Job description
The Position:
Individual consultant for 2025 Census Thematic Report - Fertility & Nuptiality Report
You will report to
Policy and Census Coordinator
How you can make a difference:
UNFPA is the lead United Nations agency for delivering a world where every pregnancy is intended, every childbirth is safe, and every young person's potential is fulfilled. The UNFPA Strategic Plan for 2026-2029 articulates the organization’s response to a complex global environment, providing a roadmap for resilience and renewal. It is designed to accelerate the implementation of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. This mandate is pursued through a focus on four interconnected outcomes: ending the unmet need for family planning; ending preventable maternal deaths; ending gender-based violence and harmful practices; and adapting to demographic change through evidence and rights-based policies.
In a world where fundamental human rights are at risk, we need principled and ethical staff who embody these international norms and standards and will defend them courageously and with full conviction.
UNFPA is seeking candidates who transform, inspire, and deliver high-impact sustained results, ensuring effective external relations, communications, partnership-building and resource mobilization in a rapidly changing development and funding landscape. We need staff who are transparent, exceptional in how they manage the resources entrusted to them, and who commit to delivering excellence in programme results
Job Purpose:
The UNFPA Country Office in Lao PDR is seeking an international consultant to provide advanced technical assistance and demographic expertise to the Lao Statistics Bureau (LSB) for the computation, validation, structural modelling, and narrative write-up of the official Population and Housing Census Thematic Report on Fertility and Nuptiality, including a high-impact Policy Brief and interactive geospatial dissemination products.
This work will be coordinated and overseen by the UNFPA Policy and Census Coordinator. Consultation will occur with UNFPA's Regional Advisers as needed. The consultancy will adhere to UNFPA's policies and procedures, in collaboration with national counterparts where required.
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic has successfully concluded the nationwide field data collection for its 2025 Population and Housing Census (PHC), marking a historic transition as the country's first-ever digital census. As the operation enters its critical post-enumeration analytical phase, turning this unprecedented digital dataset into strategic, socio-demographic intelligence is paramount.
Lao PDR stands at an essential development crossroads, shaped by its upcoming graduation from Least Developed Country (LDC) status and a time-limited window of opportunity to capitalize on its demographic dividend, as outlined in its first-ever Demographic Dividend Roadmap. Recent data from the Lao Social Indicator Survey (LSIS III) indicates that Lao PDR is undergoing a rapid and unequal fertility transition. At the national level, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has fallen from 6.3 in the 1980s to 2.5 births per woman (LSIS III, 2023), but there are profound geographic and socio-economic disparities. For instance, urban areas like Vientiane Capital have plummeted to sub-replacement levels (TFR 1.5), while provinces like Xaysomboun (TFR 3.7) and Phongsaly (TFR 3.4) experience extremely elevated reproductive intensity, with adolescent birth rates reaching as high as 183 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19.
Understanding fertility transition in Laos, socioeconomic drivers of this rapid fertility decline, changing marriage patterns, and family formation structures is an institutional imperative for programming, planning and policy response in the areas of population and development, women and youth empowerment, sexual reproductive health and rights. In the absence of a complete birth registration and administrative records, census data is essential for calculating fertility rates. Given that, LSB requires the technical support of a senior demographer to apply rigorous demographic estimation techniques, pair variables with geographic information systems (GIS), write the definitive national
monograph on fertility and nuptiality, and build analytical capacities within LSB's technical teams.
You would be responsible for:
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The International Consultant will be directly embedded within the LSB analytical structure via an Expert Pairing Modality, working 1-to-1 with a LSB counterpart and mentoring a dedicated cohort of 2–3 junior LSB experts to maximize institutional knowledge transfer.
The scope of analysis is bound by the parameters captured in the 2025 PHC questionnaires (including modules on household and individual information). The consultant will take full technical responsibility for guiding the validation, syntax preparation, analysis, indicator construction, and final structural write-up of the report.
Key Indicators and Analytical Dimensions to be Modelled:1. Nuptiality and Marriage Dynamics: Proportional distributions of marital statuses (Never Married, Married, Separated, Widowed, Divorced) disaggregated by 5-year age cohorts, sex, and urban/rural location.
a. Derivation of the Singulate Mean Age at Marriage (SMAM) across national and sub-national tiers.
b. Micro-analysis of Child Marriage (ages 12–17) and consensual/cohabiting unions without formal registration, evaluating their structural impacts on educational attainment and employment. Regional and socio-economic differentials in child marriage.
c. Dissolution of marriage through widowhood and divorce.
d. Consensual unions: persons living together with partners.
2. Fertility Levels, Variations, and Differentials:
a. Direct and indirect estimation of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) and Age-Specific Fertility Rates (ASFR), and birth-order specific fertility rates (Decomposition of TFR by birth order) nationally and across all 18 provinces.
b. Computation of mean Children Ever Born (CEB) alive to women aged 15–49 as a proxy for lifetime/completed fertility.
c. Calculation of Fertility Differentials correlated against background variables: literacy, completed educational attainment, household wealth quintiles, labour force status and employment status, and ethno-linguistic typologies.
d. Tracking of alternative demographic indicators: Crude Birth Rates (CBR), General Fertility Rates (GFR), Mean age at first marriage, Child-Woman Ratios (CWR), Parity Progression Ratios (PPR), parity-specific fertility measures and childlessness indices.
3. Adolescent and Teenage Fertility: Detailed single-year tracking (ages 15–19) of early fertility, mapping risks, sub-national hotspots, and cross-tabulating births against educational retention and marital classification.
4. Geospatial and GIS Mapping Integration: Integrating localized indicators directly with LSB's GIS infrastructure to produce high-resolution choropleth maps at the provincial level visualizing fertility/nuptiality variations (e.g., TFR and adolescent birth rates, age at first marriage), mapping gaps in reproductive access, and preparing standardized spatial data frames for integration into the forthcoming national Census Atlas .
The consultant will execute the assignment across the following mandatory operational steps:
1. Task 1: Inception and Methodological Design: Review the census questionnaires, variables, and previous survey reports (LSIS III, previous census). Produce an Inception Report establishing the rigorous mathematical framework, modeling equations, and index structures.
2. Task 2: Structural Outline and Dummy Tables: Draft the comprehensive structural skeleton of the monograph along with empty 'dummy tables' and graphic shells indicating exactly how the data will be distributed. This includes trend-line graphs comparing 2015 to 2025 data, and standardized data visualization templates suitable for a non-technical policy audience.
3. Task 3: Syntax Development and On-the-Job Mentorship: Train and guide LSB staff in writing clean, reproducible statistical scripts (SPSS and/or R syntaxes) to manipulate micro-datasets, execute deterministic syntax pipelines, and extract data to fill the agreed dummy tables.
4. Task 4: Data Validation and Indirect Adjustments: Lead the technical validation of LSB-generated outputs. smooth age-heaping errors, evaluate coverage distortions, and reconcile census counts against administrative data structures (e.g., DHIS health indicators). Apply advanced indirect demographic estimation models (e.g. Brass P/F Ratio methods, Relational Gompertz models, and Reverse Survival projections) to calculate fertility indicators.
5. Task 5: Monograph Synthesis and Narrative Drafting: Write the definitive text of the monograph, synthesizing findings, detailing demographic trends, and translating correlations into evidence-based policy recommendations.
6. Task 6: High-Impact Policy Brief Production: Author a highly concise, visually appealing 2-to-3 page national Policy Brief (mirroring the concise presentation style of global statistical snapshots) that distils complex cross-tabulations into immediate, actionable policy levers for senior planners and ministers.
Expected Outputs/Deliverables:
The successful completion of this consultancy will yield the following key outputs:
● Output 1: An approved Inception Report detailing the methodological framework and indirect estimation equations.
● Output 2: A complete set of populated dummy tables and the fully reproducible, clean SPSS/R syntax files used to generate them.
● Output 3: A comprehensive, publication-ready Fertility and Nuptiality Thematic Monograph.
● Output 4: A 2-to-3 page high-impact Policy Brief with actionable policy recommendations.
● Output 5: A final package of geospatial products (ready-to-publish thematic maps and shapefiles) for integration into the Census Atlas.