Consultancy: Childhood Pneumonia Consultant (iCCM/IMCI)- Health Section, PD - NYHQ- REQ#529809

UNICEF is seeking a consultant to provide technical support to project implementation and long-term sustainability, extract learnings and engage beyond the project countries to further refine and replicate proven approaches and catalyze scale by leveraging existing opportunities and partnerships.

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

Consultancy Title: Childhood Pneumonia Consultant (iCCM/IMCI)

Section/Division/Duty Station: NYHQ

Duration: 11.5 months

About UNICEF

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. UNICEF has over 12,000 staff in more than 145 countries.

BACKGROUND

Pneumonia continues to be the leading infectious cause of death among children under the age of five, causing over 800,000 deaths/year. Pneumonia care and treatment relies on the availability and the accessibility of quality health services, close to where children live, at the Primary Health Care level including the community level as well as functioning referral systems and referral level care. This includes well-trained and supervised health workers as well as stable supplies of essential commodities such as Amoxicillin and oxygen for children with severe disease and hypoxemia. Amoxicillin dispersible tablets (DT) have been recommended as first line treatment for child pneumonia including at community level, but the uptake and national scale up has been slow and patchy, including in many high pneumonia burden settings. Measurement of hypoxemia as well as medical oxygen are rarely available below referral level yet there are increasing efforts by countries to scale up oxygen systems. 

The UNICEF SPRINT (Scaling Pneumonia Response INovaTions) project aims to gain, analyze and apply experience on scaling medical oxygen and Amoxicillin DT, bundled as main components of a primary health care pneumonia case management service delivery package, to ultimately catalyze scale of these essential treatments. Working across two countries (Ghana and Senegal), UNICEF Regional offices, New York HQ and Supply Division, the SPRINT project supports the scale up of the two essential commodities within integrated child health programmes in the two countries while using the learnings to strengthen and optimize UNICEF’s ability to accelerate roll out across multiple countries and apply the approach to other essential commodities, for example ORS/Zinc co-pack which has recently been added to the WHO Essential Medicines List.

UNICEF is seeking a consultant to provide technical support to project implementation and long-term sustainability, extract learnings and engage beyond the project countries to further refine and replicate proven approaches and catalyze scale by leveraging existing opportunities and partnerships.

More specifically, the following outputs will improve UNICEF’s capacity to achieve its goals.

• Advocacy that leads to project countries using the SPRINT approach to further scale within their country
• Conduct technical assistance, quality assurance, and collect information outlined in the SPRINT learning framework, in order to compare SPRINT progress and learnings across countries
• Sufficient demonstration & open source documentation of the SPRINT model for easy adoption/adaption & delivery by UNICEF programs & by other organizations in new geographies.
• Advocacy that leads to significant financial partner engagement for replication stage activities.
• Application of the model to inform scale of other essential commodities for child health and survival

Terms of Reference / Deliverables 

The Pneumonia Consultant will manage all activities related to implementation support, programmatic guidance, policy and advocacy. The specialist will provide programmatic guidance for current SPRINT countries, those funded under expanded SPRINT in the future and other countries interested in scaling pneumonia response innovations.

1. Support the HQ liaison for SPRINT with Supply Division, Regional Office, Project offices
2. Provide technical support to SPRINT project countries
3. Engage with project team on the SPRINT learning hypothesis, M&E and scale up plan
4. Compare SPRINT progress and learnings across the two project countries to identify joint learnings, support cross country learning and inform the scaling model
5. Create a comparison data set from two countries outside of SPRINT to further inform the SPRINT learning hypothesis and scaling model
6. Support the documentation and dissemination of SPRINT learnings and support the development of guidance to UNCIEF country offices for scaling up essential commodities
7. Compile an overview document on the situation of introduction and scale of Amoxicillin DT, ORS/Zinc and oxygen systems for pneumonia and diarrhea high burden countries [policy, implementation activities and scale, common challenges, readily available solutions, technical assistance needs]
8. Identify opportunities for further application of the SPRINT learnings in additional countries prioritized under the UNICEF-Save the Children Partnership or as part of Quality of care initiatives
9. Support activities to accelerate the scale up of ORS/Zinc co-pack for the treatment of diarrhea including by applying learnings from SPRINT
10. Provide technical support and resource mobilization, including proposal development, to scale up Amoxicillin and ORS/Zinc in the context of iCCM programmes

Qualifications 

(1) Education

• A completed, advanced university degree (Master’s Degree) in one or mor of the following areas: Public Health, Medicine, Nursing, Project Management, or a field relevant to innovation, and or Global Development.
• A completed 1st university degree (Bachelor’s degree) and seven (7) years of relevant experience may be accepted in lieu of advanced degree (Master’s). 

2) Work experience

• Minimum five (5) years of progressively responsible professional work experience in the field of Global Health.
• Field experience in the implementation and monitoring and quality improvement of global child health programming, specifically IMCI/iCCM required
• Minimum of 1 year experience in the introduction and scale up of product innovations is highly desirable
• Experience with Global Health policy development and/or advocacy

3) Competencies

• Excellent analytical and writing skills
• Language requirements: fluent in English and French
• The individual should be highly proficient in a range of PC/web applications, including but not limited to: MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, MS Outlook, and Lotus Notes 

Requirements:

• Completed profile in UNICEF's e-Recruitment system and provide Personal History Form (P11) Upload copy of academic credentials
• Financial proposal that will include:
• your daily/monthly rate (in US$) to undertake the terms of reference (can be downloaded here: https://www.unicef.org/about/employ/index_consultancy_assignments.html 
  • travel costs and daily subsistence allowance, if internationally recruited or travel is required as per TOR.
  • Any other estimated costs: visa, health insurance, and living costs as applicable.
  • Indicate your availability
• Any emergent / unforeseen duty travel and related expenses will be covered by UNICEF.
• At the time the contract is awarded, the selected candidate must have in place current health insurance coverage.
• Payment of professional fees will be based on submission of agreed satisfactory deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.

U.S. Visa information:

With the exception of the US Citizens, G4 Visa and Green Card holders, should the selected candidate and his/her household members reside in the United States under a different visa, the consultant and his/her household members are required to change their visa status to G4, and the consultant’s household members (spouse) will require an Employment Authorization Card (EAD) to be able to work, even if he/she was authorized to work under the visa held prior to switching to G4.  

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process

For every Child, you demonstrate…

UNICEF’s core values of Commitment, Diversity and Integrity and core competencies in Communication, Working with People and Drive for Results. View our competency framework at: Here

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks, and will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles.