Evaluation Consultant (paternity cover)

Background

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security.

The mandate and functions of UN Women call for the promotion of organizational and UN system accountability on gender equality through evaluation, strengthening evaluation capacities and learning from evaluation, and developing systems to measure the results and impact of UN Women with its enhanced role at country, regional and global levels. The purpose and role of evaluation in UN Women is to enhance accountability, inform decision-making and contribute to learning on the best ways to achieve women’s empowerment and gender equality through operational and normative work. The Independent Evaluation and Audit Services (IEAS), provides independent evaluation and internal audit assurance, as well as advisory services, to management on UN Women’s programmes, controls, business systems, and processes to identify good practices, provide recommendations for improvement, and contribute to learning.

Duties and Responsibilities

Under the supervision of the Chief of the Independent Evaluation Service, the Evaluation Consultant (paternity cover) will lead and support ongoing corporate evaluations, evaluation syntheses and other work of the Independent Evaluation Service.

Responsibilities:

• Jointly lead a synthesis of UN evaluations related to SDG 5 (Gender Equality) with other UN system partner(s) (65 % of time effort)
  • Collaborate effectively with UN Women’s partner and the synthesis reference group, leading meetings as required. Collaborate with the UN Evaluation Group as required.
  • Finalize the synthesis inception report, if required
  • Identify, compile and screen UN system evaluations, impact evaluations and systematic reviews related to SDG 5 against established selection criteria.
  • Lead the development of a mapping report of selected evaluations
  • Lead the team in the analysis and synthesis of the selected evaluations to identify collective evidence, lessons learned, and gaps in evaluation evidence for SDG 5.
  • Implement quality assurance approaches throughout the exercise.
• Support the corporate evaluation of UN Women’s work with civil society organizations (30% of time effort)
  • Collaborate with other members of the evaluation team to produce key deliverables, including the inception report, data collection tools, preliminary findings, draft and final reports and other documents as required.
  • Support or lead elements of data collection, including desk review, survey design and implementation, key informant interviews and focus group discussions, and the implementation of other data collection tools.
  • Support qualitative data analysis of interviews and focus group data using thematic coding with NVivo software. Support quantitative data analysis of survey data using Excel.
• Provide support to decentralized evaluations and IES peer reviews (5% of time effort)
  • Review and provide technical input into key evaluation products, including terms of references, inception reports, preliminary findings, and draft reports.
  • Ensure that the UN Women Evaluation Policy and UN Evaluation Group Norms and Standards for Evaluation are implemented.

Competencies

Core Competencies:

• Awareness and Sensitivity Regarding Gender Issues
• Accountability
• Creative Problem Solving
• Effective Communication
• Inclusive Collaboration
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Leading by Example

Required Skills and Experience

Required Qualifications, Experience and skills:

• Advanced university degree in evaluation, international development, social sciences, or a related field. A first-level university degree in combination with two additional years of qualifying experience may be accepted in lieu of the advanced university degree.
• A minimum of 3-5 years professional experience in qualitative/quantitative data collection and analysis, programme or corporate evaluation required.
• Understanding of the UN system or experience working with an international organization an asset.
• Demonstrated experience in the areas of gender equality and women’s empowerment, gender mainstreaming, gender analysis, and gender-responsive evaluation an asset.
• Experience supporting or leading evaluation syntheses an asset. 
• Experience with data analysis and visualization tools (e.g. Nvivo, Tableau) an asset

Language:

Fluency in oral and written English is required. Knowledge of another official United Nations language (e.g. French, Spanish) is desirable.