Country: India
Closing date: 21 Aug 2015
he Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) is a global, multi-stakeholder membership and partnership organization that works with poor people, their organizations, governments and small-scale entrepreneurs to improve sanitation and hygiene at scale. Founded in 1990, the Council maintains a membership of over 3000 water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) professionals from over 130 countries. The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is the legal and administrative host of WSSCC. The mission of the Council is to ensure sustainable sanitation, better hygiene and safe drinking water for all people, but especially for the poorest and most marginalized individuals in developing countries.
WSSCC’s main corporate priorities for delivering its five year strategic plan are equality and non-discrimination and access and use at scale. Improved hygiene and sanitation are critical determinants for reducing disease and improving health but also for unlocking multiple benefits in education, jobs and quality of life. WSSCC’s work in the area of equality and non-discrimination is based on the principles of justice, human dignity, equality of rights and opportunities, and respect for diversity and coexistence, paying special attention to the most vulnerable and unprotected people. With a population of 1.25 billion people and despite a vibrant economy, India faces the twin challenges of rampant open defecation and staggering inequalities. With more than half a billion of these still defecating in the open, poor health, malnutrition, stunting and wasting threaten the country’s safety, dignity, growth and productivity on a daily basis. Additionally, these numbers constitute 60% of total open defecation (OD), more than the OD in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Women and children are the most affected. Women and young girls sit out in the open, often in difficult conditions, including heat and cold and rains and under the constant threat of being watched, molested and raped. They disproportionately take on the burdens of poor sanitation, inadequate water supply and hygiene, and caring for the sick, while also managing poor facilities and their own personal hygiene needs. Inherent structural inequalities in many parts of the country are reinforced by facilities and services that ignore their biological needs, dening them a seat at the table but requiring them to act as unremunerated cleaners and managers of water and sanitation services at home and in the community.
The Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) (SBM (G)), launched by Government of India on 2 October 2014, aims to achieve a clean rural India, ending open defecation by 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. Increasing the speed of coverage from 2% (on an average per year over the last decade) to the 12% required to meet this target calls for exceptional efforts, particularly in terms of training and capacity building on the one hand and monitoring and learning on the other. The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS), Government of India (GOI) has requested that WSSCC join other bilateral and multilateral partners in ramping up its efforts to help the country achieve its aims, thereby also contributing significantly to reducing the global sanitation and hygiene related disease burden.
To do this in a more systematic way, building on some significant achievements in policy transformation and capacity building under the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, WSSCC in consultation with the Government of India has decided to deploy a team in New Delhi, to provide policy, monitoring & evaluation, capacity building, and learning and action research support. The new guidelines of Swachh Bharat Mission lay emphasis on pro-active, robust and time-bound monitoring system through the Rapid Action Learning Units (RALU). These units at the national, state and district levels are tasked with listening, learning and analysing actions and interventions in rural sanitation and hygiene, evaluating their impact, and identifying good practices for sharing and replication. Action learning is conceived as about and from action – that is learning about what is happening in field implementation and learning from past and present innovations and experiences; and learning through action, as in action research.
The purpose of this position is to support the department's work on Rights, Equity and Inclusion with a special focus on civil society, gender and governance in South and South East Asia. S/he will be expected to collaborate closely with a Technical Officer with a similar mandate, for West Africa.
The position will be based in India and work out of the institutional arrangement and office as agreed with the Government. The incumbent will report to the Programme Manager, Networking and Knowledge Management. S/he will be a member of the Networking and Knowledge Management Department (NKM), WSSCC Secretariat in Geneva.
How to apply:
PLEASE VISIT WWW.UNOPS.ORG /WORK WITH US
VACANCY VA/2015/B5007/8090 - TECHNICAL OFFICER EQUALITY AND NON-DISCRIMINATION (ASIA) TO APPLY ONLINE. THANK YOU.