Sustainable Immunization Supply Chain Financing Consultant, Programme Group, Health Section, Remote - Req 590825

Consultancy Title: Sustainable Immunization Supply Chain Financing Consultant 

Section/Division/Duty Station: Programme Group/Health Section

Duration: 15 February 2026 – 30 June 2026

Home/ Office Based: Remote

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 for developing 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.

BACKGROUND

Purpose of Activity/ Assignment:

Providing immunization services with traditional and new vaccines have been shown to be a game-changing public health intervention, preventing vaccine-preventable diseases and mortalities and contributing to overall health and wellbeing. 

Asides procurement of vaccines and associated commodities (which have increased over time), effective in-country immunization supply chains are critical to ensuring timely availability of adequate quantities of potent vaccines at all fixed, outreach and mobile service delivery points-and to overall achievement of immunization programme goals. In addition to in-country contextual challenges, the burden on immunization supply chains continually increases with higher number of antigens that immunization programmes introduce. Thus, to ensure that this is achieved sustainably, adequate and well-timed financing of in-country immunization supply chain functions are critical.  

However, while there’s been much progress with (sustainable) immunization financing, this is often synonymous with vaccine/commodities procurement. Supply chain (end to end functions) financing is often not holistically considered, resulting in sub-optimal and in some cases regressive supply chain financing practices, which are worse at the last mile.  

For example, while higher supply chain level cold rooms are typically well thought out, associated commodities’ stores are often afterthoughts. Similarly, dedicated financing for distribution, for stock management tools, or for effective maintenance or appropriate waste management systems etc. are often unavailable especially between districts and service delivery points (last mile) while supply chain human resources and their capacity and skills needs are not always prioritized. Where these gaps occur, they contribute to supply chain inefficiencies, sub-optimal vaccine availability and stock-outs (and eventually low coverage and inequities), higher out of pocket expenditures for supply chain functions by health workers, exposure of vaccines to temperature variations, and negative environmental impacts.  

The Vaccine & Cold Chain Management workstream in UNICEF’s Health Centre of Excellence (CoE) will operationalize UNICEF’s Immunization Roadmap, Health Strategy 2030 and the new Gavi Alliance 6.0 iSC and Health systems strategy, providing technical expertise and support to countries in vaccine and cold chain management, including supply chain inputs into immunization strategy costing (such as within the National Immunization Strategy, NIS) and initiatives such as vaccine prioritization and optimization (VPOP). To achieve this, UNICEF is seeking a Sustainable Immunization Supply Chain Financing Consultant to support development of sustainable immunization supply chain financing guidance, including appropriate tools for end-to-end costing of immunization supply chain needs, to deploy these in the development of a global immunization supply chain business case (for a subset of interventions) as well as to support operationalization of the tools to support full costing of in-country supply chains. The consultancy assignment will be supervised by the Senior Adviser, Vaccine and Cold Chain Management Unit and the consultants will collaborate with a wide range of partners in iSC2, regions and countries.

Scope of Work:

Under the supervision of the Senior Adviser, Vaccine and Cold Chain Management Unit, the Sustainable Immunization Supply Chain Financing Consultant will: 

1. Use a standard set of inputs against broad immunization supply chain functions, to develop methodologies and guidance for sustainable immunization supply chain costing, prioritization, budgeting, financing, and disbursement. 
2. Co