International Consultant to conduct a baseline study and develop a monitoring strategy for the TransformCare Initiative

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.

The Policy, Programme and Intergovernmental Division develops and implements UN Women’s programme of work across its normative, coordination, and operational triple mandate and provides policy advice and guidance and technical support to intergovernmental processes, UN system, and UN Women regional and country offices, among other partners and stakeholders. The Division is organized in thematic sections, which undertake policy research; analyze data on country, regional and global trends; and propose evidence-based options for global policy, norms and standards as well as for UN Women’s policy advocacy and global programme strategies, including flagship programme initiatives. With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UN Women is supporting the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) towards achieving gender equality and women's economic empowerment by 2030 to benefit all women and girls.

Economic empowerment is one of the priority areas of UN Women. UN Women works with governments and partners to promote women’s economic empowerment and increase their access to economic opportunities and outcomes, especially for those who are most excluded. The recent Economic Empowerment strategy outlines three of the 10 UN Women’s Gender Equality Accelerators (GEAs). The GEA on Transforming the care economy is hosted in the Care and Macroeconomic team within the Economic Empowerment section. To implement the GEA, the TransformCare initiative was created, aimed at transforming the undervaluing and gendered division of care and improve the lives of women and girls across 30 countries and six regions. It will do this by supporting inclusive and equitable comprehensive care systems that have the potential to benefit 300 million women and girls in all their diversity, release one billion hours of women and girls' time, and create 40 million low-carbon decent jobs that benefit women. This ambitious initiative complements existing successful UN Women programmes and will work with partners, including UN Agencies, national and local governments, civil society, unions, academia, private sector, and the media, to support a whole-of-society approach to addressing care inequalities.

TransformCare will support three high-level outcomes at sub-national, national, regional and global levels: 

• OUTCOME 1: Increased quality and low-carbon care-supporting services, basic infrastructure and energy-saving equipment, especially benefitting women and girls in low-income and rural households. 
• OUTCOME 2: Creation of decent jobs in the purple economy and increased access to jobs in the green and digital economies, especially benefitting women informal workers and domestic workers, including women migrant workers.  
• OUTCOME 3: Shift in economic and social norms that consider care work (unpaid and paid) as valuable and skilled work, and as a shared responsibility within households and between households, the state, businesses, and communities. 

          
Description of Responsibilities/ Scope of Work

The overall purpose of this consultancy is to support UN Women in building a robust impact narrative using meaningful indicators and evidence. This will be done by reviewing the proposed set of indicators, conducting a baseline study for them and developing a monitoring strategy to systematically track them during the implementation of the TransformCare Initiative, for effectively measuring the impact of this intervention. The baseline study should establish a situation analysis of care work and care systems in 40 countries, selected based on their interest in being part of the Transform Care Global Initiative, with a focus on UN Women past and current interventions results and impact. Baseline data and findings should guide the development of a complete monitoring strategy including a monitoring framework, plan and tools for data collection for impact tracking.

The consultant will be reporting to the Policy Advisor, Macroeconomics and Global Lead on Care and will be coordinating with the Care and Macroeconomics team.

The consultant will be expected to perform the following tasks:

Stage 1.  Desk review, revision of data sources and Inception Report 

• Conduct a desk review o