National Consultant to provide support to UN Women’s work on innovation within Ending Violence against Women programme.Vacancy Number: Pr20/02053
Background
UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action, peace and security. The work of UN Women in Moldova is guided by its Country Strategic Note for 2018-2022, aligned with the Republic of Moldova–United Nations Partnership Framework for Sustainable Development 2018–2022, the Global Strategic Plan of UN Women for 2018-2021, the National Strategy on Gender Equality for 2017-2021 (NSGE), the National Strategy for Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence for the Period 2018-2023, and aims to contribute to the gender-responsive implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Strategic Note focuses on three main areas: 1/strengthening women’s participation in politics and decision making, 2/economic empowerment of women and 3/ending violence against women and girls. To achieve progress under these areas, UN Women works with variety of national and international partners and as part of different national and regional initiatives. Violence against women (VAW) is one of the most systematic and widespread human rights violations. In Moldova, as in the region and around the world, it affects individuals regardless of the context, culture, or their socio-economic status, with serious repercussion for women, their families, and society in general. According to the Moldovan national study “Violence against Women in the Family”, carried out by the National Bureau of Statistics, and commissioned by UN Moldova in 2011, 63% of women above 15 years old experience some form of violence (psychological, physical, sexual, and economic) from a husband/partner during their lifetime. Rural women, elderly women, Romani women, women with disabilities, HIV-positive women reported the highest prevalence rate of multiple forms of violence. Despite significant progress, including in the area of legal and policy reforms, research, and awareness raising campaigns, the prevalence of VAW in Moldova remains high. There is still widespread limited access to justice and support services for survivors. Stigmatization of women victims of gender-based violence, domestic violence by their family, community, law enforcement representatives and service providers still continue. As a result, women affected by violence and eyewitnesses are demotivated to report abusive acts Taking into consideration these aspects, UN Women Moldova Country Office started to apply innovative approaches from 2010 in programming with the key focus on Eliminating Violence against Women area, and in a more systemic manner from 2015. This was done as a follow up to the establishment of UN Women Innovation Cohort, where UN Women Moldova Representative took part. By implementing the approach called positive deviance (PD) UN Women engaged women survivors of violence who overcame their violence situations, broke the norm and found ways to achieve greater results with the same resources to help other women in their communities. UN Women employs such adaptive solutions by empowering survivors of violence from various backgrounds to speak up and advocate for concrete actions with their peers as well as with authorities and the media. This approach has led to a change in the perceptions of survivors among representatives of the authorities, media and other women, so that they are acknowledged and involved as the key experts in eliminating VAW in legislative, policy, institutional and community level initiatives. In addition to this, UN Women Moldova has initiated in 2015 a partnership with academics and practitioners from the University of Oxford/Said Business School, Copenhagen University, Inland University of Applied Science and Welfare Improvement Network (WIN) in testing the use of virtual reality tools for effective response to cases of violence against women. The partners have fully embraced together the call for exploring innovative ideas to find sustainable and transformative solutions as envisaged by Agenda 2030 and started some initiatives in developing virtual reality, system dynamics models/approach for policy and decision making. The virtual reality tool was tested in July 2018 with participation of representative from multidisciplinary teams from Drochia district, public authorities’ representatives, service providers and women’s survivors of violence giving UN Women and its partners the possibility to verify the solutions’ potential. In 2019, UN Women Country Office has started the next stage of the work in innovation and exploring new approaches in development work by further testing virtual simulation models as a learning tool for women survivors of violence, service providers, other important stakeholders with main focus in prevention of violence among youth. Therefore, UN Women has invited a high caliber and specialized company working on Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) to partner with UN Women Country Office in Moldova to jointly conceptualize the use of upscaling solutions in Moldova with the focus on youth. In this regard, during August 2019-February 2020, UN Women Moldova has hosted two missions in Moldova of the team of experts from the VR/AR company to facilitate the co-creation of a virtual reality/augmented simulation tool with the aim to accelerate dissemination and upscaling of behaviors that promote ending violence in Moldova based on the Positive Deviance approach with major focus on youth. Since the start of the initiative, the representatives of the international company have been working to identify champion behaviors through seven scenarios which have been developed by the participants representing youth, service providers and government representatives within several thematic workshops. One scenario has been selected to be integrated in the Virtual Reality prototype, which has to be tested and piloted in collaboration with relevant stakeholders. In addition to this, a framework for a blended learning strategy has been developed that will ensure supporting the efficient utilization of the tool. In order to ensure the successful finalization of the initiative, specifically conducting the testing and piloting of developed VR prototype and relevant materials, programmatic support is needed from a local consultant with necessary knowledge of Moldova local context, expertise in EVAW field and previous collaboration with local relevant stakeholders. Therefore, UN Women plans to recruit a national consultant to support UN Women programmatic work on Ending Violence against Women, with focus on innovation, on the above-mentioned initiative. Scope of work
The main objective of this consultancy is to provide support to EVAW programme in organizing the testing of developed Virtual Reality prototypes and to ensure the organization of the piloting stage, in collaboration with relevant stakeholders. The activity of the consultant will consist in providing technical assistance, guidance, facilitation, coordination, monitoring and regular exchange of knowledge and experience between various stakeholders (NGOs, LPAs, service providers, initiative groups, youth and positive champions/outliers etc.). Requirements for experience
Education:
Experience:
Language Requirements:
Other Skills
Documents to be included
Interested candidates are invited to submit their online applications by 15 July 2020 with the following documents.
Financial proposal
The financial proposal shall include a breakdown of the lump sum amount (daily rate and number of anticipated working days). Please see Annex I: Price Proposal Guideline and Template and Price Proposal Submission Form. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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