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UNICEF contributes to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in Nigeria with a mandate to advocate for the protection of children’s rights, to help meet their basic needs and to expand their opportunities to reach their full potential. UNICEF’s Nigeria country programme: Aims to accelerate the realization of the rights of all c...
Job Number: 521197
Location: Nigeria
Work Type: Consultancy
This consultancy is for 6 months
Background/Purpose of Assignment
Immunization through vaccination is the most effective way of checking vaccine preventable diseases in large populations like Nigeria. The country has made valuable progress in the fight against vaccine preventable diseases, especially in protecting children against child-killer diseases and in preventing huge outbreaks of diseases within the population. Over the years, GAVI has supported the country with the introduction of new vaccines into the country's immunization schedule for children at birth to 9 months and the implementation of campaigns against vaccine preventable diseases like measles, yellow fever and meningitis.
Although Nigeria has made significant progress, routine immunization (RI) has suffered a severe setback with a national low coverage standing at just 33% and high numbers of unimmunized children according to the 2016 Multi Indicator Cluster Survey (MICs) and National Indicator Cluster Survey (NICS). Although lack of awareness of RI (42%) was cited in the survey as one of the main reasons for the low coverage recorded in the country, the setback is also largely due to the high concentration of missed children and limited communication interventions related to key household practices.
The low coverage of RI has also led to several outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases including yellow fever, measles and meningitis in the country that have resulted to high number of deaths. Based on current risk status of a national spread and an urgent need to contain these outbreaks, Nigeria will be implementing three major mass vaccination campaigns across states in the country and the Federal Capital territory (FCT) in the third and fourth quarters of 2019. These are measles vaccination campaign for children ages 9 months to 59 months, a preventive yellow fever mass vaccination campaign for people ages 9 months to under 45 years, and a Meningitis ‘A campaign for children ages 1 to 7 years.
The overall goal of these campaigns is to reduce transmission in the states by achieving desired coverage amongst targeted populations. The specific objective of the campaigns is to implement high-quality vaccination campaigns which takes lessons from previous campaigns into consideration, achieve desired vaccination coverages in implementing states and Local Government Areas (LGAs), use opportunities provided to strengthen the health system and immunization programme and strengthen the pharmaco-vigilance system for monitoring adverse events following immunization.
UNICEF’s core values of Commitment, Diversity and Integrity and core competencies in Communication, Working with People and Drive for Results.
UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.
UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks, and will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles.
Part of the success of the campaign will depend mostly on the extent of social mobilization and demand creation activities conducted to achieve these objectives, hence the special focus on addressing negative behaviours using acceptable strategies familiar/linked to the community through healthy partnership with community-based organizations, community mobilizers, field volunteers, forum for traditional and religious leaders, media engagement, rapid assessments, etc.
UNICEF Nigeria is seeking the services of National Communication for Development (C4D) Consultants to provide technical support to government and partners in the 36 states of the country and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in the area of evidence-based planning, social mobilization, demand generation, capacity building, tracking of fund utilization, media engagement, monitoring and evaluation and data management to ensure a high quality of all campaigns with the set coverage based on post- campaign coverage survey.
Major Tasks to be Accomplished
The C4D Consultants, working with communication and social mobilization teams will undertake the following tasks:
Qualifications or Specialized Knowledge/Experience Required
Note: Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.
Interested and qualified? Go to UNICEF on www.unicef.org to applyBuild your CV for free. Download in different templates.
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