International Evaluation Consultant, IC, Home-based, UN-HABITAT

Background

UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable and resilient towns and cities. It is the focal point agency for all urbanization and human settlement matters within the UN system. UN-Habitat envisions well-planned, well-governed, and efficient cities and towns, with adequate housing, infrastructure, and universal access to employment and basic services such as water, energy, and sanitation. Responding to crisis and post-crisis context is part of UN-Habitat’s mandate and strategic plan. 

Pursuant to its various mandates, UN-Habitat works on two levels to achieve its goals, effectiveness and impact. At the operational level, it undertakes technical cooperation projects. At the normative level, it seeks to influence governments and non-governmental actors in formulating, adopting, implementing and enforcing policies, norms and standards conducive to sustainable human settlements and sustainable urbanization. Its work is guided by successive strategic plans and work programmes, notably UN-Habitat’s strategic plans (2020-2025 and 2026-2029) that promote preventive risk reduction, effective post-crisis response and inclusive long-term recovery. 

Upon request of its Executive Board in March 2022 and of the Government of Ukraine in July 2022, UN-Habitat has been exploring how its urban expertise in conflict contexts could support the recovery of cities in Ukraine. After an initial engagement with a wide range of stakeholders at the 11th World Urban Forum (Katowice, June 2022), a scoping mission to Ukraine was conducted in October 2022 allowing UN-Habitat to ground truth its proposed support to Ukrainian cities and ensure its alignment with the context, government priorities and the ongoing UN response. UN-Habitat’s Country Programme Framework for Ukraine was adopted corporately in December 2022. A final mission to Ukraine in May 2023 allowed to detail agreements and implementation modalities with key stakeholders.

The war in Ukraine, resulting in the loss of lives, destruction of land, infrastructure and property, has put cities and local governments under extreme pressure. Beyond the physical damage and destruction of the built environment, urban areas are critical in addressing war-related effects on communities. National and subnational governments must identify, plan, finance and implement recovery interventions in a highly complex and volatile environment, where demographics, social cohesion, infrastructure, economic and financial systems, and natural environment have been heavily impacted.

This collectively calls for the recovery efforts to introduce a systemic shift in the planning and design of towns and neighbourhoods, while also embedding measures to build capacity within the built environment professions, including urban planning.

UN-Habitat is therefore supporting Ukrainian authorities with technical support in urban planning & recovery and policy development, within the principles of participation, inclusiveness, resilience and sustainability.

The project ‘Towards inclusive and resilient urban recovery in Ukraine’ is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by UN-Habitat, and executed in close collaboration with Restart, Ro3kvit, IMPACT Initiatives and national counterparts under the leadership of the Ministry for Development of Territories and Communities of Ukraine. The project amounts to Euro 8,050,000 and has been implemented over a period of 30 months. 

The project aims to identify areas for improvement to ensure that national regulatory frameworks, policy and processes support nationally led recovery efforts while enabling bottom-up locally led urban recovery efforts. The project activities fully mobilize Ukrainian planning capacity and ensure cross-learning across all local planning recovery work in Ukraine. The intent is to build longer term Ukrainian planning capacity through on-the-job training, tailored capacity building efforts, and supporting the design of new curricula working closely with Ukrainian centers of education.

 

Through the establishment of its office in Kyiv, including the Ukraine Urban Lab, UN-Habitat supports urban recovery, through the following inter-connected areas of work: 

1. Policy advisory at national level, for the creation of an enabling environment for urban recovery through the development of an Urban Recovery Framework (URF), based on diagnostics of key areas for urban recovery, including capacities for urban planning and built environment management, regulatory frameworks for recovery and reconstruction planning, housing, land and property rights, multi-level governance systems, municipal finance, smart cities and digital governance, etc. 
2. Technical support in strategic and terri