Consultant, Environmental Health

Scope of Work and Deliverables:

The UNICEF Strategic Plan has elevated action on climate change and environmental degradation as an organizational priority, to be integrated throughout UNICEF programmes. To concretize this, Programme Group developed the global programme framework on Healthy Environments for Healthy Children (HEHC). UNICEF and partners have also founded a Children’s Environmental Health Collaborative to mobilize international action to protect child health and development from the impact of climate change and environmental degradation. The Collaborative aims to inspire, motivate, equip and mobilize efforts through advocacy, brokering knowledge and catalyzing action.

• Lead is poisoning around one in three children globally on a massive and previously unrecognized scale. It is a major contributor to intellectual disability among children in low- and middle-income countries. As a result, vast economic and social potential is being lost from the widespread cognitive decline and the long-term health effects caused by lead poisoning.
• UNICEF is working with partners to address this problem through systems investments in awareness, surveillance, regulations, enforcement and remediation. A key gap in this area is that the technical guidance, practice and learnings on a range of these issues is distributed across a range of partners and practitioners. Therefore, UNICEF and partners are prioritizing a global toolkit and supplementary resources to support low-and-middle income countries working on this issue.
• As part of the HEHC programme, UNICEF is also considering about leveraging its experience in the pollution space to be being an active player in protecting children from mercury poisoning and persistent organic pollutants. The purpose of this consultancy is to support the development of technical products, tools and investment cases related to lead poisoning and other toxic metals and chemicals.

Qualifications

Education:

• Master’s in environmental sciences or public Health with an environmental health focus, or a related technical qualification.

Experience:

• Technical expertise on lead, mercury, POPs, and other toxic chemicals and environmental health.
• Proven experience in drafting research and policy on lead and other toxic chemicals.
• Minimum 8 years of progressively responsible and relevant work experience in lead programming in low- and middle-income countries.
• Demonstrated professional experience in successful proposal/project development for resource mobilization (e.g., GEF Chemicals and waste portfolio) is an asset.
• Previous experience of working with UNICEF and the UN is desirable.

Source: https://jobs.unicef.org/cw/en-us/job/572471