Country: United Arab Emirates
Closing date: 24 Oct 2017
If you are a committed, creative professional and are passionate about making a lasting difference for children, the world's leading children's rights organization would like to hear from you.
For 70 years, UNICEF has been working on the ground in 190 countries and territories to promote children's survival, protection and development. The world's largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.
Purpose of the Assignment
In August 2016, a MoU was signed between UNICEF Gulf Area Office and Sharjah Baby Friendly Office to carry out an Assessment Study for the Emirate of Sharjah- mainly in the areas of health, education, participation, and social services to evaluate current practices and policies in these areas according to the Child Friendly City framework. The assessment study highlighted the major achievements Sharjah has accomplished and its commitment to invest in children.
In February 2017,UNICEF announced Sharjah a candidate city for its ‘Child Friendly Cities’ Initiative, culminating the emirate’s efforts over the past three decades in protecting and elevating the status of children and youth. Sharjah’s candidacy for the Initiative – the first of its kind in the region – follows the emirate’s ground-breaking achievement of becoming the world’s first Baby Friendly City in December 2015.
It has also identified a number of insufficiencies that would need to be addressed towards a Child Friendly Sharjah. Hence, an action plan was developed to include proposed measures to achieve goals based on the gaps identified. The outcome of the action plan is for Sharjah City to be accredited as a Child Friendly City if it successfully achieves the objectives listed in the work plan. There are 3 main results:
ensure that all children in Sharjah are actively participating in the community and that their views are taken into account in matters affecting their lives
A Child Friendly City must have a strategy to identify and address direct and indirect discrimination and barriers to inclusiveness. It needs to be welcoming for all children, who should have equal access to services and equally enjoy their rights. In Sharjah, there’s need for more work toward inclusiveness of some groups of vulnerable children. Moreover, further work is needed to identify other groups of vulnerable children.
Social service department in Sharjah covers wide range of services: financial support for families, improve living and housing circumstances, help families increase their capacities/ skills to generating income, involved with family courts and child protection services including: help-line/ hot-line for children. The groups of children and families that have access to these services and facilities need to be explored (national/non-national children, children with disabilities etc.).
Therefore, UNICEF Gulf Area Office is looking for an Arabic speaking expert to conduct a mapping of Social Services in Sharjah.
Social services refer to a broad range of support for children and families. The diversity of social services varies across several dimensions: the target age of children served; method of service delivery (e.g. home based; centre based); focus of the programme (financial, improve living and housing circumstances) – these dimensions are not always discrete. The overall purpose of this assignment is to develop set of recommendations to strengthen existing social services and programmes in Sharjah toward more inclusiveness and better targeting.
The initial activity is to assist in conducting a desk review of international methodologies related to mapping of social services, collect, analyse existing documents / databases of all on-going major social services, assessment report carried out by UNICEF GAO. The review of existing data from Sharjah Census should analyse the disparities among children as well as excluded and vulnerable children.
As the next step, an in-depth review of selected social services will be conducted. Criteria and factors defining excluded and vulnerable children, and guidance documents will be provided by the international expert to inform the in-depth review-which will include semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with selected key informants (i.e. decision makers; service providers; community members). In addition, Focus Group discussions with children and their families will be conducted along with researchers from the University of Sharjah.
Assignmenttasks
-Documenting and describing social services currently available
- Assessing their scalability, quality, effectiveness and sustainability
- Identifying critical programmatic gaps, constraints and lessons learnt
-Identify groups of children that are victims or at risk of exclusion from facilitiesand services;
Scope of social services mapping
The review of selected social services should map / analyse the following:
Description of social services
Monitoring and evaluation systems utilised and extent to which monitoring and evaluation has improved the quality of social services
Scalability of the social services
Enablers and barriers (strengths and weaknesses) to scalability
Qualityof social services
Enablers and barriers (strengths and weaknesses) to quality of social services
Effectiveness
Enablers and barriers (strengths and weaknesses) to effectiveness
Sustainability
Enablers and barriers (strengths and weaknesses) to sustainability
Expected Deliverables
Qualifications of Successful Candidate
Education
Years of relevant experience
To view our competency framework, please click here.
Please indicate your ability, availability and daily/monthly rate (in US$) to undertake the terms of reference above (including travel and daily subsistence allowance, if applicable). Applications submitted without a daily/monthly rate will not be considered.
UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages qualified female and male candidates from all national, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of our organisation.
How to apply:
UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages qualified female and male candidates from all national, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of our organization. To apply, click on the following link http://www.unicef.org/about/employ/?job=507744