Social Protection Officer

Details

Mission and objectives

UNICEF, also known as the United Nations Children’s Fund, is a United Nations agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide. The agency is among the most widespread and recognizable social welfare organizations in the world, with a presence in 192 countries and territories. UNICEF’s activities include providing immunizations and disease prevention, administering treatment for children and mothers with HIV, enhancing childhood and maternal nutrition, improving sanitation, promoting education, and providing emergency relief in response to disasters.

Context

As part of the Social Protection portfolio, UNICEF Kenya is advocating and undertaking activities to strengthen disability inclusion in the social protection sector, both at national and county level. This builds on the recognition that, although Kenya made commendable progress in responding to poverty and vulnerability in the last decade, by taking major steps in putting in place a comprehensive and right-based social protection system, some vulnerable groups still experience marginalization. Persons living with a disability and children living with disabilities are one of these groups. An estimated ten per cent of Kenya’s population, approximately 4.44 million people, is living with a form of disability. The largest proportion of these, close to 45 per cent, are children between 0 and 14 years of age (1.92 million), and 21 per cent are young people between 15 and 24 years (0.93 million).
The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) assignment is part of UNICEF Kenya social protection and disability inclusion programme with a focus to support developing a costed road map, inclusive policy scenarios and programme documents for Disability Inclusive and Gender-Responsive care and support systems for Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) across the life cycle.
Building on the joint work initiated prior to Global Disability Summit (GDS) of 2022 and the conceptual and normative framework proposed by OHCHR in its recent report to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/52/52), this project seeks to contribute to change by clarifying the demand from an OPDs’ perspective, developing an assessment tool to improve concrete understanding of the normative framework and its implication at country level and to support elaboration of costed policy scenarios exploring viable pathways for progressive development of community support and care systems in Kenya.

Task description

Under the direct supervision of the Social Policy Specialist/Disability inclusion, the UN Volunteer will undertake the following tasks:
 Support Kisumu and West Pokot counties in coordination and implementation of humanitarian innovation programme and select counties on care and support models.
 Provide technical assistance and inputs and to contribute to reaching the political and technical agreements needed with sub national counterparts within UNICEF focus counties for the implementation of Gender responsive Disability Inclusive initiatives, delivery and evidence generation of UNICEF supported social protection interventions (“Cash plus”) and in the identification of potential implementing partners from civil society and key actors from the private sector.
 Support advocacy activities at sub national level on disability mainstreaming in social protection and other social sectors
 Support capacity development and knowledge management liaise with external partners, notably those working in the inter-agency coordination committee, as well as with UNICEF sections working on related programmes (particularly Health, Education, CAP, SBC, and Innovation sections)
 Provide technical inputs to relevant documentation knowledge products, presentation, briefs, and other documents ensuring inclusion is mainstreamed.
 Support disability mainstreaming at sub national level activities and UNICEF-supported programmes within the counties
 Support the inception meetings for humanitarian innovation programme and unpaid care models in the selected counties.
 Provide technical assistance to the sub national governments to improve policies, planning, budgeting, consultation, and accountability processes to assure the definition of local action plans and enhancing Child-sensitive, gender responsive and disability inclusive social protection programming.
 Collaborate with the national and county government to strengthen capacity on quality data collection, analysis for policy development, planning, implementation, coordination, monitoring of essential social services, with emphasis on community participation and accountability.
 Support the monitoring of the gender responsive, disability inclusive and shock responsive social protection programmes implementation, including the definition of indicators and the review of progress reports.
Furthermore, UN Volunteers are required to:
•Strengthen their knowledge and understanding of the concept of volunteerism by reading relevant UNV and external publications and take an active part in UNV activities (for instance in events that mark International Volunteer Day).
•Be acquainted with and build on traditional and/or local forms of volunteerism in the host country.
•Reflect on the type and quality of voluntary action that they are undertaking, including participation in ongoing reflection activities.
•Contribute articles/write-ups on field experiences and submit them for UNV publications/websites, newsletters, press releases, etc.
•Assist with the UNV Buddy Programme for newly arrived UN Volunteers.
•Promote or advise local groups in the use of online volunteering or encourage relevant local individuals and organizations to use the UNV Online Volunteering service whenever technically possible.