PAHO Consultant - IT development for SDH Monitoring Systems and Strengthening Healthy Municipality Self-Assessment Platform

OBJECTIVE OF THE OFFICE/DEPARTMENT

This is a requisition for employment at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/Regional Office of the World Health Organization (WHO)

Contractual Agreement:

Non-Staff - International PAHO Consultant

Job Posting:

May 30, 2025

Closing Date:

June 11, 2025, 11:59 PM Eastern Time

Primary Location:

Off Site

Organization:

DHE Social and Environmental Determinants for Health Equity

Schedule:

Part time

PURPOSE OF CONSULTANCY

International Consultant for the elaboration of the architecture and infrastructure of the monitoring system of Social Determinants of Health (SDH) at national, subnational, and local levels, and the strengthening of the self-assessment system for the implementation of criteria for healthy municipalities, cities, and communities

Job description:

The Health Promotion and Social Determinants of Health Unit (DHE/HP) of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) is responsible for leading processes and programs in the area of social determinants and equity, health promotion, urban health, and community participation, among others.
A social determinants of health (SDH) monitoring system is a type of public health surveillance system that focuses on collecting, analyzing, and reporting data related to SDH and the policies or interventions that address them. Its purpose is to establish associations and causal pathways between these determinants and health outcomes, enabling a better understanding of how inequities are generated and promoting actions to achieve health equity.
As part of the Special Initiative on Social Determinants of Health, efforts are underway to build an SDH monitoring system at national, subnational, and local levels. Special emphasis has been placed on the local level, as implementing such systems at the territorial level is expected to significantly support local governments in reducing health inequities.
In 2024, progress was made in consolidating a database with 74 indicators on SDH and related policies at the national level across Latin American and Caribbean countries. This laid the groundwork for generating subnational indicators in the four countries participating in the Special Initiative. Additionally, four pilot municipalities were identified to implement the local-level monitoring system: Suaza (Colombia); La Pintana, Renca, and Calle Larga (Chile). In these municipalities, the design and implementation process of the SDH monitoring systems has begun and is currently ongoing.
By 2025, it is expected that the local pilots will be completed and the experience systematized to develop technical guidance that facilitates their scalability across the region. Furthermore, PAHO/WHO, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Region Health Department (SEREMI) of Chile, will work on updating its health information system, transforming it into a monitoring system for health inequities and social determinants of health.
Additionally, the Health Promotion and Social Determinants Unit coordinates the technical secretariat of the Healthy Municipalities, Cities, and Communities Movement and has developed a dashboard to manage evaluation and monitoring data for the Movement, which now requires updating.

Consultancy Objectives

This consultancy has the following objectives:

1.      To design and coordinate the implementation of a set of Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools and services. This includes unifying applications and libraries while establishing levels of public and private access.

2.      To document and publicly share the code of example applications and public libraries that make up the DSS Monitoring System of PAHO/WHO. This will facilitate the reuse of system components, allow third parties to contribute to the development and maintenance of the system, and ensure its long-term sustainability.

3.      To collaborate in updating the PAHO/WHO Monitoring Dashboard by optimizing data loading and display at all three levels, and to validate the proposal for developing a Health Inequities and DSS Monitoring System.

4.      To update the Dashboard used for monitoring and self-assessment in implementing the PAHO/WHO Criteria for Healthy Municipalities, Cities, and Communities.

DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:

Description of Activities

For objective 1:

• Establish the organization and user accounts to which the PAHO/WHO team will have private access.
• Design a working Monorepo, which will centralize all code used by the DSS monitoring system’s applications and libraries.
• Select the appropriate tools, def