International Consultant to Provide Technical Support in developing National ECD Strategy for Uzbekistan

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Background:
Early childhood refers to the period from conception to the age of formal school entry, typically around 8 years old. Early Childhood Development (ECD) encompasses the physical, cognitive, motor, language, social, and emotional growth of children during these formative years. This development is the result of a multidimensional and continuous process in which the brain and body maturing during early childhood that leads to the acquisition of essential skills and capacities across various developmental domains.

ECD is widely recognized as foundational for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For the first time, ECD has been included in the global development agenda, based on decades of neuroscience and behavioral research. This evidence highlights that the early years (0-8 years) are critical for laying the groundwork for prosperous and sustainable societies. Investments in ECD and their positive outcomes are increasingly valued for their essential contributions to human capital development and productivity. Conversely, the social and economic costs of neglecting ECD are too high to afford for any country.

The Lancet’s series of papers on Early Childhood Development, including the recent publication “The Next 1000 Days” (Published Online on November 18, 2024), emphasizes the importance of nurturing and caring environments to establish healthy behaviors and to build on early gains, sustaining or improving trajectories of healthy development. These reviews show the importance of leveraging opportunities to optimize nurturing care inputs, which can yield significant benefits in early childhood development alongside child health, nutrition, and protection.

In the Republic of Uzbekistan, Early Childhood Development (ECD) presents a crucial investment opportunity for achieving socio-economic progress and ensuring the country effectively harnesses its demographic dividend. Several initiatives and reforms have been launched in the ECD sector, focusing on expanding access to maternal, newborn, and child health services, enhancing access to quality pre-school education, and promoting child protection measures. Notably, a new law passed in 2024 on the Protection of Children from All Forms of Violence supports the development of intersectoral standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the prevention and response to violence against children.

Despite ongoing initiatives, numerous challenges continue to undermine the effectiveness of national health, education, social protection and child protection systems, limiting the country’s capacity to ensure a robust and evidence-based ECD framework. Climate change acts as a risk multiplier, exacerbating these challenges and creating new obstacles to ECD. A particularly critical barrier is the absence of a comprehensive and targeted ECD analysis and strategy, which creates a significant bottleneck in delivering high-quality, integrated, and well-coordinated services. Ensuring a strategic vision and coordination of services is essential, since access to quality ECD should be clearly defined within a unified framework that outlines a standard package of ECD interventions across multiple institutions. Moreover, issues of equity and quality persist within all service delivery platforms, exacerbating disparities and limiting access for the most vulnerable populations. Efforts toward sustainable capacity development and the integration of innovative approaches remain fragmented and insufficiently embedded within the broader ECD system, further hindering progress.

Against this backdrop, the recent establishment of the National Agency for Social Protection and its capacity to ensure coordinated action across several ministries represents an opportunity for the Republic of Uzbekistan to ensure a more cohesive and coordinated ECD approach. Comprehensive ECD requires sustained investment in strengthening the capacities of governments and partners to implement evidence-based strategies and make policy decisions that enhance the quality of services available in three key sectors: health, education, child protection and more broadly social welfare. It also necessitates promoting protective caregiving behaviors and norms.

Early Childhood Development (ECD) is vital for fostering cognitive, social, emotional, and physical growth in young children, serving as a critical period that establishes the foundation for lifelong learning, behavior, and health, and for building resilience to environmental shocks and climate change impacts.
Responding to these challenges and emerging opportunities, UNICEF is dedicated to improving ECD in the Republic of Uzbekistan by focusing on evidence-based strategies that promote holistic development of young children. To enhance ECD services, UNICEF is seeking the support of an international expert to support to the Government of Uzbekistan in developing an integrated, evidence-based ECD strategy that aligns with both international best practices and national priorities.
Purpose
The purpose of this consultancy is to provide technical support in outlining the objectives, scope, and methodology for the development of an Multisectoral ECD strategy in Uzbekistan. The strategy will aim to optimize nurturing care inputs, support healthy child development, and foster sustainable societal growth and enhance resilience to climate change and environmental risks.

Rather than duplicating and creating a new set of policies, the analytical mapping and strategy development process should cross reference existing sectoral and multi-sectoral strategies, plans and programmes to ensure complementarity and unified ECD vision and framework. Particularly the analysis should take into consideration existing challenges and opportunities related to maternal and newborn health, immunization, nutrition, early and preschool childhood education, social and child protection building on UNICEF Situational Analysis of children and adolescents conducted in 2024 and other recent data available at country level.

Objectives

• To conduct a comprehensive assessment of the current ECD landscape in Uzbekistan, including existing policies, programmes, and challenges with focus on issues related to early identification and intervention servicers and approaches.
• To identify entry points supported by evidence-based best practices and successful models from other countries that can be adapted to the local context.
• To formulate a strategic framework that outlines clear goals, objectives, and actionable interventions for ECD.
• To identify and engage relevant stakeholders, including government entities, Development Partners, NGOs, Organizations of people with disabilities and community organizations, in the development and validation of the ECD strategy.
• To propose mechanisms for implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the strategy to ensure its effectiveness and sustainability.

Scope of Work

Assessment of Current Situation:

• Analyze existing ECD policies, programmes, and services, including NGO-led, community level programmes in Uzbekistan ensuring cross-sectorial analysis related to child poverty, family friendly policies, access to childcare facilities, health, nutrition, education, social and child protection sectors and public expenditures in these areas.
• Analyze gaps and challenges in the current ECD framework, including systemic barriers that limit access to service for CWD.

Stakeholder Engagement:

• In consultation with UNICEF ensure a stakeholders’ mapping analysis to identify key stakeholders and investors in the ECD sector, including government agencies, development Partners contributions, civil society, including organizations of people with disabilities, private sector and international organizations. An ECD working group to be established by UNICEF and Government for further consultative work.
• Conduct consultations, workshops, and focus groups to gather input and insights from stakeholders and ECD working group members.

Research and Best Practices:

• Review international literature and case studies on ECD strategies and interventions.
• Identify best practices that can be adapted to the Uzbekistan context.

Strategy Development:

• Draft the ECD strategy, including vision, mission, goals, objectives, and key interventions.
  – Provide recommendations for policy amendments or new policies to support ECD.
  – Include an integrated theory of change with clear thematic pillars: multidimensional child poverty; health and nutrition; early identification and intervention; early learning and play; family friendly policies and childcare services; social protection, including introduction of universal child benefits; child protection and care; parenting and family support; gender and social inclusion and systems strengthening and partnerships (more information is provided below); public expenditures into ECD and their sustainability and efficiency.

Implementation Plan:

• Develop an actionable high level implementation plan outlining roles, responsibilities, timelines, budget envelops and commitments linked to resource requirements.
• Propose a monitoring and evaluation framework with indicators to assess progress and impact of the strategy.

Specifically, in line with national priorities and UNICEF draft country programme 2026-2030, the ECD Framework should include a high-level theory of change in order to:

• Improve health outcomes for mothers and children from pregnancy to birth and in early childhood including improved nutrition, breastfeeding … ;
• Improve health outcomes for mothers from the pre-conception period and for children from pregnancy through birth and early childhood by ensuring access to essential, high-quality, and integrated health and nutrition services including: Improved maternal nutrition and antenatal care, improved infant and young child feeding practices, including promotion, protection, and support to early and exclusive breastfeeding; timely early identification and intervention services; immunization and preventive care, skilled birth attendance and essential newborn care, responsive caregiving and parental support (including mental health services); community outreach and structured home visiting programmes.
• Develop and enhance early identification and support services for families and young children, including for families with children at risk for developmental delay and children with disabilities;
• Develop new opportunity for early learning, play and stimulation, while expanding access to quality inclusive early childhood education and care services;
• Develop strategic vision on enhancing ECD through promoting family friendly policies, improving access to childcare facilities, lowering barriers to accessing child benefits and increasing efficiency, sustainability and adequacy of public expenditures in these areas;
• Ensure the development and scale-up of child protection and care services that prevent violence, abuse, neglect, exploitation, and unnecessary family separation. This includes strengthening community-based family support systems, improving early identification and referral mechanisms, investing in the social service workforce, and ensuring access to high-quality, family-based alternative care for children who cannot safely remain with their families.
• Integrate recommendations to address existing gender inequality essential to ensure equity, access and quality for all children and caregivers, including and not limited to gender equality in access, gender roles in caregiving, predominant female workforce.
• Provide access to clean and safe environment, including climate resilient WASH services at institutions and communities, to mitigate the impacts of climate change on children.
• Expand partnerships across stakeholders including better strategic engagement of parents and the private sector for quality ECD services

Tasks and deliverables

Working closely with UNICEF and collaborating closely with appointed ECD working group at national level the consultant is expected to work on the following tasks and deliverables:

• Develop an inception report including workplan, methodology for all deliverables, timeline/deadlines in close consultation with UNICEF responsible staff.
• Develop comprehensive assessment report (Analytical Mapping) of the current ECD landscape and stakeholder consultation report summarizing feedback and insights.
• Draft ECD strategy document outlining vision, goals, interventions, and implementation plan.
• Finalize ECD strategy document incorporating stakeholder input and revisions.

Monitoring and Evaluation
A framework for monitoring and evaluating the progress and impact of the ECD strategy will be established in collaboration with stakeholders to facilitate ongoing assessments and adaptations as needed. It is important to link the framework to the subdomain of Early Childhood Development under cross-cutting domain of the CRM Framework. Likewise, it would be important to look at MICS data and Situation Analysis of children and adolescents in Uzbekistan to establish baselines and targets for the framework.

Work Assignment Overview – Deliverables – Timeline / Deadline

1. Develop a workplan – 10 days
In close consultation with UNICEF responsible staff develop inception report including workplan and methodology for all deliverables, timeline/deadlines.

Inception report with workplan and methodology

2. Assessment of Current Situation and stakeholder engagement – 20 days
a. Analyze existing ECD policies, programs, and services in Uzbekistan.
b. Analyze gaps and challenges in the current ECD framework.
c. Identify key stakeholders in the ECD sector, including government agencies, civil society, and international organizations.
d. Conduct consultations, workshops, and focus groups to gather inputs and insights from stakeholders

First country visit

Analytical Mapping Report including comprehensive assessment of the currents ECD landscape and stakeholder consultation report. 

3. Draft ECD strategy – 30 days

a. Organize and lead online and offline consultation(s) with national stakeholders on the draft review of the policy document.
b. Meet with relevant UNICEF Uzbekistan CO teams (Education, Health, Social Protection, Child protection, Communication, Gender and Inclusion) to obtain information and insights.
c. Take minutes of the consultations with clear tasks and deadlines.
d. Draft the ECD strategy, including vision, mission, goals, objectives, and key interventions.
e. Provide recommendations for policy amendments or new policies to support ECD strategy implementation

Second country visit

Draft ECD Strategy document

4. Finalize ECD Strategy – 20 days

a. Organize and lead online and offline consultation(s) with national stakeholders on the final draft review of the policy document
b. Finalize document including clear implementation plan outlining roles, responsibilities and timelines. Propose a monitoring and evaluation framework to assess progress and impact of the strategy.
c. Support the final consultation with national stakeholders on the Implementation Plan of the Strategy to elaborate further partnership on ECD. Prepare Consultation report with clear action points such as legalization of the policy through existing plans and normative framework; cross-sectorality; monitoring and evaluation; communication; allocation of resources.
d. Support the Launch of the ECD Policy, make a presentation for the event and all relevant stakeholders.

Third country visit

Finalized ECD Strategy

PPP for the launch of the Strategy

Consultation Report 

Total: 80 days

Travel International (to Uzbekistan) at least 3 times: Consultative meetings to draft and finalize ECD Strategy, Launch of the Strategy. Approximately 3 visits are envisaged during the assignment.

Please submit a professional fee (in USD) based on 80 working days to undertake this assignment, without travel fees as this will be reimbursed as and when they take place.

Final rate shall follow the “best value for money” principle, i.e., achieving the desired outcome at the lowest possible fee. 

Payment of professional fees will be based on submission of agreed 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

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have… 

• An advanced university degree (Master’s or higher) in one of the disciplines relevant to the social policy, ECD areas.
• Minimum 15 years + of professional work experience in policy development, strategic planning, integrated and multi-sectoral approaches, monitoring and evaluation in the ECD area.
• Advanced university degree in Social Policy, Public Health, Education, Child Development, or a related field.
• Strong knowledge of UNICEF ECD Programme Guidelines and UNICEF/WHO Nurturing care framework.
• Proven experience in leading the development of an evidence-based Strategy/Policy would be a strong asset and advantage, with focus on ECD. Highly developed analytical and writing skills. Strong communication and interpersonal skills. Fluency in spoken and written English Previous experience working with UNICEF is an asset.

For every Child, you demonstrate… 

UNICEF’s values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS). 

 To view our competency framework, please visit  here. 

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious or ethnic background, and persons with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization. To create a more inclusive workplace, UNICEF offers paid parental leave, breastfeeding breaks, and reasonable accommodation for persons with disabilities. UNICEF strongly encourages the use of flexible working arrangements. Click here to learn more about flexible work arrangements, well-being, and benefits.

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual, or sensory impairments which, in interaction with various barriers, may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. In its Disability Inclusion Policy and Strategy 2022-2030, UNICEF has committed to increase the number of employees with disabilities by 2030. At UNICEF, we provide reasonable accommodation for work-related support requirements of candidates and employees with disabilities. Also, UNICEF has launched a Global Accessibility Helpdesk to strengthen physical and digital accessibility. If you are an applicant with a disability who needs digital accessibility support in completing the online application, please submit your request through the accessibility email button on the UNICEF Careers webpage Accessibility tendersglobal.net UNICEF.

UNICEF does not hire candidates who are married to children (persons under 18). 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 based on gender, nationality, age, race, sexual orientation, religious or ethnic background or disabilities. UNICEF is committed to promote the protection and safeguarding of all children. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks, and will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check, and selected candidates with disabilities may be requested to submit supporting documentation in relation to their disability confidentially.

Remarks:  

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

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures, and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws. 

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.