were related to the engagement of local media. Finally, the consultant should look into the existence of any plan related to work on prevention developed by the public institutions in selected locations. Assessment should be limited to the period of last three years.

Under this delivery, the consultant is expected to conduct following steps:

Develop the methodology for the assessment. Methodology should include, but should not be limited to a list of materials for the desk research, list of stakeholders to be consulted, list of questions, plan of the filed visit, as well as tentative sections of the final report. Methodology will be presented and cleared by UN Women;
Desk research. The consultant is expected to consult previous relevant research on this topic produced by international organizations, governmental institutions as well as NGOs. The consultant will use Istanbul Convention as its most important referent document;
Field research. The consultant is expected to do a field visit in each project location. The consultant is expected to contact service providers from public sector, women’s NGOs as well as to collect the information form the beneficiaries of the services that is women victims of violence;
Develop the baseline assessment. Baseline assessment should include Introduction, section on methodology, theoretical section, results of the research, conclusions and recommendations. Baseline assessment should not be shorter than 5 and longer than 10 pages for each targeted location.

Action plan for enhancing local/cantonal capacities to protect and prevent violence against women and domestic violence in each selected location. Action plan should encompass following elements:

Action plans should be developed for each target location on the bases of baseline assessment of local/cantonal capacities to protect and prevent violence against women and domestic violence;
Action plan should be developed using UN Women results and resources framework. The consultant will develop a clear list of outcomes, outputs, activities and indicators to be reached/implemented until the end of 2018. The consultant will limit the number of outcomes to two, one related to protection and one related to prevention of violence against women and domestic violence. Under each outcome, the consultant is expected to list outputs. For each output the consultant will develop indicators as well as list of activities. The consultant should clearly indicate the implementation year for each output/activity;
Action plan should contain a monitoring and evaluation plan for each target location for each implementation year. The consultant will develop the plan using a monitoring and evaluation matrix provided by UN Women;
The consultant will develop this action plan in a participative manner with stakeholders (both governmental and non-government) from each location. Final product should be endorsed by relevant stakeholders and decision makers in the municipalities and cleared by UN Women.

Activities and timeframe

The Consultant will be expected to complete the tasks within the indicative timeframe:

Tasks/Days/Delivery date:

Baseline assessment

Meeting with UN Women team 1 June 1st;
Draft of the methodology sent to UN Women 1 June 7th;
Final methodology sent to UN Women 1 June 9th;
Desk research 2 June 16th;
Field visits 14 July 7th;
Draft of the assessments for each location 8 July 21st;
Final assessment 3 July 26th.

Action plan:

Field visits 10 July 30th;
First draft of the action plan for each targeted location sent to UN Women 8 August 25th;
Validation with the relevant local focal point in each location 6 September 9th;
Action plan of each targeted location finalized and endorsed by UN Women 4 September 15th.

Total 58

Reporting

Under the overall supervision of the EVAW Project Manager and the direct supervision of the EVAW Project Coordinator, the Consultant will develop and deliver the above listed outputs in accordance with the above outlined timeframe. All the outputs should be provided in either English or B/H/S in accordance with the above table.

Competencies

Values:

Demonstrates professional competence and is conscientious and efficient in meeting commitments, observing deadlines and achieving results;
Display cultural, gender, nationality, religion and age sensitivity and adaptability;
Demonstrates integrity and fairness by modelling UN values and ethical standards.

Functional Competencies:

Excellent interpersonal, presentation and communication skills;
Great organizational skills;
Ability to conceptualize information into written reports;
Delivers oral/written information in a timely, effective and easily understood manner;
Initiative, sound judgment and demonstrated ability to work harmoniously with people of different ethnic backgrounds.

Required Skills and Experience

Education:

University degree in gender studies, law, public policy, psychology, sociology or any other related social science. MA degree in one of these areas will be considered as an advantage.

Experience:

At least 5 years of demonstrated research experience, preferably in the field of gender issues;
Demonstrated experience in the field of gender based violence, preferably with service provision or/and prevention;
Track record of similar assignments (applied research studies, PCM, evaluations);
Demonstrated experience in applied research with data collection, analytical and presentation skills and demonstrated ability to structure information;
Experience working with projects related to gender and gender equality will be considered an asset.
Experience developing logical frameworks for development interventions;
Experience developing monitoring and evaluation matrix for development interventions;
Proven record of facilitation of working group meetings.

Language:

The candidate should demonstrate excellent oral/written communication skills in both local language (B/H/S) and English.

Documents to be included when submitting the proposals

Interested individual consultants must submit the following documents/information to demonstrate their qualifications:

Detailed financial proposal - broken down to demonstrate the consultancy fees and a budget for travel and accommodation);
UN P11 form.

Please note: Both documents have to be uploaded in 1 file.

Evaluation of offers

UN Women applies a fair and transparent selection process that takes into account both the technical qualification of potential consultants as well as the financial proposals submitted in support of consultant applications. Candidate applications will be evaluated using a cumulative analysis method taking into consideration the combination of applicant qualifications and a financial proposal. The contract will be awarded, based on the desk review, to the individual consultant whose offer has been evaluated and determined as:

Responsive/compliant/acceptable, and
Having received the highest score out of below defined technical, interview and financial criteria.

Only candidates obtaining a minimum of 50 points in the technical evaluation will be considered as qualified and evaluated further. Only top 3 candidates (with highest number of points in the technical evaluation- documents based) will be interviewed. The maximum number of points assigned to the financial proposal will be allocated to the lowest price proposal among those top 3 qualified candidates. All other price proposals will receive points in reverse order.

Criteria:
Technical Evaluation – documents and interviewed based (80%)

Financial Evaluation- based on submitted offer (20%)

Evaluation of submitted financial offers will be done based on the following formula: S = Fmin / F * 20
S - score received on financial evaluation;
Fmin - the lowest financial offer out of all the submitted offers qualified over the technical evaluation round;
F - financial offer under the consideration.

Please note that travel costs and accommodation cost should be covered by the consultant and included in the financial offer.

Qualified women and members of minorities are encouraged to apply. UN Women applies fair and transparent selection process that would take into account the competencies/skills of the applicants as well as their financial proposals.
Due to the large number of applications we receive, we are able to inform only the successful candidates about the outcome or status of the selection process.
For any additional information, please contact unwomen.bih@unwomen.org.