This consultancy will produce an evidence-based analytical report and operational toolkit enabling governments and UNICEF to plan, cost, and finance regular MICS and child-centred household surveys through domestic PFM systems (budget lines, MTEF, program budgeting)—including tested guidance and country-ready templates.
The AU Women and Youth Financial and Economic Inclusion (WYFEI) 2030 initiative is a cornerstone of the African Women's Decade (2020–2030), aiming to eliminate systemic barriers to financial and economic inclusion for women and youth across Africa. Through public-private partnership and alignment with Agenda 2063, WYFEI 2030 drives empowerment via entrepreneurship, job creation, and inclusive policies. UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited (GenU) and the African Union have launched the EmPowerHer Africa programme to empower 50 million adolescent girls and young women by 2030, expanding access to market-relevant skills, financial inclusion, and entrepreneurship opportunities.
PURPOSE OF CONSULTANCY:
Provide strategic, operational, and technical support to EmPowerHer Africa, supporting AU and UNICEF frameworks for programme delivery, partnership strengthening, knowledge generation, and roll-out of targeted interventions across Member States. The role is responsible for programme planning, coordination, and stakeholder engagement to ensure high-quality, scalable implementation.
This assignment helps ensure the ranking of UNICEF’s Parenting Hub on traditional search engines and strengthens its visibility in AI platforms. It takes place during a period of transition, limited staffing and major technological shifts in these areas. Operating under a deliverables-based contract, the consultant will play a critical role in researching keyword gaps and opportunities, developing content to rank on search engines and feature in AI responses, as well as tracking and optimizing performance.
Working closely with the Web Editorial team, the consultant will combine an editorial and technical lens to develop and optimize content that is 1. Engaging and useful for its target audience, and 2. Maximizes the likelihood of the audience discovering this content on search engines and AI platforms. The work will directly support UNICEF’s Parenting Hub by ensuring the accessibility, visibility and relevance of content, which is key to our ability to achieve our digital goals and grant deliverables.
This assignment is a specialized consultancy designed to accelerate progress in strategic data and statistics system work during the organizational transition. It aligns with UNICEF’s commitment to act as “One UNICEF”—a unified team making courageous decisions and collaborating across the evidence ecosystem to achieve results for children at scale.
The Brand Designer (Intermediate) will help us deliver on our mission by extending the brand expression across brand systems, global brand assets and activations and brand guidance
The Division of Data, Analytics, Planning and Monitoring (DAPM) is responsible for driving, shaping and guiding UNICEF’s evidence-informed analysis, corporate and country planning, programme implementation and related risk management, monitoring, knowledge management and organizational performance. As such, DAPM enables the organization to deliver on results in a more coherent manner, based on agile and contextualized programming processes, and on data, evidence, and analytics, as well as the application of human-rights based and results-based approaches.
Within DAPM, the Programme Effectiveness Team (PET) leads, regulates and coordinates the development and issuance of organization-wide policies, procedures, standards, guidance, systems, tools and platforms to strengthen programme effectiveness across all contexts, including programme planning, implementation and related risk management, safeguarding, monitoring, organizational performance, knowledge management, at all levels. In doing so, PET engages with all divisions/offices across HQ as well as with all regional offices, UN agencies, funds and programmes, specialized agencies, other technical organizations and the UN Development Coordination Office.
The Help Desk and Rollout consultant will provide end-user support, training, and system rollout assistance for UNICEF’s corporate programme systems including RAM, eTools, UNPP, PRP and CPX. The consultant will ensure that system users receive timely support and guidance. This role is critical in maintaining high user satisfaction, ensuring smooth transitions during system upgrades or rollouts, and capturing lessons learned for continuous improvement.
The consultant will ensure business continuity and user adoption of the corporate digital platforms of the Office of Evidence and System of UNICEF —eTools (ePD, PRP, FMM, FAM, Action Points, eWorkplanning) and the UN Partner Portal (UNPP)—which are critical for programme implementation and partnership management.
This includes strengthening governance mechanisms, resolving system incidents, coordinating enhancements, leading rollout stability, and supporting country offices and partners through training, communication, and direct guidance. The consultant will collaborate closely with business owners, ICTD teams, and regional focal points to streamline user support and accelerate platform adoption globally.
UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children’s lives, defend their rights, and help them fulfill their potential, from early childhood through adolescence.
At UNICEF, we are committed, passionate, and proud of what we do for as long as we are needed. Promoting the rights of every child is not just a job – it is a calling.
UNICEF is a place where careers are built. We offer our staff diverse opportunities for professional and personal development that will help them reinforce a sense of purpose while serving children and communities across the world. We welcome everyone who wants to belong and grow in a diverse and passionate culture., coupled with an attractive compensation and benefits package.
Visit our website to learn more about what we do at UNICEF.
Humanitarian action is a cross-cutting priority within UNICEF’s Strategic Plan. UNICEF is committed to stay and deliver in humanitarian contexts. Therefore, all staff, at all levels across all functional areas, can be called upon to be deployed to support humanitarian response, contributing to both strengthening resilience of communities and capacity of national authorities.
Additional information about working for UNICEF can be found here.
UNICEF seeks to hire a senior technical consultant to support the implementation of key activities as part of the acceleration plan for pilot implementation of revised 2023 WHO Guidelines on prevention and management of wasting and nutritional oedema among children under five in Katsina state.
The purpose of this individual consultancy is to strengthen UNICEF’s Social and Community Listening (SCL) capacity of UNICEF SBC teams at global level. The consultancy is hosted by the Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) PG HQ team, transitioning into the new Global Programme Division. The expert is meant to provide targeted advisory support to leverage SCL within specific global programme priorities, with a focus on immunization demand, public health emergencies & climate, and a third sectoral priority to be determined, while supporting ROs and COs with, training, technical support, and knowledge products.
The support and expected deliverables will enable UNICEF to systematically capture, analyse, and act on community and digital insights, while also integrating misinformation management and sectoral applications. This work builds on the progress made by SBC teams globally in scaling up SCL and will support the mainstreaming of the frameworks, guides, and technical guidance developed by the SBC HQ team in 2024–2025. By combining strategic positioning of SCL to inform global and country programmes and the provision of capacity building, evidence generation, and knowledge management technical support, the consultant will ensure that SCL becomes an operational tool for decision-making, and programme design across global, regional, and country levels.
UNICEF Nigeria Country Office in Abuja, Nigeria is seeking a passionate and committed person to work in the role of a national consultant for maternal and newborn health and invites applications from highly motivated and committed persons who want to contribute to results for children. If you are that person, we encourage you to apply and become part of a highly motivated and committed team.
UNICEF Nigeria Kano office is seeking a passionate and committed person to work in the role of an education consultant for foundational Learning and Skills development in Kano and Jigawa and invites applications from highly motivated and committed persons who want to contribute to results for children. If you are that person, we encourage you to apply and become part of a highly motivated and committed team.
UNICEF has established TeamOne as a global mechanism to provide digital support to country offices. TeamOne brings together digital advisors from across the organization in one virtual team to serve as a Global Digital Advisory Service. TeamOne also serves as a platform for continuous upskilling, thought leadership and knowledge management. As part of the TeamOne mechanism, a digital platform was implemented to gather, track and manage digital support requests, primarily from country offices. This digital platform is currently in pilot phase, with an aim to test its effectiveness for TeamOne, as well as gather initial sets of TeamOne requests to test its collaboration processes and ways of working.
The TeamOne KM consultant will manage CO requests on the platform, as well as develop knowledge assets, insights and learnings on priority knowledge areas and platform usage. The consultant will develop regular reports on key KPIs related to the system, work with request owners to ensure completion and collect feedback on completed requests. In doing so, the consultant will work closely with communications, community engagement teams, as well as TeamOne Principal Digital Advisors, to share back lessons and incentivize platform use and appropriate knowledge capture. In addition, the TeamOne KM consultant will track and promote the adoption and use of the knowledge assets created.
UNICEF Generation Unlimited (GenU), in partnership with the African Union Commission’s Women, Gender and Youth Directorate (WGYD), is the hiring entity for this consultancy. GenU and the AU have joined forces to launch EmPowerHer Africa—a flagship programme aiming to empower 50 million adolescent girls and young women by 2030. The programme seeks to expand access to market-relevant skills, entrepreneurship pathways, financial inclusion mechanisms, and supportive policy environments across Africa. The consultancy will be physically and administratively based within the AU WGYD, emphasizing the Youth Directorate
PURPOSE OF CONSULTANCY:
To provide technical and operational support to monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (MERL) across the WYFEI Initiative through AU/UNICEF EmPowerHer Africa. This will ensure results-based implementation, rigorous reporting, enhanced accountability, capacity building, and strategic learning for scale-up.
Aligned with UNICEF’s strategic positioning of ECD in the next Strategic Plan, the objective of this consultancy is to support the ECD Team in: (i) ensuring timely data quality assurance through internal monitoring mechanisms for UNICEF-supported and implemented ECD programmes globally in 2025; (ii) producing analytical quantitative and qualitative updates and visuals for annual and donor reporting; (iii) developing a consolidated summary report of global ECD results for the current Strategic Plan (SP) period; (iv) providing technical inputs to UNICEF progress and global reports (e.g., Global Annual Results Report GARR); and (v) extracting illustrative examples and case studies from country reports to supplement ECD 2025 result statements in reports with field stories.
The consultant will work in the Data and Analytics Section of the Office of Strategy and Evidence to support projects and activities related to machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), data analysis, and information extraction.
In particular, the consultant will:
• Maintain and optimize the vaccine stockout machine learning model already trained for UNICEF’s Program Group Immunization Division, ensuring its accuracy, performance, and sustainability.
• Continue to enhance methods for large-scale data and information extraction from diverse and unstructured document sources for the West Central Africa Region Social Policy teams and the WASH Analytics team before moving to additional domains.
• Support the development of automated briefs and reports generation pipelines.
• Test, evaluate, and implement robust frameworks for (semi)-automated GenAI report and data quality assurance.
• Contribute to geospatial (GIS) and AI-related initiatives, particularly as part of the Frontier Data Network Ahead of the Storm project.
• Provide technical advice on AI/ML approaches.
• Build reproducible workflows and contribute to machine learning and GenAI knowledge transfer within the team
The Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) Programme is UNICEF’s flagship household survey, providing internationally comparable, statistically rigorous data on the situation of children and women. Managed globally by UNICEF’s Data Collection Unit in Data, Analytics, Planning and Monitoring Division (DAPM), MICS supports more than 100 countries with technical assistance, capacity building, and data quality assurance.
With the growing number of ongoing and planned surveys, and a new funding modality centered on country resources, effective program coordination is critical to ensure the timely implementation of survey activities, efficient use of funds, and consistent coordination across regional and country offices.
MICS is a national government-led activity, with UNICEF providing technical assistance and limited financial support. Given the current dramatic reduction in donor funding and constrained national fiscal space, the consultant will focus on assessing the broader financial sustainability of MICS, including funding from governments, donors, and other partners. The consultant will analyse how MICS is financed across different sources to support strategic planning and resource mobilization.
The purpose of this consultancy is therefore to assess and articulate the extent to which MICS can and should respond to the changing global survey landscape, and under what conditions—institutional, technical, and financial—such an expanded role would be viable and sustainable. The work will examine how MICS could contribute to maintaining continuity in global demographic and health statistics while reinforcing existing national data infrastructures and avoiding the creation of parallel systems.
As part of the MICS programme, UNICEF continues to strengthen its MICS support mechanism at all levels, so that implementing partners in countries can receive the required level of technical assistance on a timely basis at critical survey stages and are in a better position to support the implementing partner. The 7th round of the MICS programme (MICS7) was launched in March 2023 and there are already 40 planned and ongoing MICS7 surveys and potentially 20-30 more surveys in the pipeline. There are also 7 surveys from the 6th round of the MICS programme that are still in data processing or report finalisation stages.
A very important element of MICS design and implementation is sampling, which is a very specialized field of work. Excellent sampling support is needed during the design, implementation, and reporting stages of all surveys.
As currently there is no sufficient funding to cover all planned activities, some deliverables are planned to be completed only if additional resources become available.
UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)—implemented in over 120 countries and aligned with 22 of 23 SDG indicators previously monitored through DHS—represent one of the world’s leading sources of internationally comparable data on children and women. In this evolving context, there is a growing expectation that MICS could play an expanded role in addressing the data gaps left by DHS. However, this potential requires careful assessment of both external opportunities and internal readiness, including questions of institutional capacity, financial sustainability, and strategic prioritization.
The purpose of this consultancy is therefore to assess and articulate the extent to which MICS can and should respond to the changing global survey landscape, and under what conditions—institutional, technical, and financial—such an expanded role would be viable and sustainable. The work will examine how MICS could contribute to maintaining continuity in global demographic and health statistics while reinforcing existing national data infrastructures and avoiding the creation of parallel systems.
This assignment will produce an evidence-based analysis and a strategic framework to guide UNICEF’s decisions on the internal investments, partnerships, and operational adjustments required to strengthen MICS’s position within the global data ecosystem. It will be conducted in alignment with the ISWGHS Task Force on Sustainable Demographic and Health Statistics and UNICEF’s Global Data Strategy, ensuring that all recommendations are grounded in principles of national ownership, complementarity, and sustainability.
The Senior Leadership Support (SLS) Team drives UNICEF’s strategic people and culture agenda through four pillars: talent management for senior and Deputy Representative roles, strategic partnerships with the Office of the Executive Director (OED), the Office of the Secretary of the Executive Board (OSEB), and the Ethics Office, as well as stewardship of the interagency portfolio. As trusted advisors, the SLS Team provides expert guidance on leadership development and organizational integrity, collaborating across the Division of People and Culture (DPC), Regional Offices, and the global HR network to ensure alignment and impact.To support increased workload from the Global Ring-Fenced Recruitment and Senior Staff Rotation exercises, UNICEF seeks a People and Culture Specialist (P-3) for a temporary appointment. The Specialist will advance global talent acquisition and succession planning, particularly for Deputy Representatives, while ensuring equity, transparency, and consistency in HR practices. The role combines strategic advisory functions with practical execution of people and culture policies that foster leadership excellence and inclusion.
This consultancy will produce an evidence-based analytical report and operational toolkit enabling governments and UNICEF to plan, cost, and finance regular MICS and child-centred household surveys through domestic PFM systems (budget lines, MTEF, program budgeting)—including tested guidance and country-ready templates.
The AU Women and Youth Financial and Economic Inclusion (WYFEI) 2030 initiative is a cornerstone of the African Women's Decade (2020–2030), aiming to eliminate systemic barriers to financial and economic inclusion for women and youth across Africa. Through public-private partnership and alignment with Agenda 2063, WYFEI 2030 drives empowerment via entrepreneurship, job creation, and inclusive policies. UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited (GenU) and the African Union have launched the EmPowerHer Africa programme to empower 50 million adolescent girls and young women by 2030, expanding access to market-relevant skills, financial inclusion, and entrepreneurship opportunities.
PURPOSE OF CONSULTANCY:
Provide strategic, operational, and technical support to EmPowerHer Africa, supporting AU and UNICEF frameworks for programme delivery, partnership strengthening, knowledge generation, and roll-out of targeted interventions across Member States. The role is responsible for programme planning, coordination, and stakeholder engagement to ensure high-quality, scalable implementation.
This assignment helps ensure the ranking of UNICEF’s Parenting Hub on traditional search engines and strengthens its visibility in AI platforms. It takes place during a period of transition, limited staffing and major technological shifts in these areas. Operating under a deliverables-based contract, the consultant will play a critical role in researching keyword gaps and opportunities, developing content to rank on search engines and feature in AI responses, as well as tracking and optimizing performance.
Working closely with the Web Editorial team, the consultant will combine an editorial and technical lens to develop and optimize content that is 1. Engaging and useful for its target audience, and 2. Maximizes the likelihood of the audience discovering this content on search engines and AI platforms. The work will directly support UNICEF’s Parenting Hub by ensuring the accessibility, visibility and relevance of content, which is key to our ability to achieve our digital goals and grant deliverables.
This assignment is a specialized consultancy designed to accelerate progress in strategic data and statistics system work during the organizational transition. It aligns with UNICEF’s commitment to act as “One UNICEF”—a unified team making courageous decisions and collaborating across the evidence ecosystem to achieve results for children at scale.
The Brand Designer (Intermediate) will help us deliver on our mission by extending the brand expression across brand systems, global brand assets and activations and brand guidance
The Division of Data, Analytics, Planning and Monitoring (DAPM) is responsible for driving, shaping and guiding UNICEF’s evidence-informed analysis, corporate and country planning, programme implementation and related risk management, monitoring, knowledge management and organizational performance. As such, DAPM enables the organization to deliver on results in a more coherent manner, based on agile and contextualized programming processes, and on data, evidence, and analytics, as well as the application of human-rights based and results-based approaches.
Within DAPM, the Programme Effectiveness Team (PET) leads, regulates and coordinates the development and issuance of organization-wide policies, procedures, standards, guidance, systems, tools and platforms to strengthen programme effectiveness across all contexts, including programme planning, implementation and related risk management, safeguarding, monitoring, organizational performance, knowledge management, at all levels. In doing so, PET engages with all divisions/offices across HQ as well as with all regional offices, UN agencies, funds and programmes, specialized agencies, other technical organizations and the UN Development Coordination Office.
The Help Desk and Rollout consultant will provide end-user support, training, and system rollout assistance for UNICEF’s corporate programme systems including RAM, eTools, UNPP, PRP and CPX. The consultant will ensure that system users receive timely support and guidance. This role is critical in maintaining high user satisfaction, ensuring smooth transitions during system upgrades or rollouts, and capturing lessons learned for continuous improvement.
The consultant will ensure business continuity and user adoption of the corporate digital platforms of the Office of Evidence and System of UNICEF —eTools (ePD, PRP, FMM, FAM, Action Points, eWorkplanning) and the UN Partner Portal (UNPP)—which are critical for programme implementation and partnership management.
This includes strengthening governance mechanisms, resolving system incidents, coordinating enhancements, leading rollout stability, and supporting country offices and partners through training, communication, and direct guidance. The consultant will collaborate closely with business owners, ICTD teams, and regional focal points to streamline user support and accelerate platform adoption globally.
UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children’s lives, defend their rights, and help them fulfill their potential, from early childhood through adolescence.
At UNICEF, we are committed, passionate, and proud of what we do for as long as we are needed. Promoting the rights of every child is not just a job – it is a calling.
UNICEF is a place where careers are built. We offer our staff diverse opportunities for professional and personal development that will help them reinforce a sense of purpose while serving children and communities across the world. We welcome everyone who wants to belong and grow in a diverse and passionate culture., coupled with an attractive compensation and benefits package.
Visit our website to learn more about what we do at UNICEF.
Humanitarian action is a cross-cutting priority within UNICEF’s Strategic Plan. UNICEF is committed to stay and deliver in humanitarian contexts. Therefore, all staff, at all levels across all functional areas, can be called upon to be deployed to support humanitarian response, contributing to both strengthening resilience of communities and capacity of national authorities.
Additional information about working for UNICEF can be found here.
UNICEF seeks to hire a senior technical consultant to support the implementation of key activities as part of the acceleration plan for pilot implementation of revised 2023 WHO Guidelines on prevention and management of wasting and nutritional oedema among children under five in Katsina state.
The purpose of this individual consultancy is to strengthen UNICEF’s Social and Community Listening (SCL) capacity of UNICEF SBC teams at global level. The consultancy is hosted by the Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) PG HQ team, transitioning into the new Global Programme Division. The expert is meant to provide targeted advisory support to leverage SCL within specific global programme priorities, with a focus on immunization demand, public health emergencies & climate, and a third sectoral priority to be determined, while supporting ROs and COs with, training, technical support, and knowledge products.
The support and expected deliverables will enable UNICEF to systematically capture, analyse, and act on community and digital insights, while also integrating misinformation management and sectoral applications. This work builds on the progress made by SBC teams globally in scaling up SCL and will support the mainstreaming of the frameworks, guides, and technical guidance developed by the SBC HQ team in 2024–2025. By combining strategic positioning of SCL to inform global and country programmes and the provision of capacity building, evidence generation, and knowledge management technical support, the consultant will ensure that SCL becomes an operational tool for decision-making, and programme design across global, regional, and country levels.
UNICEF Nigeria Country Office in Abuja, Nigeria is seeking a passionate and committed person to work in the role of a national consultant for maternal and newborn health and invites applications from highly motivated and committed persons who want to contribute to results for children. If you are that person, we encourage you to apply and become part of a highly motivated and committed team.
UNICEF Nigeria Kano office is seeking a passionate and committed person to work in the role of an education consultant for foundational Learning and Skills development in Kano and Jigawa and invites applications from highly motivated and committed persons who want to contribute to results for children. If you are that person, we encourage you to apply and become part of a highly motivated and committed team.
UNICEF has established TeamOne as a global mechanism to provide digital support to country offices. TeamOne brings together digital advisors from across the organization in one virtual team to serve as a Global Digital Advisory Service. TeamOne also serves as a platform for continuous upskilling, thought leadership and knowledge management. As part of the TeamOne mechanism, a digital platform was implemented to gather, track and manage digital support requests, primarily from country offices. This digital platform is currently in pilot phase, with an aim to test its effectiveness for TeamOne, as well as gather initial sets of TeamOne requests to test its collaboration processes and ways of working.
The TeamOne KM consultant will manage CO requests on the platform, as well as develop knowledge assets, insights and learnings on priority knowledge areas and platform usage. The consultant will develop regular reports on key KPIs related to the system, work with request owners to ensure completion and collect feedback on completed requests. In doing so, the consultant will work closely with communications, community engagement teams, as well as TeamOne Principal Digital Advisors, to share back lessons and incentivize platform use and appropriate knowledge capture. In addition, the TeamOne KM consultant will track and promote the adoption and use of the knowledge assets created.
UNICEF Generation Unlimited (GenU), in partnership with the African Union Commission’s Women, Gender and Youth Directorate (WGYD), is the hiring entity for this consultancy. GenU and the AU have joined forces to launch EmPowerHer Africa—a flagship programme aiming to empower 50 million adolescent girls and young women by 2030. The programme seeks to expand access to market-relevant skills, entrepreneurship pathways, financial inclusion mechanisms, and supportive policy environments across Africa. The consultancy will be physically and administratively based within the AU WGYD, emphasizing the Youth Directorate
PURPOSE OF CONSULTANCY:
To provide technical and operational support to monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (MERL) across the WYFEI Initiative through AU/UNICEF EmPowerHer Africa. This will ensure results-based implementation, rigorous reporting, enhanced accountability, capacity building, and strategic learning for scale-up.
Aligned with UNICEF’s strategic positioning of ECD in the next Strategic Plan, the objective of this consultancy is to support the ECD Team in: (i) ensuring timely data quality assurance through internal monitoring mechanisms for UNICEF-supported and implemented ECD programmes globally in 2025; (ii) producing analytical quantitative and qualitative updates and visuals for annual and donor reporting; (iii) developing a consolidated summary report of global ECD results for the current Strategic Plan (SP) period; (iv) providing technical inputs to UNICEF progress and global reports (e.g., Global Annual Results Report GARR); and (v) extracting illustrative examples and case studies from country reports to supplement ECD 2025 result statements in reports with field stories.
The consultant will work in the Data and Analytics Section of the Office of Strategy and Evidence to support projects and activities related to machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), data analysis, and information extraction.
In particular, the consultant will:
• Maintain and optimize the vaccine stockout machine learning model already trained for UNICEF’s Program Group Immunization Division, ensuring its accuracy, performance, and sustainability.
• Continue to enhance methods for large-scale data and information extraction from diverse and unstructured document sources for the West Central Africa Region Social Policy teams and the WASH Analytics team before moving to additional domains.
• Support the development of automated briefs and reports generation pipelines.
• Test, evaluate, and implement robust frameworks for (semi)-automated GenAI report and data quality assurance.
• Contribute to geospatial (GIS) and AI-related initiatives, particularly as part of the Frontier Data Network Ahead of the Storm project.
• Provide technical advice on AI/ML approaches.
• Build reproducible workflows and contribute to machine learning and GenAI knowledge transfer within the team
The Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) Programme is UNICEF’s flagship household survey, providing internationally comparable, statistically rigorous data on the situation of children and women. Managed globally by UNICEF’s Data Collection Unit in Data, Analytics, Planning and Monitoring Division (DAPM), MICS supports more than 100 countries with technical assistance, capacity building, and data quality assurance.
With the growing number of ongoing and planned surveys, and a new funding modality centered on country resources, effective program coordination is critical to ensure the timely implementation of survey activities, efficient use of funds, and consistent coordination across regional and country offices.
MICS is a national government-led activity, with UNICEF providing technical assistance and limited financial support. Given the current dramatic reduction in donor funding and constrained national fiscal space, the consultant will focus on assessing the broader financial sustainability of MICS, including funding from governments, donors, and other partners. The consultant will analyse how MICS is financed across different sources to support strategic planning and resource mobilization.
The purpose of this consultancy is therefore to assess and articulate the extent to which MICS can and should respond to the changing global survey landscape, and under what conditions—institutional, technical, and financial—such an expanded role would be viable and sustainable. The work will examine how MICS could contribute to maintaining continuity in global demographic and health statistics while reinforcing existing national data infrastructures and avoiding the creation of parallel systems.
As part of the MICS programme, UNICEF continues to strengthen its MICS support mechanism at all levels, so that implementing partners in countries can receive the required level of technical assistance on a timely basis at critical survey stages and are in a better position to support the implementing partner. The 7th round of the MICS programme (MICS7) was launched in March 2023 and there are already 40 planned and ongoing MICS7 surveys and potentially 20-30 more surveys in the pipeline. There are also 7 surveys from the 6th round of the MICS programme that are still in data processing or report finalisation stages.
A very important element of MICS design and implementation is sampling, which is a very specialized field of work. Excellent sampling support is needed during the design, implementation, and reporting stages of all surveys.
As currently there is no sufficient funding to cover all planned activities, some deliverables are planned to be completed only if additional resources become available.
UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)—implemented in over 120 countries and aligned with 22 of 23 SDG indicators previously monitored through DHS—represent one of the world’s leading sources of internationally comparable data on children and women. In this evolving context, there is a growing expectation that MICS could play an expanded role in addressing the data gaps left by DHS. However, this potential requires careful assessment of both external opportunities and internal readiness, including questions of institutional capacity, financial sustainability, and strategic prioritization.
The purpose of this consultancy is therefore to assess and articulate the extent to which MICS can and should respond to the changing global survey landscape, and under what conditions—institutional, technical, and financial—such an expanded role would be viable and sustainable. The work will examine how MICS could contribute to maintaining continuity in global demographic and health statistics while reinforcing existing national data infrastructures and avoiding the creation of parallel systems.
This assignment will produce an evidence-based analysis and a strategic framework to guide UNICEF’s decisions on the internal investments, partnerships, and operational adjustments required to strengthen MICS’s position within the global data ecosystem. It will be conducted in alignment with the ISWGHS Task Force on Sustainable Demographic and Health Statistics and UNICEF’s Global Data Strategy, ensuring that all recommendations are grounded in principles of national ownership, complementarity, and sustainability.
The Senior Leadership Support (SLS) Team drives UNICEF’s strategic people and culture agenda through four pillars: talent management for senior and Deputy Representative roles, strategic partnerships with the Office of the Executive Director (OED), the Office of the Secretary of the Executive Board (OSEB), and the Ethics Office, as well as stewardship of the interagency portfolio. As trusted advisors, the SLS Team provides expert guidance on leadership development and organizational integrity, collaborating across the Division of People and Culture (DPC), Regional Offices, and the global HR network to ensure alignment and impact.To support increased workload from the Global Ring-Fenced Recruitment and Senior Staff Rotation exercises, UNICEF seeks a People and Culture Specialist (P-3) for a temporary appointment. The Specialist will advance global talent acquisition and succession planning, particularly for Deputy Representatives, while ensuring equity, transparency, and consistency in HR practices. The role combines strategic advisory functions with practical execution of people and culture policies that foster leadership excellence and inclusion.
