Consultancy: Advocacy Capacity Building Consultant (remote based, 12 months) - GCA, NYHQ - Requisition# 575587

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, [an advocate] 

UNICEF is mandated to advocate for the protection of children’s rights, and the Strategic Plan recognizes the importance of advocacy to deliver against UNICEF’s mission and secure programmatic results for children. Advocacy plays an essential role in supporting and pressing governments and other influential actors to ensure measurable, sustainable change for children, whether through private influencing, mobilizing public support, policy advice, or a holistic blended approach. As highlighted in the Global Communication and Advocacy Strategy, truly global or ‘glocal’ advocacy requires identifying strategic advocacy opportunities at the national, regional, and global levels, and working together to capitalize on these opportunities to advance advocacy goals. We accelerate our impact for children by building, strengthening and leveraging the full advocacy strength of the organization.

The Advocacy Capacity Building Initiative (ACBI) within the Advocacy Section, Division of Global Communications and Advocacy, requires consultancy services to support the strengthening of UNICEF advocacy skills, capacity and knowledge at a global, regional, and country level.

How can you make a difference? 

The purpose of the consultancy is to support the Advocacy Capacity Building Initiative (ACBI) to continue to strengthen global advocacy skills, including supporting Country Offices, Regional Offices and National Committees through bespoke advocacy capacity, strategy development and monitoring. The consultant will also be responsible for supporting the design and development of workshops, tools, and templates to strengthen strategic advocacy capacity and advocacy monitoring across various operating contexts.

Expected results: (measurable results)

The ACBI is supported in effectively building advocacy skills, knowledge, and confidence of UNICEF staff across HQ, COs, ROs, and NatComs, through:

1. Development of advocacy training modules, resources, templates, and tools tailored to specific operating environments
2. Conceptualizing and delivering advocacy workshops tailored to specific global, national and/or regional priorities
3. Strengthening institutional advocacy practice by effective documenting and dissemination of lessons learnt and good practices

Description of the assignment

The purpose of the consultancy is to support the Advocacy Section in:

1. Development of Advocacy Training Modules, guidance, resources, tools, templates etc.

• Develop workshop content and designing sessions to create a cadre of trainers as well as build colleagues’ advocacy capacity and skills on advocacy strategy, implementation, tactics (including use of communication tools for advocacy) and monitoring – specific to varied contexts.  
• Support the development of advocacy tools and templates, to complement colleagues’ advocacy skills. This includes creating of workshop modules that can be adapted and implemented by UNICEF staff across Regional and Country Offices.
• Support stronger integration of advocacy into UNICEF Programme Planning, working with Division of Analytics, Planning and Monitoring, Regional Offices and other key internal stakeholders, including documenting best practice examples from offices, as relevant.
• Support the development of easily adaptable tools, templates, resources to strengthen understanding and implementation of the standard advocacy indicators to monitor advocacy standards, practice, tactics etc.   

2. Delivering Global, Regional and National Advocacy Capacity Building Workshops

• Support the strengthening of strategic advocacy knowledge, skills, and confidence at the global, regional and country level.
• Facilitate virtual and/or in-person advocacy capacity building workshops in headquarters and selected regions and countries to build advocacy knowledge, skills, and confidence of colleagues across UNICEF.
• Provide virtual/in-person bespoke advocacy capacity building and advocacy strategy development support to Country Offices, aligned with broader Advocacy Section priorities.
• Support the building of strategic links between global and national advocacy on UNICEF Global Advocacy Priorities/focus areas.
• Additional tasks as agreed with supervisor.

3.  Ensure cross-organizational learning through Advocacy Portal Update and Mai