Job description
The Position:
Individual consultant for Development of The Bottom-UP Costed Action Plan for LAO PDR's National Demographic Dividend Roadmap (DDR 2025-2030)
You will report to: Policy & 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, in close collaboration with the Ministry of Finance, is seeking an International Consultant to provide advanced technical expertise in development economics, activity-based costing, and public financial management.
The primary purpose of this assignment is to support the Ministry of Finance team and the newly formed National Population and Development Steering Committee in translating the high-level policy interventions of the approved Demographic Dividend Roadmap (DDR 2025–2030) into a rigorous, bottom-up Costed Action Plan. The bottom-up, activity-based approach will serve as the core method, complemented, where sectoral data gaps or major constraints are encountered, by top-down macro-fiscal reconciliation and peer/benchmark referencing (e.g. comparable ICPD costed frameworks and national projections) to ensure the model remains both rigorous and credible. The final costed framework will be nested directly within the discretionary programmable budget space and sectoral human capital envelopes of the 10th National Socio-Economic Development Plan (NSEDP) Financing Strategy.
This work will be coordinated and overseen by the UNFPA Policy and Census Coordinator. Consultation will occur with UNFPA's Regional Technical Advisers as needed. The consultancy will adhere to UNFPA's policies and procedures, in collaboration with national counterparts where required.
Lao PDR is navigating a profound and time-sensitive demographic transition. Demographic and National Transfer Accounts (NTA) modeling indicate that while the country's demographic window of opportunity opened in the late 20th century, the state has already surpassed 60% to 67% of this one-time lifecycle window as of 2022. The share of the working-age population relative to dependents is projected to begin contracting by 2041 to 2052, giving the government a narrow, high-yield opportunity to execute investments that secure an educated, healthy, and highly productive formal workforce before the window closes permanently.
Realizing this dividend is currently disrupted by significant domestic labor vulnerabilities, including an informality rate of 82.9% in the general workforce (spiking to 95% among working youth), high adolescent school dropouts, and rising youth out-migration fueled by macroeconomic volatility. To systematically address these issues, the Government of Lao PDR pioneered its first multi-sectoral Demographic Dividend Roadmap (DDR) with the technical support provided by UNFPA. However, the successful execution of this policy maps directly onto a highly constrained fiscal environment:
1) LDC Graduation and Declining ODA: As Lao PDR prepares for its historic graduation from Least Developed Country (LDC) status in 2026, traditional grant-based Official Development Assistance (ODA) is declining, forcing a structural transition toward domestic resource mobilization and concessional borrowing.
2) Extreme Fiscal Rigidity: The 10th NSEDP Financing Strategy (2026–2030) projects a net national financing gap of US $7–8 billion. With annual external public debt servicing absorbing 52% to 57% of all government revenues, the discretionary programmable space left for new development spending is restricted to US $9–10 billion.
3) The Resource Allocation Imperative: Within the 10th NSEDP macro-fiscal module, the government has carved out an indicative US $3.5 billion envelope for Human Capital Development.
Therefore, it is urgent and necessary to develop an activity-based Costed Action Plan for the DDR. This plan will determine the exact budget gap of the roadmap, justify the allocation of a portion of the US $3.5 billion programmable envelope, and establish clear investment packages to approach international financial institutions (IFIs), private sectors, and domestic legislative channels for resource mobilization.
You would be responsible for:
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Against this backdrop, an international Consultant will be engaged with the MOF Team, relevant members of the National Steering Committee on Population and Development and UNFPA to provide technical guidance, modeling tools, and hands-on coaching to the MoF Technical Secretariat and line ministries through five distinct implementation phases:
Phase I: Inception, Parameter Setting, and Proxy Definition:
➔ Formulate an Inception Report detailing the activity-based costing methodology using the Ingredients Approach.
➔ Establish a standard protocol for data gaps using Proxy Costing and Reference Costing methodologies. Guide the team to extract regional benchmarks (e.g., WHO-CHOICE, UNICEF registries) and perform contextual adjustments via national inflation deflators and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) metrics.
Phase II: Multi-Sectoral Input Itemization & Field Micro-Costing (On-Site Mission)
➔ Conduct a high-profile, on-site technical mission to lead intensive, face-to-face unit-cost validation workshops with line ministry focal points.
➔ Guide technical representatives page-by-page through the five core DDR Results Matrix tables to break down policy interventions into verifiable physical inputs:
● Table 1 (Health/SRHR): Conduct a comprehensive costing of all proposed interventions under the Health/SRHR pillar of the DDR Results Matrix, including but not limited to itemizing operational inputs for scaling mobile integrated outreach units, removing out-of-pocket barriers for family planning services, procuring reproductive health commodities, and expanding Basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (BEMONC) training modules.
● Table 2 (CEFM/GBV): Conduct a comprehensive costing of all proposed interventions under the CEFM/GBV pillar of the DDR Results Matrix, including but not limited to mapping localized budget lines for expanding provincial One-Stop Service Shelters, implementing protection frameworks, and launching national community awareness campaigns.
● Table 3 (Employment/underemployment): Conduct a comprehensive costing of all proposed interventions under the Employment pillar of the DDR Results Matrix, including but not limited to calculating baseline overhead, seed capital requirements, and mentoring salaries for youth business incubators, with a specific programmatic focus on formalizing and protecting youth in non-standard, digital, and gig economies.
● Table 4 (Social Protection): Conduct a comprehensive costing of all proposed interventions under the Social Protection pillar of the DDR Results Matrix, including but not limited to running fiscal scale-models and benefit projections for expanding nutrition-sensitive conditional cash transfers tailored to pregnant women, informal sector workers, and vulnerable households.
● Table 5 (Education/Skills): Conduct a comprehensive costing of all proposed interventions under the Education/Skills pillar of the DDR Results Matrix, including but not limited to calculating infrastructure and maintenance requirements for remote school boarding dormitories, upgrading TVET digital modules, and scaling secondary-school Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) rollouts. 3
Phase III: Consolidation, Macro-Reconciliation, and Gap Analysis
➔ Lead the consolidation of multi-sectoral inputs into a single, time-phased financial model spanning the short-term (2025–2026), medium-term (2027–2028), and long-term (2029–2030) phases.
➔ Isolate the programmatic funding gap by cross-referencing the DDR's total investment requirements against baseline ministry allocations.
➔ Map costing baseline codes to support integration with the real-time online monitoring platform and the state Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS).
Phase IV & V: High-Level Validation, Policy Packaging, and ROI Advocacy
➔ Guide the national team in compiling an executive policy presentation for the National Population and Development Steering Committee.
➔ Format the final costed output into a clear "Revenue Packaging Pipeline" using Return on Investment (ROI) language, specifically tying funding gaps to upcoming legislative vehicles: Health Tax Legislation (2026–2027) for health/SRHR earmarks. Social Protection Fund Law (2026–2027) for informal worker coverage. Special Economic Zones (SEZs) Performance Concessions to unlock private sector co-investment.
Expected Outputs/Deliverables
The successful completion of this consultancy will yield the following key outputs:
➔ Building Technical Capacity: Enhanced technical capacity of the Ministry of Finance (MoF) Technical Secretariat, the national coordination team, and line ministry focal points on public expenditure tracking and activity-based costing. This will be delivered through structured on-the-job training, hands-on data collection workshops, and continuous technical coaching.
➔ Comprehensive Costed Action Plan Submission: A fully itemized, bottom-up, and time-phased Costed Action Plan Model (spreadsheet/software-based input architecture) and a complete narrative analysis report for the National Demographic Dividend Roadmap (DDR) 2025–2030. This deliverable will detail exact operational input requirements, line-item price tags, and process indicators for all five core results matrices, formatted to nest within the programmable fiscal space of the 10th NSEDP Financing Strategy.
➔ Strategic ROI & Resource Mobilization Framework: A portfolio of executive investment briefs and a structured "Revenue Packaging Pipeline" that identifies programmatic funding gaps. This output will translate the roadmap’s operational requirements into clear Return on Investment (ROI) data, explicitly designed to support high-level legislative advocacy, public-private sector partnerships (PPPs), and targeted international or domestic financial pooling.