UNDP Jobs - 75594- Gender Equality Seal Initiative

Gender Equality Seal Initiative

Location :

Home Based

Type of Contract :

Individual Contract

Starting Date :

23-Jan-2018

Application Deadline :

28-Nov-17 (Midnight New York, USA)

Post Level :

International Consultant

Duration of Initial Contract :

50 working days ( over a period of 2 years)

Languages Required :

Arabic English French Spanish

Expected Duration of Assignment :

50 working days

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

The Gender Equality Seal is a corporate quality assurance mechanism that measures and certifies the achievements and competence of Country Offices, as well as Regional Service Centers and Headquarters Units in advancing women's rights and gender equality.

The certification process of the Gender Equality Seal initiative is also a learning platform that helps Country Offices / Regional Service Centers/HQ units establish a baseline, fine-tune strategies, identify and address gaps and challenges, document innovations and showcase the impacts of interventions for gender equality. The certification process creates a space for building a shared understanding of the definitions, strategies and goals of gender mainstreaming, identifying gaps and possibilities for synergies, and exploring ways to address them.

The Gender Equality Seal has three levels of certification (Gold, Silver, and Bronze) and Country Offices/ Regional Service Centers/Headquarter units are awarded a certain level of certification according to their gender equality accomplishments.

Duties and Responsibilities

Before starting the support to country offices, the consultant will agree to participate in a virtual training of assessors on the Gender Equality Seal benchmarking matrix and methodology, to ensure quality of the services he/she will provide.

Under the overall supervision of the UNDP Gender Team Director or her designate, the Consultant during a hands-on mission or virtual certification process will:

Online Assessment of Country Offices

Review Country Offices/Units results and background documents (evidences) from the online assessment tool of the Gender Equality Seal.

Advisory Services for Gender Mainstreaming

Provide advisory services to Country Offices on gender mainstreaming/ improvement of projects/institutional development as needed through a mission in country or virtually (emails, webinars, trainings etc.)

Technical support mission to Gender Seal offices

Develop an Agenda and methodology for the assessment mission and negotiate agenda with the selected Country Offices;
Review CO's gender mainstreaming work, using the Seal framework as a guiding framework, and including some techniques such as interviews in the office; Focus group discussions with staff, workshops as needed;
Identify concrete measures to improve overall performance of the office on gender equality, with special attention to issues that have been “red flagged” during the Gender Seal process.

Hands on Missions for Certification Process

Develop an Agenda and methodology for the assessment mission and negotiate agenda with the selected Country Offices;
Conduct a desk review of documents uploaded by Country Offices after the on line assessment and develop recommendations for improvement;
Carry out the assessment through: Data collection through key informant interviews in the office; Focus group discussions with staff, interviews with staff and partners, workshops (both within and across work teams and functional units); Survey using free online survey tool such as Survey Monkey;
Develop a report which should include a final score for each assessment area of the UNDP Seal benchmarking tool; recommendations; and recommended level of certification;
Prepare a PPT and organize a meeting with senior management and Gender Focal Team to agree and finalize grading and establish follow up actions;
Submit the report and recommended level of certification of the Country office/Unit (Gold, Silver, Bronze) to the UNDP Gender Equality Seal Team.

Expected Outputs:

Advisory Services for Gender Mainstreaming

Online Assessments: Verification of documents and assessment of scoring of the results of the Country Office as entered in the online assessment tool;

Carry out technical support mission to Gender Seal offices: effective advisory services on gender mainstreaming and institutional development to Country offices provided;
- Develop an Agenda and methodology for the technical mission and coordinate agenda with the selected Country Offices;
- Provide the office with a concise report and specific recommendations for action that can guide the office to improve their work on gender and overall Seal scores within 6-8 months.

Hands on Missions for Certification Process

Evidences verified and country office scored against Gold Matrix.
Final assessment report including scoring of benchmarks and recommendations for the Country Office;
Summary Report with recommendations (approximately 6/8 pages) developed and submitted to the UNDP Gender Equality Seal Team.

Competencies

Demonstrated capacity for strategic thinking, and expertise in global gender equality and mainstreaming strategies;
Proven capacity to produce high quality qualitative research and ability to absorb, analyze and synthesize large amounts of complex information within tight deadlines;
Demonstrated ability and willingness to work with people of different cultural, ethnic and religious background, different gender, and diverse political views.

Required Skills and Experience

Academic qualifications:

Masters or PhD in a development related discipline (women’s studies or gender and development) is required;

Experience:

Minimum of 5/7 years of comprehensive knowledge in gender and development, institutional development and gender mainstreaming or related fields is required;
Field experience is required;
Experience with UNDP and strong understanding of the UNDP, operations and structures, particularly those related to gender equality and women’s empowerment and field experience is desirable;
Proven expertise on gender audits, evaluations and capacity assessments for gender mainstreaming is desirable;
Proven expertise in designing and implementing gender responsive participatory methodologies is desirable;
Experience in crisis and conflict settings and in gender equality and humanitarian response is desirable;

Language:

Excellent writing, editing, and oral communication skills in English for report writing; is required
Ability to speak the official language of the country assessed is required, (either English, Spanish or French or Arabic).

Travel

Experts shall be required to travel for specific assessments and UNDP will arrange and cover the cost of the official travel in accordance with UNDP rules and procedures by providing tickets, travel allowances, daily substance allowance and terminal expenses. This may include, but is not limited to, travel to up to 3 countries per region (Africa, Latin America, Europe and CIS, Asia and Pacific and Arab States). Each expert is expected to undertake at least one mission on average and should expect to be hired for a specific region.

The fare will always be “most direct, most economical” and any difference in price with the preferred route will be paid for by the expert.

Application Procedure

The application package containing the following (to be uploaded as one file):

Online application with brief description of why the Offer considers her/himself the most suitable for the assignment; and
Personal CV or P11, indicating all past experience from similar projects and specifying the relevant assignment period (from/to), as well as the email and telephone contacts of at least three (3) professional references.

Note: The above documents need to be scanned in one file and uploaded to the online application as one document.

Shortlisted candidates (ONLY) will be requested to submit a Financial Proposal.

The financial proposal should specify an all-inclusive daily fee (based on a 7-hours working day - lunch time is not included - and estimated 21.75 days per month).
The financial proposal must be all-inclusive and take into account various expenses that will be incurred during the contract, including: the daily professional fee; cost of travel from the home base to the duty station and vice versa, where required; living allowances at the duty station; communications, utilities and consumables; life, health and any other insurance; risks and inconveniences related to work under hardship and hazardous conditions (e.g., personal security needs, etc.), when applicable; and any other relevant expenses related to the performance of services under the contract.
This consultancy is a home-based assignment, therefore, there is no envisaged travel cost to join duty station/repatriation travel.
In the case of unforeseeable travel requested by UNDP, payment of travel costs including tickets, lodging and terminal expenses should be agreed upon, between UNDP and Individual Consultant, prior to travel and will be reimbursed. In general, UNDP should 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.
If the Offeror is employed by an organization/company/institution, and he/she expects his/her employer to charge a management fee in the process of releasing him/her to UNDP under a Reimbursable Loan Agreement (RLA), the Offeror must indicate at this point, and ensure that all such costs are duly incorporated in the financial proposal submitted to UNDP.

Evaluation Process

Applicants are reviewed based on Required Skills and Experience stated above and based on the technical evaluation criteria outlined below. Applicants will be evaluated based on cumulative scoring. When using this weighted scoring method, the award of the contract will be made to the individual consultant whose offer has been evaluated and determined as:

Being responsive/compliant/acceptable; and
Having received the highest score out of a pre-determined set of weighted technical and financial criteria specific to the solicitation where technical criteria weighs 70% and Financial criteria/ Proposal weighs 30%.

Technical evaluation - Total 70% (70 points):

Criteria 1: Minimum of 5/7 years of comprehensive knowledge in gender and development, institutional development and gender mainstreaming or related fields; participatory methodologies and field experience: 20 points;
Criteria 2: Experience with UNDP and strong understanding of the UNDP, operations and structures, particularly those related to gender equality and women’s empowerment and field experience: 20 points;
Criteria 3: Proven expertise on gender audits, evaluations and capacity assessments for gender mainstreaming: 20 points;
Criteria 4: Experience in crisis and conflict settings and in gender equality and humanitarian response. 10 points;

Candidates obtaining a minimum of 70% (49 points) of the maximum obtainable points for the technical criteria (70 points) shall be considered for the financial evaluation.

Financial Evaluation - Total 30% (30 points)

The following formula will be used to evaluate financial proposal:

p = y (µ/z), where

p = points for the financial proposal being evaluated

y = maximum number of points for the financial proposal

µ = price of the lowest priced proposal

z = price of the proposal being evaluated

Contract Award

Candidate obtaining the highest combined scores in the combined score of Technical and Financial evaluation will be considered technically qualified and will be offered to enter into contract with UNDP.

Institutional Arrangement

The consultant will work under the guidance and direct supervision of the Senior Policy Advisor, Gender Mainstreaming and will be responsible for the fulfilment of the deliverables as specified above.

The Consultant will be responsible for providing her/his own laptop.

Payment modality

Payment to the Individual Contractor will be made based on the actual number of days worked, deliverables accepted and upon certification of satisfactory completion by the manager.
The work week will be based on 35 hours, i.e. on a 7 hour working day, with core hours being between 9h00 and 18h00 daily.

Framework Agreement

UNDP plans to enter into the Long-Term Agreement (LTA) with 12 TOP ranked successful Individual Contractor for a period of Two (2) years to assure resources availability at the required timeframe and/or increased demand for services requested.

Please note that the LTA does not form a financial obligation or commitment from UNDP at the time the LTA contract is signed, and that such an agreement is non-exclusive.

When a specific need arises, UNDP shall directly engage the consultant that meets the requirement, based on the ranking of the procurement process and meeting the requirements of the specific TOR, without the need for further selection process. A specific Terms of Reference (ToR) outlining the outputs and detailed arrangement for each assignment shall be provided and an IC or RLA, whichever is applicable detailing the time frame, but still within the scope of the responsibilities stated in the LTA. The successful Individual Contractor/s is expected to provide Confirmation of Interest on the specific services required. Financial commitments will only be established each time a Purchase Order for the specific services/TOR for Individual Contractor is committed and based on the agreed LTA Daily Rate Consultancy Fee.

This LTA has a cumulative ceiling amount that may accrue to the individual contractor during the life of the LTA, but said amount shall remain as an upper limit, and must not and cannot be interpreted nor understood as neither a financial commitment nor guarantee of business volume.

Mechanics for Engagement

It is anticipated that 12 candidates will be selected across the regions.

4-5 consultants (primarily for the Online Assessment of country offices)
2 Francophone consultants + 4 Anglophone consultants + 1 Spanish speaking consultant, (at least one consultant per region).