Since 1990, the Human Development Report has been UNDP’s flagship document, monitoring and assessing the development situation from a human-centred perspective. It has contributed to shifting the focus of development towards people’s lives. In addition to the annual global report, more than 620 national and sub-national Human Development Reports as well as 34 Regional Human Development Reports (RHDR) have been produced by 143 countries and 5 regional bureaus. The Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific (RBAP) together with its regional centre has produced 6 reports so far. RBAP’s Regional Strategy and Policy Unit currently leads the work on the Asia-Pacific Human Development Report.

The flagship APHDR is a regional public good that explore common issues and challenges influencing the human development in the region. It is independent policy advocacy document developed through a regional participatory process. The objective of the Report is to promote innovative ideas, advocate policy changes, stimulate reforms, and lead to transformative changes that can carve an enhanced path for development in the region. Since its inception in 2003, the APHDR has been stimulating dialogue, triggering action, and bringing to the forefront critical issues from the human development lens. The themes of the past APHDRs are diverse focusing on contemporary issues of multi-country concern often on themes that are too sensitive to be addressed through national human development reports or themes that need to be tackled through regional cooperation. Some of the past APHDRs include: “Trade on Human Terms - Transforming Trade for Human Development in Asia and the Pacific” (2006); “Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives: Accelerating Human Development in Asia and the Pacific” (2008); “Power, Voice and Rights - A Turning Point for Gender Equality for Asia and the Pacific” (2010); and “One Planet to Share - Sustaining Human Progress in a Changing Climate” (2012). These reports, written mostly by experts from the region, present a vivid account of the progress of human development in the region. These reports can be accessed on http://asiapacific-hdr.aprc.undp.org/.

The forthcoming APHDR 2014 will be the seventh in series and will tackle the theme of leveraging human capital and sustaining development in a period of rapid demographic changes. The demographic transition is happening much more quickly in Asia-Pacific than it did in Europe and North America. Industrialized countries experienced gradual demographic transition spanning between 100-150 years, whereas many countries of the region including China are undergoing such a transition in around four decades. This gives developing countries of the region little time to harness the demographic dividends. In fact, they are running under the risk of ‘growing old before getting rich’. Therefore, the countries of the region have to act quickly changing their policies and institutions to effectively utilize the short window of opportunity. The demographic changes have been coupled with several challenges including rapid urbanization, increasing youth unemployment and feminization of ageing. All these require significant policy and institutional changes to harness the human potentials.

Therefore, it is an opportune moment to prepare a regional human development report and trigger debate and discussions on how to harness the demographic dividends for sustaining high growth and promote human development in the Asia Pacific region. Furthermore, the Report will also complement the discussions related to Post 2015 development options and add to the discussion of the upcoming global conference on population and development beyond 2014. 

Against the above backdrop, the RBAP’s Regional Strategy and Policy Unit is engaged in drafting the APHDR, and is now in the process of hiring a technical editor for substantive editing of the Report. It is expected that the Editor will work closely with the APHDR team, review the draft chapters and other materials including technical background papers, with special attention to weaving the chapters along a coherent set of messages.

Under the supervision of the APHDR Team Leader, the Editor will provide editorial services to edit and synthesize APHDR draft chapters, material and draft contributions written in English into a coherent narrative of the Human Development Report. S/he will work closely with the APHDR Team in the process of substantive editing and bringing forward the arguments and messages of the Report.

Summary of key functions:

• Review, organize, edit, consolidate materials for the Report for clarity and continuity of the arguments and messages; as well as clarity of structure and core themes; identify critical knowledge gaps which may remain and liaise with UNDP/RBAP focal point.
• Undertake and oversee technical editing and copy-editing of the Report for readability, consistency and standardization in line with the UNDP corporate editorial guidelines.

Reviewing, organizing, editing and complementing the knowledge gaps

• The editor will be responsible for substantive editing and/or re-writing the Report’s chapters and narrative sections with a view to ensure: clarity and continuity of the argument and messages, and political focus of the Report; clarity of structure and core themes of the Report; internal consistency, both analytical and stylistic; general readability and accessibility to a broad readership (worldwide).
• Work closely with APHDR team on the content and messages of the report.
• Work together with the APHDR team to identify and address knowledge gaps, and discuss the editorial guidelines.

Technical editing and copy-editing

• Perform two rounds of technical editing followed with copy-editing of the Report and statistical tables in close consultation with the Lead Author and the APHDR Team;
• Pay special attention to the role of boxes, graphics and tables, with the objective of bringing the different components of the draft together seamlessly into a single coherent Report; suggest catchy and concise titles for those elements;
• The technical editing and copy-editing will concentrate on flow and clarity of argument, sequencing, consistency, especially between text and tables and figures and integration of text and boxes, content errors, style and punctuation, spelling and grammar;
• Lastly ensure that the statistical data used and referenced in the text are consistent with the data in the respective tables, figures, charts and maps, as well as with the indicator tables.

Once the Report has been copy-edited and laid out, the editor will perform proofreading, checking spelling, country and city names as well as acronyms and other abbreviations (making sure that they follow official U.N. terminology and conventions), style consistency, callouts, layout problems, references, etc.

Application procedure:

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