The Child Protection Programme of UNICEF Ghana is committed to ensuring that by 2022, girls and boys in Ghana, especially the most disadvantaged, increasingly benefit from an equitable and integrated child protection system that better protect them from violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect. The system is focus on the establishment of effective structures, functions and capacities that can prevent and respond to all child protection issues. It also seeks to integrate the actions of families (and children including adolescents), communities, formal and informal laws and practices together to protect children. To achieve these, strategic investments are made to: i) Bringing relevant policy, legal and regulatory framework in line with international standards and good practices ii) strengthening the capacity of formal and informal service providers actors to prevent and respond effectively to protection issues; and iii) supporting interventions aimed at behavioural and social change among girls, boys, families and communities. Among all children, adolescent girls in Ghana are disproportionately affected by child protection concerns, including exposure to gender discrimination, child marriage and female genital mutilation/cutting, sexual violence, unsafe migration and trafficking, among others. The purpose of the proposed UNV assignment is to provide assistance to the Child Protection section of UNICEF Ghana in further developing and strengthening its interventions for better protection of adolescent girls, by working closely with particularly vulnerable group of girls, their families and communities, service providers and other key local and national stakeholders.

Context

The UN Volunteer will be placed within the Child Protection Section of the UNICEF Ghana Office. The position is Accra-based, with travel to the field (including Field Office in Tamale) to gain learning and exposure in terms of direct field programme implementation, monitoring, data collection, documentation of best practices. The focus of the position is in support of Adolescent Girl programming within the Child Protection Programme. Within this context, the UN Volunteer will be exposed to planning, implementation and monitoring of two inter-agency and three cross-sectoral programmes: 1) The UN-FPA-UNICEF Global Programme to Accelerate Actions to End Child Marriage (2020-2023), the UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on Adolescent Girls Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (2018-2022), sponsored by the Government of Canada and 3) the follow up actions emanating from some the interventions of the ‘Better Life for Girls Project (2017-2020)’ sponsored by the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), Across these three Programmes, the UN Volunteer will gain reach experience in working cross-sectorally with other UNICEF Programmes, with sister UN Agencies, as well as a wide variety of Government and Civil Society partners.

Task description

Under the direct supervision of the Chief of Child Protection, the UN Volunteer will undertake the following tasks: •Participate in programme meetings and monitoring field visits with Government and Civil Society Partners, assessing progress and documenting gaps and recommen-dations to strengthen programming in model interventions •Assist in development of specific resources and tools for engagement with adoles-cent girls on life skills, financial skills and employability, adolescent sexual repro-ductive health and rights, sexual and gender based violence and girls’ empower-ment and participation •Support in the design and development of measurement and monitoring tools to cap-ture overtime changes in knowledge, attitudes and behaviours experienced by ado-lescent girls and community members as a direct result of programmatic interven-tions supported by UNICEF and partners •Support research, data analysis and documentation to gain a greater understanding of adolescent girls’ specific needs, vulnerabilities and protection concerns – to be widely used for public advocacy and programming purposes •Support development and writing of various reports (including donor reports), pro-posals, advocacy and other communication materials