UN WOMEN: International Consultancy for “The Global Accelerator on Decent Jobs and Social Protection for Just Transitions, Home-based

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.

UN Women is present in Uzbekistan for more than two years, focuses on Women’s Economic Empowerment, Gender Responsive Budgeting, Tackling Harmful Social Norms and Gender Stereotypes and strengthening Gender Statistics. These thematic areas are identified based on the needs of the country to accelerate the Gender Strategy 2030. In addition to various reforms on going in the country, Uzbekistan has been selected as one of the pathfinder countries for the Global Accelerator on Decent Jobs and Social Protection for Just Transitions (herein after, Global Accelerator).

The Global Accelerator is an initiative of the UN Secretary-General launched in September 2021 to help countries address multiple crises, accelerate economic recovery, investing in decent jobs and social protection, and respond to current and future challenges (formalization, youth employment, gender equality, green transition, digital economy, etc.) while facilitating just transitions for all. The Global Accelerator aims to support the creation of 400 million decent jobs, the extension of social protection to the 4 billion people who are currently excluded, and to facilitate "just" transitions for all. UN Women is one of the implementing agencies of Global Accelerator in Uzbekistan will contribute to the decent work for women through various activities.

To achieve these ambitious targets, the Global Accelerator will support: 

• Strategic investments in sectors of the economy (renewable energy, agriculture, digitalization, care, etc.) with high potential for decent job creation, formalization of employment and enterprises. 
• Strategic investments in social protection to increase the sector’s integration, effectiveness, efficiency and ability to respond to shocks of different nature.
• Strategic investments in public social protection and labour market institutions, to put the State closer to people, respond to the needs of workers and enterprises and incentivize them to contribute their fair share of taxes and social security contributions, and further capacitate institutions to design and manage social protection programmes. 

 

The Global Accelerator works through three inter-connected pillars simultaneously: 

Pillar 1 - It supports the development and implementation of integrated policy approaches to create productive jobs and achieve universal social protection in order to foster just transitions and a virtuous cycle or economic growth, public revenue generation and reinvestment in key sectors, as well as to reduce poverty and cushion vulnerable population from the impact of shocks.

Pillar 2 - It helps countries to develop and operate financing strategies using the full range of available funding sources (including tax revenues, social security contributions, official development assistance, debt relief/reduction/restructuring, private investment). 

Pillar 3 - It seeks to elicit high-level buy-in and commitment among governments, social partners, civil society, and the development community and facilitates effective intersectoral coordination and national social dialogue at the country level.

 

Description of Responsibilities/Scope of Work

 

This assignment will be undertaken under Activity 1.7 Ensure gender equality and non-discrimination at work. 

Description of intervention: Discrimination occurs when a person is treated less favorably than others because of characteristics that are not related to the person’s competencies or the inherent requirements of the job. According to the ILO Convention No.111, the discrimination covers direct and indirect discrimination. Direct discrimination occurs when “less favourable treatment is explicitly or implicitly based on one or more prohibited grounds”. Indirect discrimination refers to “apparently neutral situations, regulations or practices which in fact result in unequal treatment of persons with certain characteristics. It occurs when the same condition, treatment or criterion is applied to everyone, but results in a disproportionately harsh impact on some persons on the basis of characteristics such as race, colour, sex or religion, and is not closely related to the inherent requirements of the job. Despite advances in many countries, the concept of indirect discrimination does not appear to be clear and recognized in some r