Country Action Specialist (LAC Hub)

Details

Mission and objectives

UNOPS is mandated to expand implementation capacity across peace and security, humanitarian, and development efforts. Through its project services — including infrastructure, procurement, project management, human resources, and financial management services — UNOPS supports governments, the United Nations, and other partners in achieving Member States’ Global Goals, and local objectives for people and countries.

Context

SUN 3.0 is committed to fundamental, non-negotiable aspects of effective nutrition action, including equity and the principle of leaving no one behind. For its third phase, the SUN Movement will drive forward gender equality and enshrine youth leadership across the Movement. SUN 3.0 will strengthen partnerships to achieve greater impact on nutrition through food systems, health systems, social protection systems, actions by the private sector and humanitarian and development actors, and through education, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and climate change adaptation.
The SUN Movement Secretariat plays a central role in enabling the multiple members and structures of the Movement to work together to advance progress on country-level priorities and the global positioning of nutrition.
The SUN Movement Secretariat is based in Geneva and in various regions globally. All parts of the Movement – member governments, the SUN Global Support System – the GSS, consisting of four SUN networks (Civil Society, United Nations, Business, and Donors), and the SUN Movement
Secretariat, together with the SUN Movement Coordinator, work together to align and focus efforts on priorities within countries. The SUN Movement Secretariat is hosted by UNOPS.
The Country Action Specialist, Latin America & Caribbean (LAC) reports to the SMS Regional Representative- Latin America & Caribbean. The SUN Country Action team is critical in supporting the SUN Movement to achieve the objectives set out in SUN 3.0, and provides the capacity to ensure SUN Countries are at the centre of everything the Movement does, empowering SUN Country Focal Points and/or Country Coordinators to act. The team is currently organised into five regions globally, including Bangkok (Asia hub), Nairobi (Anglophone Africa hub), Dakar (Francophone Africa hub), Panama (Latin American & Caribbean hub) and Geneva (Convergence Hub).
The Country Action Specialist, LAC is based in Panama City, Panama and is part of a small team established to support the development of National Nutrition Plans, facilitate information sharing and knowledge exchange, and identify advocacy opportunities across the countries within the defined portfolio.
The Specialist will work closely with national counterparts and other stakeholders, including representatives of the SUN Networks, to strengthen the institutional capacity for nutrition by identifying, creating and strengthening opportunities to accelerate progress in countries; identifying successful interventions and moving quickly to scale up results and ensuring effective peer learning and knowledge exchange across the Movement.
The role supports the Regional Representative to build and maintain effective understanding, communication and technical support across the broad national and international community of stakeholders to understand risks and challenges so that resources may be mobilised and technical assistance provided as necessary.
The Country Action Specialist also works closely with the existing regional SUN networks. The role also supports countries in determining predictable and sustainable long-term funding and country financing and strengthening countries’ capacity to meet Country Financing requirements for nutrition.

Task description

Under the direct supervision of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement Secretariat (SMS) Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, the International UNV Country Action Specialist, based in Panama City, will have the following functional responsibilities:
1. Facilitation
● Support SUN Countries to articulate their needs and expectations and seize opportunities to accelerate results at country level.
● Support Countries within the designated region to develop and document appropriate national nutrition policies, strategies, and action plans to scale-up nutrition interventions.
● Support Country Focal Points/or Country Coordinators and partners to cost scale-up and identify resource requirements.
● Track and analyse the challenges, opportunities and progress of the portfolio of SUN countries.
● Facilitate information-sharing of relevant evidence and successful practices from other partners and countries to inform strategic planning processes.
● Identify and facilitate linkages with other initiatives and processes to avoid duplication of activity.
● Support the SUN Country Focal Points and/or Country Coordinators to request technical assistance from the in-country multi-stakeholder team to finance, implement and monitor the country action plan.
● Support the Regional Representative to facilitate requests through the global SUN networks or other global partners for technical assistance to support country action plans, when requests exceed locally available resources.
● Conduct technical missions to the countries to analyse the context of the countries and support them in their priorities as part of the SUN 3.0 strategy.
2. Cordination
● Identify opportunities to enhance collaboration with network focal points locally to integrate for impact and take action as appropriate.
● Support process management and facilitation of multi-stakeholder coordination mechanisms among the various Networks in the Movement.
● Assist SUN countries in the preparation of and implementation of Joint Annual Assessment (JAA) and support the timely reporting on JAA and other MEAL exercises.
● Identify opportunities to strengthen existing resources and infrastructure in regions and make recommendations as appropriate.
● Support analysis and advise on appropriate institutional arrangements for multi-sectoral coordination on nutrition utilising SUN case studies and experience.
● Strengthen process management and coordination skills of national counterparts.
3. Knowledge management and innovation
● Participate in discussion and engagement in an identified thematic area of work directly related to, and critical for advancing the engagement of SUN Countries in the region (e.g. gender, agriculture, food systems etc).
● Interact and follow up with SUN Countries to solicit and document case studies, lessons learned, success stories, and best practices for internal and external sharing.
● Contribute to the preparation of success stories and good practices for inclusion in internal and external communication products.
● Contribute to the development and introduction of innovation to ensure the Movement is continually incorporating best practice approaches.
4. Contribute to strategic planning and data analysis
● Monitor and analyse major developments in nutrition action of SUN countries in the designated region and work with the Regional Representative to determine how the Movement might respond to such developments.
● Support the Regional Representative, Country Action Team and Global Technical Advisory Team to monitor and analyse opportunities for engagement of the Coordinator with high level representatives of SUN countries within the designated region, to encourage the implementation of a multi sector, multi stakeholder approach to nutrition.
● Support the Regional Representative, Country Action Team and Global Technical Advisory Team to identify, analyze and monitor political developments and emerging issues within the designated region in relation to key principles and core themes of the SUN Movement.
● Monitor national and regional political trends that might affect the SUN Movement and report to the Regional Representative as appropriate.
5. Advocacy for sustainable financing and capacity strengthening
● Coordinate and support SUN members to build sustainable nutrition financing in national budgets through stronger domestic resource mobilization.
● Provide SUN countries with technical assistance and capacity strengthening to enhance their financing capacity, including in public finance management for nutrition.
● Develop and maintain Regional information repository on nutrition funding sources to enable countries to prepare themselves for funding opportunities and enhance nutrition sensitivity in investments and programming.
Results/expected outputs: The effective and successful achievement of results will support the SUN Movement and its Secretariat to achieve its vision of a world free from malnutrition in all its forms by 2030