Background

UNDP works to eradicate poverty and reduce inequalities through the sustainable development of nations, in more than 170 countries and territories. The Regional Bureau of Asia has the responsibility to guide and support 24 Country Offices in achieving the objectives of UNDP’s Strategic Plan.  RBAP’ staff provides technical advice to Country Offices, governments and other relevant stakeholders; advocates for UNDP corporate messages and represents UNDP at multi-stakeholder fora including public-private dialogues, government and civil society dialogues, South-South and Triangular cooperation initiatives, and engages in UN inter-agency coordination in specific thematic areas.

Climate change and environmental degradation will increasingly present some of the most complex and pressing development challenges, with potentially serious implications for health and economic development. Evidence suggests that health impacts of climate change will vary by sociocultural factors, including gender norms, roles and relations, and differences in access to and control over resources, with potentially deleterious consequences that exacerbate existing inequalities.

With the Novel Corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic, the global context for development has fundamentally shifted. The world faces the greatest socio-economic shock in a generation, coming at a time of acute inequality, ecological fragility and growing distrust within and amongst societies. The pandemic threatens to profoundly deepen inequalities and undo progress on sustainable development and humanitarian responses more broadly. Leveraging prior experience in responding to disease outbreaks (e.g. Ebola, Zika, H1N1, SARS, MERS) and pandemics of the past, an effective response must focus on the most vulnerable populations and those left farthest behind.

The combination of COVID-19 and climate change dramatically multiplies the risks to already vulnerable communities. This is particularly critical for countries already facing multiple drivers of fragility. Beyond health impact, countries are faced with immediate and immense choices to protect lives to avoid catastrophic social, economic and political crises.

UNDP’s priority is to ensure that vulnerable communities are protected against the crises of today while also designing a more resilient and sustainable tomorrow. As part of its support to countries to “build back better”, UNDP can play a critical role of articulating and incorporating the unique needs and circumstances of vulnerable and marginalized populations, building more resilient and equitable health systems and communities.

To aid in these efforts, UNDP is seeking a consultant to support development of enhanced programmatic offer at the intersection of climate change, health equity and gender, that contributes to people-focused, gender-transformative, rights-based, and equity-oriented approaches that drive health equity in the face of challenges posed by climate change, pandemics and other shocks.

Duties and Responsibilities

Objectives Of The Assignment:

The Consultant will support the Health, HIV and Development team at UNDP BRH to define and develop, through a consultative co-creation exercise, priority action areas and interventions to identify and address the root causes driving health inequity and vulnerability and building adaptive capacity and resilience of individuals, communities and institutions in the context of climate change, pandemics and other systemic shocks.

The support is envisioned to build on UNDP’s existing portfolio and pipeline of health and climate programmes, expertise on social determinants of health, gender transformative programming and partnerships with women’s and LGBTI groups, as well as being informed by UNDP’s lead role in the socio-economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.

Scope of Work:

The Consultant will support the “discovery” phase of the programme formulation exercise by gathering, reviewing, organizing and collating information from available sources. Specifically, the consultant will:

1. Conduct a desk review of available sources. The types of documents to be reviewed include:

• Relevant publications, guidance notes and policy papers by UNDP, other UN agencies, civil society organizations and development partners, on the topic of climate change and gender, climate change and health inequity, impact of COVID-19 on vulnerable/marginalized populations including women and LGBTI people;
• Rapid survey and socio-economic impact of COVID-19 assessment results;
• Internal UNDP documentation including Country Office service requests and RFF requests;
• Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), for content and goals related to health and gender and/or marginalized populations.

2. Support the external engagement: propose a list of questions to frame consultation with the community and write up summary of the discussions;

3. Support the internal engagement: propose a list of questions to frame consultation with the UNDP country offices and write up a summary of the discussions;

4. Draft a summary issue brief based on the above.

Final Procucts / Deliverables:

• Desk review report (ca. 15-20 pages)
• Set of proposed questions for online consultations with community
• Short summary report (5-10 pages) from community consultation
• Set of proposed questions for online consultations with UNDP country offices
• Short summary report (5-10 pages) from country office consultation
• One short (2-3 pages) summary issue brief aimed at external audiences

Institutional Arrangements:

The consultant will work under the direct supervision of the Programme Specialist based in the UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub. The Programme Specialist will communicate and work closely with the consultant to ensure timely delivery of expected outputs.

The Programme Specialist will review progress and quality of deliverables prior to issuance of payment.

Duration:

In accordance with the requirements above, the duration of this assignment is not to exceed 30 Days from 1 October to 30 November 2020.

Duty Station and Travel:

To carry out this assignment the consultant will be home based in any location. It is expected that the consultant will be available to meet with programme team (online) during office hours of Bangkok, Thailand. No travel or physical presence at the UNDP BRH office is expected.

The assignment requires the consultant to work closely with the supervisor and UNDP BRH team members. This assignment will be conducted remotely with no physical presence on duty station required.

Competencies

Corporate Competencies:

• Demonstrates integrity by modelling the UN’s values and ethical standards;
• Promotes the vision, mission, and strategic goals of UNDP;
• Displays cultural, gender, religion, race, nationality and age sensitivity and adaptability;
• Treats all people fairly without favouritism.

Technical Competencies:

• Analytic capacity and demonstrated ability to process, analyse and synthesise complex, technical information;
• Proven ability to support the development of high quality knowledge and training materials, and to train technical teams;
• Proven experience in the developing country context and working in different cultural settings.

Communication:

• Communicate effectively in writing to a varied and broad audience in a simple and concise manner.

Professionalism:

• Capable of working in a high pressure environment with sharp and frequent deadlines, managing many tasks simultaneously;
• Excellent analytical and organizational skills.

Teamwork:

• Projects a positive image and is ready to take on a wide range of tasks;
• Focuses on results for the client;
• Welcomes constructive feedback.

Required Skills and Experience

Degree of Expertise and Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in any of the related areas: gender, health, climate change, sustainable development or other social sciences
• At least 7 years of professional experience in relevant technical areas (gender equality, health equity, LGBTI issues, climate change)
• Substantial experience conducting research/analysis and/or proposal writing in the areas of expertise mentioned above
• At least 5 years of demonstrated substantive experience working with developing countries undertaking policy and/or programmatic work in the areas of expertise mentioned below
• Strong understanding of the links between climate change/pandemics, health, and gender issues
• Experience with or strong familiarity with the work of UNDP and/or other multilateral, bilateral and civil society development partners, including actors working on gender and LGBTI issues
• Excellent analytical, writing and communication skills
• Fluency in spoken and written English (as assessed through CV and writing sample)

Price Proposal and Schedule of Payments:

Consultant must send a financial proposal based on Daily Fee. Consultant shall quote an all-inclusive Daily Fee for the contract period. The term “all-inclusive” implies that all costs (professional fees, communications, consumables, etc.) that could be incurred by the IC in completing the assignment are already factored into the daily fee submitted in the proposal. Payments shall be done on a deliverable basis based, upon verification of completion of deliverables.

In general, UNDP shall not accept travel costs exceeding those of an economy class ticket. Should the IC wish to travel on a higher class he/she should do so using their own resources.

In the event of unforeseeable travel not anticipated in this TOR, payment of travel costs including tickets, lodging and terminal expenses should be agreed upon between the respective business unit and the Individual Consultant prior to travel and will be reimbursed.

Travel costs shall be reimbursed at actual but not exceeding the quotation from UNDP approved travel agent. The provided living allowance will not be exceeding UNDP DSA rates.

Evaluation Method And Criteria:

Individual consultants will be evaluated based on the following methodology

Cumulative analysis                           

The award of the contract shall be made to the individual consultant whose offer has been evaluated and determined as a) responsive/compliant/acceptable; and b) having received the highest score out of set of weighted technical criteria (70%) and financial criteria (30%). Financial score shall be computed as a ratio of the proposal being evaluated and the lowest priced proposal received by UNDP for the assignment.

Technical Criteria for Evaluation (Maximum 100 points)

• Criteria 1: Education and language skills  – Max 10 points
• Criteria 2: Professional experience and understanding of issues relating to climate change, health equity and gender, including substantive experience working with developing countries undertaking policy and/or programmatic work in relevant technical areas  –  Max 25 points
• Criteria 3: Substantial experience conducting research/analysis and/or proposal writing in the areas of expertise mentioned above, including as demonstrated through a writing sample  –  Max 25 points
• Criteria 4: Understanding of the assignment, and feasibility and merits of proposed approach and indicative work plan – Max 20 points
• Criteria 5: Interview – Max 20 points.

Shortlisted candidates shall be called for an interview. Only candidates obtaining a minimum of 70% of the total technical points would be considered for the Financial Evaluation.

Documentation Required:

Interested individual consultant must submit the following documents/information to demonstrate their qualifications. Please group them into one (1) single PDF document as the application only allows to upload maximum one document:

• Letter of Confirmation of Interest and Availability and financial proposal using the template provided in Annex III.
• Personal CV, indicating all past experience from similar projects, as well as the contact details (email and telephone number) of the Candidate and at least three (3) professional references.
• A cover letter, including  a brief description of why the individual considers him/herself/themselves as the most suitable for the assignment
• A short description of how they would approach the assignment including an indicative work plan (ca. 2-3 pages)
• One writing sample (a publication, policy brief, journal article or programmatic document that the applicant has authored)

Incomplete proposals may not be considered. The short listed candidates may be contacted and the successful candidate will be notified.

ANNEXES:

Annex I - TOR Consultant to support definition of programmatic offer
Annex II - General_Terms_and_Conditions_for_Contracts_Individual_Consultants
Annex III - Letter of Confirmation of Interest and Availability and financial proposal
Annex IV - P11 Form_for_ICs_optional
Annex V - Procurement Notice

All documents can be downloaded at: https://procurement-notices.undp.org/view_notice.cfm?notice_id=69945

For any clarification regarding this assignment please write to procurement.th@undp.org under Subject: JobAds 93815 - Consultant to support definition of programmatic offer on climate change, health equity and gender.