Background

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 center of all its efforts, UN Women leads and coordinates United Nations System efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world. It provides strong and coherent leadership in support of Member States priorities and efforts, building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors.

 UN Women Ethiopia Country Office (ECO) to support national and local efforts in the acceleration of progress towards gender equality and women empowerment, while also advocating for systematic integration of gender-focused approaches within various sectors of organizations. The ECO uses result Based Management and a Rights Based Approaches to promote women as rights holders, while supporting the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) and other stakeholders to be gender responsive as duty bearers and development partners.   The country office is working on four priority areas: (i) increasing women’s leadership and participation, (ii) ending violence against women and girls; (iii) enhancing women’s economic empowerment; and (iv) making gender equality central to national development planning and budgeting as well as addressing gender issues and priorities in humanitarian action.

Aligned to UN Women Ethiopia Strategic Plan (2022-2025), Women Economic Empowerment (WEE) interventions focus on creating opportunities for women living in rural and urban areas by binding their agencies, promoting their  access and control over productive resources such as land, climate resilient agriculture and agricultural technologies, inputs and services, finances and know-how to ensure that they are economically empowered and increasingly benefit from economic development initiatives, programs and reforms in Ethiopia. These strategic focuses have also been translated through its various programs including the ongoing UN Women and ILO Joint Program of promoting decent employment for women through inclusive growth policies and investments in the care economy.

UN Women-ILO has been implementing the Global Joint Programme 'Promoting decent employment for women through inculsive growth policies and investments in the care economy" in Ethiopia. The main objective of the programme is to support governments and social partners in implementing gender-sensitive policy responses to the pandemic and during the recovery phase. The programme supports various policy and operational level government and development partners’ initiatives to promote decent employment for women through macroeconomic planning, sectoral policy and investments in the care economy. It aims to scale up the UN Women’s work on Gender responsive budgeting and engendering macroeconomic policies with the government; Ministry of Finance (MoF), Ministry of Women and Social Affairs, and international organizations; IMF and WB.

There have been ongoing initiatives on institutionalizing Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) and capacity building on the need to design and implement gender responsive macroeconomic policies. UN Women Ethiopia country office implemented a four-year program entitled ‘’Transformative financing for Gender Equality’’from July 2017-June 2021 to enable the Government of Ethiopia to establish a gender-responsive planning and budgeting system to ensure that resources are allocated adequately and effectively financing on gender equality and women's empowerment commitments.  The evaluation report of the program shows that it has made good progress in GRB, however, a lot still needs to be done to fully integrate GRB. Therefore, based on the recommendations from the evaluation, UN Women has been designing a second phase of the Programme by taking good practices, lessons learned, and recommendations provided in the evaluation. In addition to this, UN Women has been providing financial and technical support to Ministry of Finance and jointly provide training on GRB for public bodies/federal and regional offices. They prepared guideline and training manual on GRB, conducted training of trainers, assessments, knowledge management and developed a tool kit for parliamentarians. UN Women also developed budget tracking tool in English as well as in Amharic that help the Federal as well as regional experts to quote and use it as a reference while planning, allocating, auditing, and monitoring budget from Gender perspective and research initiatives.

A conference organized by UN Women in collaboration with Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Women, Children and Youth (the present MOWSA) in 2019 on “macroeconomic impacts of Gender inequality: seizing the opportunity for sustainable change” was another initiative that inform policy makers and higher officials on gender responsive budget process by sharing best practices from other countries to advance gender equality and bring economic development. Lessons learnt from a conference indicated that gender equality matters a lot to guarantee macroeconomic stability and sustainable development. Besides this, a two-day workshop was organized by UN Women in 2019 on Gender and Macroeconomics and informed policy makers and higher officials the need for engendering macroeconomic policies to bring sustainable economic development and the need for addressing gender biases in mainstreaming growth policies with taking into consideration the differentiated needs and contributions of women and men.

A research paper on labor force participation and economic implications in Ethiopia, which jointly produced by Un Women and International Monitory Fund (IMF) indicated that countries that increase participation of women in the labor force experience faster growth and income rise rapidly as women enter formal work. The study showed significant gender gaps in wages and productivity exists in Ethiopia, particularly in agriculture sector. Female managed farms in Ethiopia are 24% less productive than male managed farms due to the plot size, land quality, household duties, lower use of inputs and unpaid care work. Women also are less likely to own businesses as they face significant constraints; so only 16.6% of registered businesses in 2014 were owned by women. In addition, the study showed that, increasing women’s education could increase output by around 10% and increasing women’s participation in wage employment could increase output by 10.5% which is significant to country’s economic development.

1. Justification

Many studies highlighted macroeconomic policies are crucial enablers of gender equality as they shape the overall economic environment for advancing women economic empowerment through channels of employment creation, the level of unpaid care required of women and the size of fiscal space which determines the resources available for governments to promote gender equality. Macroeconomic policies have a direct impact on achieving gender equality. However, macroeconomic policies are typically assumed to be ‘gender neutral’, while they have distributive consequences that impact differently on women and men and influence gender dynamics more broadly. Despite its importance to a range of economic and social outcomes, macroeconomic management typically focuses on a narrow set of goals such as increasing gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates or reducing inflation to extremely low levels. The issues of inequality and distribution are absent or poorly addressed. It is often assumed that economic growth will provide solutions to problems such as gender inequality, yet evidence shows that faster growth in itself will not bring gender equality.

Macroeconomic policies can limit or broaden the possibilities for addressing women’s socio-economic disadvantage through several channels. Macroeconomic policies have a direct impact on both the quantity and quality of employment opportunities available to women and men, because of widespread occupational segregation in the labour market. These policies also affect the burden of unpaid care and domestic work via their impacts on employment, household incomes and living standards. Additionally, they have distributive consequences for example, through taxation, that affect both women and men differently and can either reinforce the extent of women’s socioeconomic disadvantage or, potentially, promote a redistribution of resources towards women. In line with this, macroeconomic management and financial regulations also influence economic uncertainty and crises such as COVID-19, which women and men bearing different costs of negative shocks. This instability at the macroeconomic level produces outcomes that can reinforce existing gender dynamics. Thus, macroeconomic policies have a key role to maintain the progress already made in the country and improve the result.

Ethiopia has shown political commitment to the advancement of gender equality and women’s rights, however, significant challenges remain around women’s economic participation. While the vast majority of people work in Ethiopia, women face many barriers particularly to formal labor force participation and have significant wage gaps compared to men. A study made by IMF and UN Women in 2018 on quantifying the macroeconomic returns to closing gaps in labor force participation and education levels between men and women in Ethiopia indicated that, eliminating gender gaps in both educational attainment and the rate of formal employment could increase output in Ethiopia over time by over 24 percent. Further, the study come up with a finding that there is a positive relationship between the ratio of labour force participation rates between men and women and the rate of growth of an economy of a country. The study indicated that a 1 percentage point increase in the female-male labour force participation ratio is associated with a 0.2 percentage point increase in the rate of growth of an economy.

Macroeconomic policies go beyond economic growth and include a broader set of objectives to ensure that growth benefits women and men and includes access to decent work, enhances informal livelihoods, addresses unpaid care work, and ensures basic living standards. Particularly in times of crisis of COVID-19, the effects of macroeconomic policies on social hierarchies can become noticeable, which can promote the existing negative socio-cultural norms.  Thus, economic and social policies need to support the realization of human right and substantive equality, which a rethinking of macroeconomic policies became very essential.

To support the integration of gender equality goals in macroeconomic policies and planning, different frameworks, approaches and methodologies have been developed by many countries including Ethiopia. A number of governments have adopted Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB), which has helped the government to prioritize the reallocation of existing resources to support gender equality and women empowerment efforts. Effective implementation of these approaches, macroeconomic policies and tools as well as financial regulations in a gender responsive manner, requires creating awareness and strengthening the capacity of policy makers and development practitioners to increase the responsiveness and accountability of government and organizations in charge of economic policy design and implementation.

It is with this understanding, UNW-ILO has planned to strengthen the capacity of policy makers and high-level experts on the need for engendering macroeconomics to advance gender equality and economic development. This capacity building will be conducted on Gender and Macroeconomics by contextualizing the existing UN Women’s training manual on Gender and Economics. The training will be provided for five days using adapted tool, focusing on promoting decent employment for women and investment in care economy in Ethiopia. Using the inputs/feedback to be obtained from the training participants the contextualized manual will be further enriched and finalized for use in the similar trainings. The target audience will comprise policy makers and experts from Ministry of Finance, MoWSA, Ministry of Plan and Development, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ministry of Innovation and Technology, Ministry of Agriculture and other sectoral ministries, trade unions, private sectors, UN Agencies, CSOs and NGOs.

To this effect, UN Women Ethiopia is seeking National Consultant to develop a training manual on Gender and Macroeconomics adapting the global UN Women’s training manual on Gender and Economics; and provide training using adapted manual for policy makers and development practitioners. 

Duties and Responsibilities

Phase I

1. Review UN Women's training manual on Gender and Economics and other relevant documents,
2. Develop inception report including standard and contextualized manual outline on gender and macroeconomics
3. Present inception report including the draft outline of the training manual
4. Revise the inception report based on the comments from the inception workshop and UN Women  
5. Conduct consultation meeting with UN Women, MOF, MPDC and other relevant stakeholders
6. Draft Context specific and participatory gender and macroeconomic training manual. Adult learning principles should be used as an approach in the due course of adapting the global manual.
7. Submit the draft manual to UN Women.

Phase II

1. Design, Plan, and prepare training schedule on Gender and Macroeconomics based on the adapted manual,
2. Provide training for policy makers and high-level experts from government and non-government organization, CSOs, NGOs and private sectors,
3. Prepare pre and post evaluation questionnaires to evaluate the knowledge of participants before and after the training,
4. Gather feedback from trainees to further contextualize the training manual and making it more participatory,
5. Revise the manual based on comments collected from the training,
6. Develop training report and submit for review,
7. Submit the final draft manual to UN Women for review,
8. Submit final training manual and training report,

Deliverables

The specific deliverables for this consultancy, to be approved by UN Women Ethiopia Country Office, will be the following:

1. Inception Report (which includes understanding of ToR, proposed methodology, outline of the manual, deliverables and schedule as the main components) about ten-page long
2. Inception workshop report
3. Draft training manual on Gender and Macroeconomics
4. Minutes of consultations
5. Training for five days
6. Training report
7. Revised training manual incorporating inputs collected from the training,
8. Final Gender and Macroeconomics training manual

Competencies

Core Values/guiding principles:

• Integrity - Demonstrate consistency in upholding and promoting the values of UN Women in actions and decisions, in line with the UN Code of Conduct.
• Professionalism - Demonstrate professional competence and Consultant knowledge of the pertinent substantive areas of work.
• Cultural sensitivity and respect for diversity - Demonstrate an appreciation of the multicultural nature of the organization and the diversity of its staff. Additionally, each individual should have an international outlook, appreciating difference in values and learning from cultural diversity.

 Core Competencies:

• Planning & Organizing – Develops clear goals in line with agreed strategies, identifies priorities, foresees risks and makes allowances accordingly.
• Organizational Awareness - Demonstrate corporate knowledge and sound judgment.
• Teamwork - Demonstrate ability to work in a multicultural, multi-ethnic environment and to maintain effective working relations with people of different national and cultural backgrounds.
• Accountability – Takes ownership of all responsibilities and delivers outputs in accordance with agreed time, cost and quality standards.

Required Skills and Experience

Education

• Minimum qualification Master’s degree in economics, or any other relevant field of economics with an expertise in the areas of gender and development.

Experience

• Minimum 10 years of experience working on gender and economics
• Experience on manual development, conducting and facilitating high- level capacity building and training programs for government officials,
• Experience in facilitating participatory, interactive, multi-cultural training for adults,
• Previous experience working with the United Nations system, the African Union or other inter-governmental organizations will be an asset.

 Language and skill

• A consultant needs to have excellent knowledge of written and oral communication in English
• Computer skills: full command of Microsoft applications relevant to the assignment

Note

Technical component:

• Letter of interest explaining why he/she is the most suitable for the work
• Signed Curriculum vitae with contact details of 3 clients for whom you have rendered preferably similar services 

Please attach a completed P11 to your application. Kindly note that applications without a completed and signed UN Women P-11 form will be treated as incomplete and will not be considered for further assessment.

UN Women Personal History form (P-11) can be downloaded from http://www.unwomen.org/en/about-us/employment .

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If you need any reasonable accommodation to support your participation in the recruitment and selection process, please include this information in your application. 

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