Summary
Date Posted: Friday, April 07, 2023 , Base Salary: Not Disclosed

JOB DETAILS:
UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.
Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.
For every child, a fair chance
Uganda is one of the over 190 countries and territories around the world where we work to overcome the obstacles that poverty, violence, disease, and discrimination place in a child’s path. Together with the Government of Uganda and partners we work towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the objectives of the Uganda National Development Plan, and the planned outcomes of the United Nations Development Assistance Framework.

Background and Purpose
UNICEF Uganda Country Programme Document (CPD 2021-2025) identified stunting in its priority areas of focus, aimed at reducing child deprivation and supporting the National Development Plan (NDP III) which set to reduce stunting from 29% to 19%. In addition, UNICEF Regional collaboration for children (ESARO C4C) put stunting reduction as a top agenda, among others for the region. Specifically, the Child Survival and Development Programme of UNICEF Uganda focus the nutrition component direction on reducing stunting.
Stunting, which is the chronic form of malnutrition, is the impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation. Stunting in early life, particularly in the first 1000 days from conception until the age of two, impairs growth, has adverse functional consequences on the child including poor cognition and educational performance, low adult wages, lost productivity and, when accompanied by excessive weight gain later in childhood, an increased risk of nutrition-related chronic diseases in adult life. For every dollar invested in reducing stunting among children in Africa, there is a return of 16 dollars; African countries loses 3% - 16% to stunting and malnutrition.
Stunting remains of high public significance and increases with the age of the child from 12 per cent among the under six months, increases at 9 to 11 months and peaking at 24-35 months. Despite the documented progress in reducing malnutrition in Uganda, stunting rates remain high especially among children under five years of age, compromising their health and survival. Currently, the prevalence of stunting in Toro region is the highest at 40% way higher than the 29% national prevalence rate. In fact, the most recent Food Security and Nutrition Assessment (FSNA) in Western region reported an even higher stunting prevalence of 42% amongst the refugee communities in the region.
The statistics in Tooro sub-region in Western Uganda present a big contradiction because the same region is considered a food basket, exporting food to the neighboring cities and countries. The increased malnutrition rates have been attributed to people’s overconsumption of monotonous diets, consisting primarily of bananas as a leading staple food. Complementary feeding, a stage where children should be introduced to nutritionally diverse foods to ensure that requirements for growth are met, is poor in Tooro region. For example, according to UDHS 2016, about two in ten children (20%) of all children 6-23 months in the region are fed the minimum required number of food groups (dietary diversity), while only two out of five children (40%) accessed the minimum number of meals to meet their daily nutrient needs. Overall, only 7.5 per cent of children 6-23 months in the region receive a minimum acceptable diet of adequate diversity and meal frequency, placing infants and young children at risk of undernutrition, including stunting, wasting and micronutrient deficiencies. Additionally, the UDHS 2016 reports that over 40% of children 6-23 months of age in this region are anemic, with the latest FSNA (2022) reporting a higher anemia prevalence of 50% for children in host districts.
Based on this background, UNICEF proposes to recruit four consultants who will oversee the nine districts across Tooro region to support roll out of the nutrition programme for both preventive, promotive and curative interventions, increase visibility for multisectoral actions across all systems to improve feeding and children’s diets with a special focus to the stunting reduction agenda.

Justification
Despite high stunting rate, the Toro region has structral gap in both human resource and nutrition structures across districts. With a relatively low development partners footprint, recent COVID-19 and Ebola Virus Disease on the health system further weakened the nutrition capacity of districts within the Toro region to adequately address stunting. Thus, an accelerated effort is required to prevent and avert further worsening of stunting among children in the region. One of the strategies is to bridge the human resource gap in the priority areas, including strengthening the capacity across the region to accelerate implementation of flagship government nutrition activities identified as highlighted below;
• Strengthen district capacity: There is a need to drive and accelerate the delivery of evidence-based nutrition interventions. Whiles advocacy and technical support to address the human resource gap in the long term; there is aneed to position human resource to drive the nutrition agenda in the region as a short-term measure in 2022.
• Community mobilization and engagement for stunting prevention through concerted efforts using community action as driven by the Uganda Nutrition Advocacy and Communication Strategy II and locally available evidence on social norms, practices and behaviors.
• Implementation of evidence-based and community tailored package of interventions: There are multiple intertwined causes of stunting and other forms of undernutrition among children under 5 years. These causes are often not linear which implies the solutions to addressing them should also be varied. Therefore, based on the literature and desk reviews, a package of interventions focused on addressing the immediate and underlying causes of stunting as outlined in UNICEF GLOBAL guidelines and tailored based on the outcome of the research will be rolled out, including food systems approaches, enriching complementary foods, multiple micronutrients supplements for pregnant women (MMS) and strengthening PHCs with a strong community driven activities in the geographic area of focus and they should be interlinked:
• Integrated nutrition service delivery at health facility level, which will enhance the capacities of districts and health facility teams to deliver quality nutrition services.

Objective of the assignment
• The consultants will strengthen the capacity of DLGs, health facilities and the community to accelerate implementation of a package of interventions in the nine districts across Tooro region.
• The consultants will contribute to improved programme scale up, visibility, documentation and reporting of the nutrition programme activities through support to the health facilities, district health teams and community volunteers. See the TOR here

Tasks
Governance
• Provide technical support for the functionality of District Nutrition Coordination Committees (including support to capacity building, quarterly supportive supervisions etc.)
• Provide technical support and guidance to DLGs for nutrition partner mapping and coordination
• Provide technical guidance and support for mapping and establishment of strategic partnerships with tea estates and commercial farms that employ women to promote breastfeeding (establishment of baby friendly corners for continued breastfeeding support)
• Provide technical support and guidance to DLGs for integration and alignment of multi-sectoral nutrition actions into district planning and budgeting processes
• Provide technical support and guidance for advocacy efforts for stunting reduction o Including regional and district based social behavior change on dietary diversity including co-designing with the community for appropriate nutrition campaigns (linking to the national NACS)
• Integrated nutrition service delivery for regular programming and emergency response at health facility level
• Provide technical support and guidance to DHT and health facilities to improve Maternal, Infant and Young Child Feeding by improving breastfeeding practices and children’s diets in the first years of life
• Scale up BFHI for improved quality of care for mothers and newborns,
• Nutrition assessment and weight gain monitoring
• micronutrient interventions like IFA, Vitamin A, DW
• counselling on age-appropriate complementary feeding
• Counselling and responsive feeding education
• Including nutrition supplies management (forecasting, quantification, ordering storage and reporting etc.)
• Provide technical support and guidance to the DHT and health facilities on the management of children with severe acute malnutrition
• Including nutrition supplies management (forecasting, quantification, ordering storage and reporting etc.)
• Provide technical guidance and support for improved data management
• Including reporting timeliness, completeness, quality and use of HMIS/DHIS2 data
• Provide technical support and guidance to DHT to plan for on-job mentorship and support supervision, community mass screening and integrated outreaches including ICHDs.
• Community mobilization and engagement for stunting reduction
• Provide technical support and guidance to the DLGs for formation and/or scale up of community MIYCAN using the care group approach.
• Provide technical support and guidance to the DLGs to support implementation of community-based interventions, coordination and reporting of care groups
• Care groups will support the delivery of actions below
• Interpersonal communication among mothers to promote and support breastfeeding, counselling on age appropriate nutritionally diverse complementary foods,
• Linkages with nutrition-sensitive agricultural activities, farmer field schools
• community mobilization and mass media.
• Provision of one egg per day for 6 months to young children
• Food demonstrations and recipe formulations for appropriate complementary foods using local foods
• Integrated health and agricultural SBCC
• Monthly community Growth monitoring and promotion
• Community mass screening
• Integrated child health days
• Evidence generation and documentation
• Document and report on nutrition response activities and case studies for stunting reduction in Toro region
• Participate in implementation research in the region
• Organize regional nutrition symposium to share knowledge and best practices on stunting reduction initiatives

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…
The selected national consultant should have:
Education:
• University Degree in Nutrition, Public Health or other related disciplines.

Work Experience:
• At least 5-year professional experience in nutrition, public health, nutrition planning and management, nutrition research, policy development and knowledge management.
• Experience working with Government entities in national programming for health, nutrition, public health, and other child survival and development areas.
• Experience in undertaking work or projects that improve maternal infant young child and adolescent nutrition at national and subnational levels, and engaging communities to reduce malnutrition Experience in project management
• Experience of working with leadership and management spheres in public health and nutrition programmes
• Experience in facilitating dialogue among different stakeholders

Desirable:
• Working experience with UN agencies, donors, CSOs, their implementing partners at national, regional, district and community level.
• Working experience with the Ministry of Health, Regional Referral Hospitals, District Local Governments, and/ or other governmental entities.

Language: Fluency in English.


Work Hours: 8

Experience in Months: 60

Level of Education: Bachelor Degree

Job application procedure

Interested candidates are required to submit a technical proposal on how they intend to approach the work. The proposal should include a timeline, and methodology, based on the Terms of Reference. The proposal must also include detailed CV of the consultant, as well as a financial proposal, clearly indicating daily rate for professional fees. The financial proposal must be all-inclusive of all costs (consultancy fees and where applicable air fares, airport transfers, daily living expenses). This is an international level consultancy and competitive market rates should apply.

Interested and qualified click here to apply.


All Jobs

QUICK ALERT SUBSCRIPTION