UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security.  Placing women’s rights at the centre of all its efforts, the UN Women will lead and coordinate United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world. It will provide strong and coherent leadership in support of Member States’ priorities and efforts, building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors.

A key area of concern for UN Women is women’s economic empowerment as expressed in UN Women’s Strategic Plan 2018-2021. Empowering women to participate fully in economic life is essential to building strong economies, establishing just societies, and achieving the 2030 Agenda including Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 for gender equality and women’s empowerment and several other SDGs relating to inclusive growth, decent work, ending poverty, and reducing inequality, and revitalizing the global partnership for sustainable development. Ensuring women’s participation and leadership and inclusion of their needs, experiences, and skills in the economy requires intentional actions and commitments from both the public and the private sector. 

The WeEmpowerAsia programme

The WeEmpowerAsia (WEA) programme is a collaborative effort between the Regional Office of UN Women for Asia and the Pacific (ROAP) and the European Union (EU), which is funding the action under its Partnership Instrument. With this programme the two entities will leverage their joint commitment to enhance women’s economic empowerment globally. They each have longstanding experience and partnerships in the Asian region. UN Women will apply its triple mandate of normative, operational and coordination actions and use its convening power to bring multiple stakeholders together for effective collaboration. EU brings valuable private and public sector partnerships across sectors as well as its solid expertise in trade and economic development.

The overall objective of the WEA programme is that more women lead, participate and have access to enhanced business opportunities and leadership within the private sector to advance sustainable and inclusive growth. The programme will achieve this through three complementary outcome areas to be implemented in seven selected middle-income countries (China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) in Asia:

• ADVOCACY: Women’s networks, public institutions, and the private sector will collaborate and share expertise and knowledge to build an enabling business environment for women’s economic empowerment in the workplace and in the marketplace,
• ENTREPRENEURSHIP: The capacity of women-owned businesses and women entrepreneurs will be developed to enable them to engage with government and private sector corporations in policy development and dialogues for advancing women’s economic empowerment, and
• BUSINESS ENGAGEMENT: The private sector will be supported to implement gender-sensitive practices and culture within their businesses through the take-up of the Women Empowerment Principles (the WEPs – a set of guiding principles to achieve gender equality within companies).

Ultimately, the programme will contribute to the achievement of gender equality through enabling women’s increased participation in the labour force and in the marketplace, improved opportunities for women entrepreneurship and business start-ups, and through strengthening of corporate sector’s commitment and action to ensure gender equality in business culture and practices. 

The Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs)

The guiding platform for the WeEmpowerAsia programme is the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), a set of seven principles for businesses offering guidance on how to strengthen gender equality in the workplace, in the market place and in the community. Jointly established by UN Women and UN Global Compact, the WEPs are informed by international labour and human rights standards, adapted from the Calvert Women's Principles®, and grounded in the recognition that businesses have a stake in, and a responsibility for, gender equality and women’s empowerment.

The WEPs serve as the umbrella framework for multi-stakeholder networks to work together to foster implementation and awareness of the internationally agreed standards for business practices that empower women. The Principles are also the primary vehicle for corporate delivery on gender equality and women’s empowerment dimensions of the 2030 agenda and the SDGs.

By signing the Women’s Empowerment Principles, companies furthermore galvanize their shareholders and stakeholders to drive change for gender equality. They are becoming role models for attracting talent, entering new markets, serving their communities, while measurably improving the bottom line.

The seven Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) are:

• Principle 1: Establish high-level corporate leadership for gender equality
• Principle 2: Treat all women and men fairly at work – respect and support human rights and non-discrimination
• Principle 3: Ensure the health, safety and well-being of all women and men workers
• Principle 4: Promote education, training and professional development for women
• Principle 5: Implement enterprise development, supply chain and marketing practices that empower women
• Principle 6: Promote equality through community initiatives and advocacy
• Principle 7: Measure and publicly report on progress to achieve gender equality

To examine the extent to which Indonesian companies have corporate policies/plans that are aligned with the 7 WEPs, a joint study in Indonesia was conducted in 2018, by the UN Women, the IGCN (Indonesian Global Compact Network) and the IBCWE (Indonesia Business Coalition for Women Empowerment). The research team approached about 600 companies, but only 50 were willing to participate. Most of the respondents, or 42%, were from the manufacturing sector, while the remainder were engaged in finance, property, services, agriculture, mining, trade, tourism, transportation and communications. Nearly half of the respondents are multinational or regional enterprises, and the rest national corporations.

Some highlights of the study showed that 84% of those companies have at least one woman on their boards of executives with 28% being the average proportion of women on the board. 68% of the participating companies have policies to retain women, especially after maternity leave. The study concludes that most of the companies are familiar with the concept of WEPs, yet do not fully understand the principles.

Hence there is still a lot of homework to do in Indonesia to ensure that the principles are adopted and implemented by the companies to ensure gender equality and as a good business practice. As the McKinsey Global Institute said in a recent report that Indonesia can increase its gross domestic product by 9% or $135 billion within the next seven years by achieving gender equality in the workplace. It is imperative to increase the quantity and quality of business’ engagements in the WEP.

Therefore, UN Women aims to strengthen the interventions on WEPs implementation by getting more companies to sign the WEPs and provide technical assistance including through capacity building on translation the principles. As part of a preliminary step towards this initiative, UN Women intends to carry out scoping activities to map out potential signatories and identify the need for capacity building related to the implementation of WEPs.

Under the overall guidance of UN Women Representative, and close supervision by Country Programme Manager, the consultant shall undertake the following duties:

• Carry out a scoping to identify and build a list of potential corporations, have one-on-one dialogues with existing partners like IGCN & IBCWE as well as other networks from the Philanthropy and Business for SDGs platform (like IBL, PisAgro, Filantropi Indonesia, CCPHI, APINDO, etc) for this scoping purpose.

• Facilitate a workshop or FGD to identify the needs of capacity building support for companies that are signing into the Principles, mapping out the existing training materials and propose training method preferred by the companies.

• Provide UN Women with timely, coherent and strategic advice on building an increased private sector engagement in WEPs, include building on its present partnerships and stakeholders.  

Expected Deliverables

Competencies

Essential knowledge and experience:

• At least 5 years of proven overall experience in convening partnership with private sectors particularly to promote social issues including gender equality and women’s empowerment to corporates.
• At least 5 years of experience in developing, implementing and evaluating economic empowerment programmes and trainings.
• Proven experience in facilitating workshop and/or FGD with private sectors participants.
• Previous experience in developing, design and delivering of training materials to business audiences is an advantage.
• Master’s degree (or equivalent) in Education, Business Management, Gender Studies or other related fields
• Previous experience in working with UN agencies or other international organizations is an asset
• Excellent command of written English, with proven report writing experience.

Corporate Competencies:

• Demonstrates integrity by modelling the United Nations' values and ethical standards;
• Promotes the vision, mission, and strategic goals of the UN and UN Women;
• Displays cultural, gender, religion, race, nationality and age sensitivity and adaptability;
• Ability and willingness to work as part of a team to meet tight deadlines and produce high quality work.

Required Skills and Experience

Contract period and work location

The period of this consultancy is from February 17 to April 30, 2020. The consultant will be based in Jakarta, Indonesia and work home-based and at the UN Women Indonesia Office or partner offices as required. The consultant might be requested to travel on a mission for which travel costs and Daily Subsistence Allowance (DSA) will be provided. Travel Authorization will be granted to the consultant prior to the travel date. 

 Evaluation                                       

Applications will be evaluated based on the cumulative analysis.

• Technical Qualification (100 points) weight; [70%]
• Financial Proposal (100 points) weight; [30%]

A two-stage procedure is utilised in evaluating the applications, with evaluation of the technical application being completed prior to any price proposal being compared. Only the price proposal of the candidates who passed the minimum technical score of 70% of the obtainable score of 100 points in the technical qualification evaluation will be evaluated.

Technical qualification evaluation criteria:

The total number of points allocated for the technical qualification component is 100. The technical qualification of the individual is evaluated based on following technical qualification evaluation criteria:

Only the candidates who have attained a minimum of 70% of total points will be considered as technically qualified candidates who may be contacted for validation interview.

Financial/Price Proposal evaluation:

• Only the financial proposal of candidates who have attained a minimum of 70% score in the technical evaluation will be considered and evaluated.
• The total number of points allocated for the price component is 100.
• The maximum number of points will be allotted to the lowest price proposal that is opened/ evaluated and compared among those qualified technical candidates who have attained a minimum of 70% score in the technical evaluation. All other price proposals will receive points in inverse proportion to the lowest price.

Submission of application

Submission package includes:

• Updated CV
• Personal History Form (P11)
• Writing sample
• Technical Proposal including approach and workplan
• Financial proposal breaking down the daily fee

Payments

Payments for this consultancy will be based on the achievement of each deliverable and certification that each has been satisfactorily completed.