Consultant, Senior Technical Expert on Children's Environmental Health, CEED PG, NYHQ remote, Req #584319

About UNICEF

If you are a committed, creative professional and are passionate about making a lasting difference for children, the world's leading children's rights organization would like to hear from you. For 70 years, UNICEF has been working on the ground in 190 countries and territories to promote children's survival, protection and development. The world's largest provider of vaccines fordeveloping countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments. UNICEF has over 12,000 staff in more than 145 countries.

Consultancy Title: Consultant, Senior Technical Expert on Children’s Environmental Health

Division/Duty Station: CEED, PG, NYHQ   

Duration: 1 October 2025 – 30 September 2026

Home/ Office Based: Remote

 

BACKGROUND

Purpose of Activity/ Assignment:

The purpose of the consultancy is to develop high-quality technical content on children’s environmental health and support capacity development and CEH global leadership.

Scope of Work:

The last three decades have witnessed huge progress in the reduction of poverty-related environmental risks to children’s health. With the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals, the global community made a promise to all children: to safeguard the gains made on child survival and to ensure that every child has the chance to thrive and fulfil their potential. However, climate change and environmental degradation are seriously jeopardizing these precious gains and our promise to the world’s children.

The UNICEF Strategic Plan has elevated action on climate change and environmental degradation as an organizational priority, to be integrated throughout UNICEF programmes. To concretize this, UNICEF HQ is implementing its global Healthy Environments for Healthy Children (HEHC) programme framework in over 30 countries with the ambition to grow the programme to 50 countries by 2030. To mobilize collective action, UNICEF and partners have founded Children’s Environmental Health Collaborative to protect child health and development from the impact of climate change and environmental degradation.

To support these efforts, UNICEF requires a senior expert in Children's Environmental Health to support  high-level content development, strengthen technical collaboration, and expand capacity development initiatives for a global audience.

This is a 12 month consultancy and the consultant will be responsible for spearheading the development and quality assurance of a suite of technical knowledge products. This includes  the conceptualization of an advanced lecture series on Children's Environmental Health (CEH) for medical professionals, creating comprehensive global guidance for healthy environments where children live, learn, and play, and authoring and/or quality assuring a series of evidence-based policy briefs on high-priority topics. A key function of this role will be to serve as a primary technical reviewer for UNICEF's CEH publications, providing rigorous quality assurance for technical reports, country-level analyses, and other global guidance documents to ensure they are evidence-based and of the highest standard.

Furthermore, the consultant will play a critical role in expanding UNICEF's technical collaboration and capacity development efforts. This involves support to the identification of key technical partners, including academic institutions, WHO CEH collaborating centers, and professional networks to enhance evidence generation and knowledge sharing. The role will also focus on strengthening the capacity of stakeholders by mapping existing development programs in LMICs, serving as a key resource person for a global webinar series, engaging leading experts to create impactful videos for policymakers, and providing on-demand technical review and strategic advice for country-level documents and programme strategies to ensure alignment with global best practices.

Terms of Reference / Key Deliverables:

Work Assignment Overview/Deliverables and Outputs/Delivery deadline

 1) Content development and quality assurance:

• Support the conceptualization and development of an advanced lecture series on CEH tailored f