UN Women Fiji MCO is implementing the Women’s Resilience to Disasters (WRD) Programme in the Pacific. UN Women promotes gender-responsive disaster risk reduction (DRR) and resilience across its triple mandate through technical and policy support, provision of gender expertise to DRR mechanisms and processes (local, national, regional, and global), advocacy and knowledge management, and by implementing programmes and projects for gender-responsive DRR and resilience building, including the Women’s Resilience to Disasters (WRD) programme, which is UN Women’s signature DRR initiative. The WRD Programme aims to reduce the loss of lives and livelihoods from disasters and threats, including COVID 19 and climate change, and to contribute to sustainable, secure and thriving communities and countries through addressing critical gender gaps in disaster and climate resilience. UN Women’s key partners include the 50 UN entities related to the UN Plan of Action on Disaster Risk Reduction for Resilience, all stakeholders working on disaster and climate resilience including the Early Warnings for All Initiative, the Loss and Damage collaboration and international financial institutions, and various gender, DRR and climate platforms at the global, regional, and national levels.
UN Women’s WRD programme proposes a comprehensive package for building women’s resilience to disasters, climate change and threats. The aim of the WRD Programme is to render women’s and girls’ lives and livelihoods disaster-resilient, contributing to sustainable and secure communities, by promoting gender responsive prevention, preparedness, and recovery systems, plans and tools; and by enabling targeted action to help women and girls withstand hazards and threats, recover fully from disasters, and increase their resilience to future risks.
Objectives of the Assignment:
The WRD Pacific regional component is looking for an individual consultant to support the Vanuatu National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) to support the implementation of selected activities under the work plan of the WRD programme.
For this purpose, the selected consultant will work under the leadership of the Director of the Vanuatu National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) with technical support from UN Women. He/ She will report to and be supervised by the WRD national programme coordinator (NPC) and in collaboration with the UN Women Country Programme Coordinator (CPC) based in Vanuatu. The consultant will be technically supported by the WRD Regional team and Programme Manager as and when required.
Duties and Responsibilities:
Responsibilities:
The National Consultant will provide support in enhancing knowledge, skills around the gender dimensions of disaster risk and strengthen utilization of tools that support gender responsive DRR, climate change actions.
Enhance capacity of actors to effectively engage in disaster risk reduction and resilience building with adequate knowledge and skills for promoting leadership of women and girls.
Strengthen NDMO utilization of gender response frameworks through available resources and relevant review processes support engagement of DRR and climate resilience practitioners in communities of practice, networks, and partnerships; and,
Strengthen DRR coordination mechanisms and partnerships to ensure they adequately integrate gender responsiveness and social inclusion.
Suggested Activities to fulfil these overarching objectives include:
IEC Material Review/Development:
Review the existing resources in gender responsive DRR, Climate Action materials to develop new IEC products that are both Gender responsive and socially inclusive targeting people with special needs and other vulnerable grouping.
Arrange for translation of the IEC materials, into all the three national languages of Vanuatu; and,
Support printing, dissemination, and socialization of materials.
Support Community Engagement:
Provide support to strengthen communication at all levels to ensure gender and other social inclusion agendas are addressed and made known to the community, DRR decision makers and practitioners through appropriate mediums and events.
Review of the Hazard drill guidelines for the Community Disaster and Climate Change Committees / CDCCC) / Provincial Disaster Climate Change Committees (PDCCC) targeting gender and social inclusion.
Initiate the review and strengthen existing drill guidelines and consultation with relevant stakeholders for necessary revision from gender and social inclusion perspective.
Undertake training (including TOT) for CDCCC participants 2023,2024) to rollout the guidelines.
Review early warning messages & signs capturing the Gender and social inclusion perspectives.
Undertake an assessment of existing early warning messages for the purpose of finding the gaps and opportunities for revision.
Draft modified messages for targeted groups based on localized needs for submission to the appropriate authorities for endorsement.
Finalize the modified early warning messages and disseminate to appropriate authorities for updating/implementation in partnership with relevant agencies.
Capacity building initiatives for stakeholders:
Conduct capacity building initiatives to strengthen the capacity of climate change and disaster governance bodies (national, provincial, municipal and community levels) to plan for and respond to the specific needs of women, children, youth, people with disabilities, the elderly and other vulnerable groups.
Organize capacity building sessions with the women leaders at national, provincial, municipal and community levels.
Review Vanuatu National Policy on climate change and disaster induced displacement (NPCCDID):
Support the review of the existing policy addressing gender and social inclusion perspective and develop the policy implementation plan with an M&E framework.
Engage stakeholders in consultation workshops for the review and finalization of the policy.
Finalize the inputs for submission to the national authority for approval and subsequent implementation.
Review the National Disaster recovery Framework incorporating gender responsive measures and social inclusion; and incorporate Gender responsive measures into the National Disaster Recovery Framework.
Coordinate and liaise with networks for women's resilience and leadership in DRR (Community of practice, strategic networking, and partnerships):
Support DWA and NDMO to identify active women leaders from the 6 provinces including 2 municipal councils for strategic networking.
Provide mentoring and support to these leaders to enhance visibility, impact, and profile of their work.
Liaise with national and provincial events national committees to secure spots that could be used by women champions/leaders in DRR to share their experiences, lessons learnt and how to improve in the future.
Organize leadership training (using the leadership tool developed by UNW) for local women Community's leaders/local actioners and grassroots activists.
DRR and recovery coordination and partnerships (gender-responsive coordination mechanisms):
Support the WRD National Programme Management Committee chaired by the Department of Women.
Provide quarterly updates to the NPMC meetings or other related meetings on the workplan and implementation progress on behalf of the NDMO.
Required Skills and Experience:
The Consultant should fulfil the following requirements:
Education:
Master’s degree or equivalent in Social Sciences, International Development, Disaster Risk and Climate Change, Environment, Programme Management, Data Analysis, or other related areas is required.
A first-level university degree in combination with two additional years of qualifying experience may be accepted in lieu of the advanced university degree.
Experience and Skills:
At least 2 years (with Master’s degree) or 4 years (with first-level university degree) of progressively responsible experience related to information management, data science, development, adaptation and resilience capacity building, disaster risk reduction, climate resilience or other closely related fields.
Minimum of 2 years’ relevant national/regional/international experience both in the field and headquarters in disaster response, recovery, or development work.
Experience in disaster risk reduction, emergency preparedness and/or response and recovery is required.
Excellent writing and consultation skills with the ability to gather and synthesize information, and present it in a clear, concise format, is required.
Familiarity with government knowledge management resources (sector, macro, sub-national) is an advantage.
Experience with risk assessment and disaster risk metrics is an advantage.
Experience in the UN system related to disaster risk reduction, emergency preparedness, humanitarian-development-peace collaboration, response, and recovery is desirable.
Experience in training and building capacity of both government and UN representatives is desirable.
Language and other skills:
Excellent skills and fluency in verbal and written English is required.
