Monitoring, Reporting, Evaluation, and Research Specialist - International Consultant (Retainer)

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 and peace and security.

The UN Women Regional Office for Arab States (ROAS) exercises UN Women functions at a regional level and in support of UN Women’s engagement in 17 countries across the region. Drawing on UN Women’s triple mandate, ROAS promotes the realization of gender equality and the empowerment of women. The ROAS Strategic Note 2022-2025 includes a comprehensive and innovative monitoring and reporting framework to measure and report on transformational results at the regional level, including in those countries where UN Women is a regionally based entity. ROAS engages with regional and global inter-governmental processes to ensure gender equality is an integral part of norms and standards and promotes women’s full participation and leadership in policy processes and gender-responsive governance systems, including gender statistics. ROAS aims to advance supportive regulatory frameworks for promoting decent work and enterprise development, including for women migrant workers, and promotes private sector engagement and the Women’s Empowerment Principles. Focusing on prevention and response, ROAS works to eliminate violence against women. ROAS’s programming takes a gender-responsive approach to the prevention of violent extremism and supports integration of gender considerations into humanitarian action and to advance the women, peace, and security agenda. 

The monitoring and reporting function plays a central role in facilitating the implementation of the Strategic Note/Biannual Work Plan, internal reporting processes, and donor reporting. Importantly, gender-responsive monitoring and reporting is critical to track and measure the impact of UN Women’s coordination mandate at country and regional levels, and the impact of engagement with the private sector on ESG priorities. In 2025, the Regional Office will develop a new Strategic Note covering the period 2026-2029, including a results framework and indicators that measure alignment with global priorities and demonstrate the impact of regional operations.  

The consultant will report to the Regional Coordination Specialist and will liaise closely with the Regional Strategic Planning Specialist and programme and monitoring and reporting colleagues in ROAS and Country Offices, as well as colleagues in the Strategic Planning, Resources and Evaluation Division in headquarters.

Description of Responsibilities /Scope of Work:

• Conduct in-depth bespoke research projects to answer questions of strategic importance for the office’s coordination, private sector partnerships, and programme development. This includes developing research tools, executing surveys, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews, as well as quantitative and qualitative data analysis with tools such as Stata, R, SPSS, Atlas.ti, etc. This includes lead research and analysis on the impact of the Gender Equality Marker as a planning tool on reported results, impact assessment of corporate volunteerism as part of the Nokia portfolio, and other studies as needed;
• Conduct a comprehensive strategic review of UN Women ROAS’s operational and normative coordination results in the current Strategic Note and identify gaps and opportunities to strengthen coordination as a mainstreamed priority for UN Women’s operational and normative mandate in the context of the UN Gender Equality Acceleration Plan and UN80 process (includes developing a data collection plan, desk review of documentation, developing data collection tools (e.g., interview guides), conducting key informant interviews, and systematic and thematic analysis of qualitative data);
• Develop innovative indicator frameworks, monitoring plans, indicator methodological notes, and tools to facilitate measurement and reporting, including in relation to UN Women’s coordination and normative mandate in the context of the UN Gender Equality Acceleration Plan, and engagement with the private sector (e.g. Nokia project);
• Conduct trainings, develop analysis and research etc. to build capacities for gender-responsive planning, monitoring and reporting both within UN Women (ROAS and COs) and UNCTs and Gender Theme Groups in the Arab States region in line with standards contained in the UN System-Wide UN Country Team Gender Equality Scorecard;
• Lead coordination and quality assurance of ROAS’s corporate reporting (mid-year and annual) for the development of high-quality ROAS annual reports, including confirming accur