Child Protection Junior Officer- Child labour

Details

Mission and objectives

The Child Protection Programme of UNICEF Ghana is committed to ensuring that by 2022, girls and boys in Ghana, especially the most disadvantaged, increasingly benefit from an equitable and integrated child protection system that better protect them from violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect. The system is focus on the establishment of effective structures, functions and capacities that can prevent and respond to all child protection issues. It also seeks to integrate the actions of families (and children including adolescents), communities, formal and informal laws and practices together to protect children. To achieve these, strategic investments are made to: i) Bringing relevant policy, legal and regulatory framework in line with international standards and good practices ii) strengthening the capacity of formal and informal service providers actors to prevent and respond effectively to protection issues; and iii) supporting interventions aimed at behavioural and social change among girls, boys, families and communities.
Among all children, adolescent girls in Ghana are disproportionately affected by child protection concerns, including exposure to gender discrimination, child marriage and female genital mutilation/cutting, sexual violence, unsafe migration and trafficking, among others. The purpose of the proposed UNV assignment is to provide assistance to the Child Protection section of UNICEF Ghana in further developing and strengthening its interventions for better protection of adolescent girls, by working closely with particularly vulnerable group of girls, their families and communities, service providers and other key local and national stakeholders.

Context

In Ghana, 28% of children aged 5-17 years are engaged in child labour, with 21% of children in hazardous working conditions. Ghana is the second largest cocoa exporter in the world, after Ivory Coast. About 770,000 children in Ghana are engaged in child labour in cocoa.
However, Ghana faces challenges due to the consistently inadequate budget allocation and expenditure to deliver social services at the decentralized level. There are also critical gaps in human resources in the social sector. The assessment of the National Plan of Action (NPA) for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour 2022-2026 found that often private sector-supported interventions so far were not aligned with the government vision, therefore, increasing the need to strengthen collaboration.
In line with the Ghana Accelerated Action Plan Against Child Labour 2023-2027, UNICEF has spearheaded the development of a multistakeholder and multisectoral public-private partnership (PPP) to tackle the root causes of child labour, with partnerships with various Government organizations, development partners, private sectors and civil society organizations (CSOs). The PPP is implemented from 2024 to 2025 in four districts (Bibiani, Assin South, Ayensuano, and Asunafo North) where child labour is prevalent in various sectors, including cocoa but also agriculture and mining. The PPP builds on the existing transformative approaches and tools in Ghana, such as the Integrated Social Services (ISS), Social Welfare Information Management System (SWIMS), Child Protection Community Facilitation Toolkits, Community of Excellence (CoE), and more.

Task description

Under the direct supervision of Child Protection Specialist (P3), the UN Volunteer will undertake the following tasks:
1. Support internal coordination across sectors involved in the child labour PPP, includ-ing Child Protection, Social Policy and Inclusion, Adolescents, Gender and Youth, Ed-ucation, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, Partnerships, and Communication for the regular follow up on the implementation, monitoring, report writing and knowledge management;
2. Support conducting research and implementing recommendations to identify innova-tive ways to tackling the root causes of child labour in agriculture sectors and beyond (i.e. mining and markets), including looking at effective gender-sensitive youth solu-tions (i.e. youth empowerment, advocacy and employment) in collaboration with the Adolescents, Gender and Youth colleagues and climate solutions (i.e. climate change, deforestation and alternative income generation for cocoa farmers);
3. Support organizing and participating in meetings, workshops and events related to child labour, child protection, youth empowerment, climate change, and document the meeting results;
4. Support the UNICEF team in conducting field visits and join them to capture trans-formative human interest stories, develop knowledge management materials, docu-ment programme success, areas of improvement and key lessons learned;
5. Support reporting and fundraising efforts related to child labour and child protection;
6. Support liaising with KOICA to strengthen the collaboration in the area of child labour, child protection and youth empowerment in support of implementing the Govern-ment’s Ghana Accelerated Action Plan Against Child Labour 2023-2027; and
7. Support any other tasks assigned by the supervisor