International Consultant – Programme (Resilience & Livelihoods) at World Food Programme

JOB TITLE: International Consultant – Programme (Resilience & Livelihoods)

Number of openings: 01

Contract Type: International Consultant

Level: II

Post holder reports to : Deputy Country Director (DCD)

Duration: 6 months (Possibility to extend based on funding and performance)

Duty Station (City, Country): Monrovia, Liberia’

ABOUT WFP

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. We are the world’s largest humanitarian organization, saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability, and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters, and the impact of climate change.

Our response to emergencies – saving lives and livelihoods either through direct assistance or by strengthening country capacities – remains at the heart of our operations, especially as humanitarian needs become increasingly complex and protracted.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT

Today’s world is characterized by unprecedented development, but also by increasing risk and fragility. The risks include political instability, conflict, natural hazards, disease, and volatile prices. Humanitarian responses to crises have saved lives and restored livelihoods but have not always addressed underlying vulnerabilities. Early evidence shows that adopting a resilience-building approach to programming increases cost-effectiveness by reducing the financial, administrative and resource burdens of responding to recurrent crises and of missed opportunities in development.

WFP Liberia Country Office is providing livelihood and capacity strengthening support through its Food Assistance for Assets projects, and the provision of trainings and agricultural equipment, stimulating local food production and support the Government in enhancing the efficiency of food value chains in Liberia.

The school feeding programme is the cornerstone of WFP’s activities in Liberia and, in line with the Government of Liberia’s development plan, and in collaboration with the Ministry of Education provides nutritious meals for school children through four types of modalities – on-site school meals, home-grown school feeding and take-home rations. The take-home rations is provided in the form of in-kind rations and cash-based transfers using mobile money and value voucher.

WFP is leveraging school feeding with a solid HGSF component to deliver climate-smart livelihood support activities that provide smallholder farmers, particularly rural women, with reliable and sustainable markets. This includes strengthening vulnerable smallholder farmers’ resilience to climate-related and other recurrent shocks through the creation or regeneration of productive community assets. WFP is also continuing to gradually shift its focus from the direct delivery of relief assistance towards the provision of capacity strengthening to support government agencies in managing sustainable food security and nutrition programmes, social protection and resilience interventions and emergency preparedness and response systems in an equitable, inclusive, and empowering manner.

As part of the implementation of the Country Strategic Plan 2019-2023, the World Food Programme in Liberia seeks to achieve Strategic Outcome 1(SO1), namely: \”Food-insecure populations, including school-aged children in targeted areas, have access to adequate and nutritious food, including food produced locally, by 2030».

ACCOUNTABILITIES/DELIVERABLES/ RESPONSIBILITIES:

Programme Leadership, Technical Support & Capacity Strengthening

• Support WFP Programming with a particular view to sustainable food security and nutrition programmes, social protection and resilience interventions, natural resource management and emergency preparedness and response systems.
• Support project coordination in COs in implementation of integrated resilience projects; Institutional development support to strengthen CO structures to sustain scale-up dynamics.
• Support roll-out of 3PA tools; Act as Trainer for 3PA Tools, specifically the Community-Based Participatory Planning (CBPP).
• Organize and participate in FFA/Asset Creation training and boot camps, ensuring a high-quality implementation of climate-smart low land agriculture, flood control and drainage management technologies.
• Provide advice and oversight support to the development of livelihood and resilience building projects, plans, and processes, ensuring alignment with wider programme policies and guidelines.
• Take the lead on drafting proposals and support initiatives that strengthen linkages with gender, nutrition, value chains (P4P), home-grown school feeding (HGSF) etc.; Capacity to support these processes on technical aspects, activity selection and planning, timelines, budgets, etc.
• Support adoption of climate-smart lowland crop farming, conservation agriculture, vegetable gardens, drainage management, flood control measures (DRR infrastructure in general), land rehabilitation/soil and water conservation.
• Support the local purchase programme, including analyses of the costs and trade-offs of the arrangements, food quality, smallholder farmer capacity and possible risks associated with local purchase, along with strategies for mitigating those risks.
• Support community food reserve construction and related machinery (drying floors, threshing machines,) and train community food reserve members in business development skills and group management.