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Work at UNAIDS as a Youth Officer (P2 International Position)

Work at UNAIDS as a Youth Officer (P2 International Position)


Specific Focus- Provides substantive support to countries in coordinating their youth activities by leading, facilitating and promoting efforts to scale up, strengthening and funding of the HIV response by and for young people.


Work at UNAIDS as a Youth Officer (P2 International Position)

Title: Youth Officer, RST ESA
 
Grade: P2
 
Contract type: Temporary appointment
 
Duration of contract:  2 years extra-budgetary project post of limited duration, extension subject to availability of XB funding
 
Application Deadline: 6 December 2023
(14 day(s) until closing deadline)
Currently accepting applications
 
Organization unit: AI/RSJ Regional Support Team, East and South Africa (AI/RSJ)
Johannesburg, South Africa
 
Duty station:  Johannesburg South Africa

The United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, lead the global effort to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. By placing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to reduction of inequalities at the heart of our work, we lead the global response to AIDS by: (i) maximizing equitable and equal access to HIV services, (ii) breaking down barriers to achieving HIV outcomes, and (iii) integrating efficient HIV responses into wider health and protection systems.

MANDATE OF THE DEPARTMENT:

The UNAIDS Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) provides leadership and coordinates support for an expanded UN system response to ending the AIDS epidemic at regional and country level. It steers, promotes, and supports regional and national partners and the UN system towards ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. Using an equity and equality lens as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Regional Office for ESA promotes effective use of strategic information of the epidemic trends and the status of its response and provides technical leadership on people-centered HIV prevention and response in the region focused on key populations and locations most at risk.
The Equality and Rights for All Practice delivers on the UNAIDS Secretariat’s goals of reducing inequalities. This specifically refers to ensuring that the HIV response is gender-transformative, rights-based, and people-focused in a manner that is community-led, inclusive and progresses societal enablers. The Practice also delivers on the organizational agenda to remove human rights barriers and intersecting gender inequalities. It does that by developing and sharing policies, guidance, research, and tools that support legal, policy and social norm change; by advocating for a greater political commitment; and by convening communities of practice and leveraging existing and new partnerships to continuously identify and respond to the inequalities driving the HIV epidemic.

Main tasks and Responsibilities of the Position:

Within the matrix management reporting structure of the Regional Office for ESA and the Equality and Rights for All Practice, the Regional Youth Officer focuses on a manageable set of deliverables that are aligned with the UNAIDS equality and rights for all vision, the epidemic trajectory, the social norms, and the needs in the region. This post, like all ERA posts, includes a focus on youth engagement and leadership, customized to respond to the regional and subregional contexts and epidemic, and to match the focus of the post (i.e., a focus on young people living with HIV and young key populations etc.)
The Regional Youth Officer is responsible for contributing to the practice area objectives in the office and with UNAIDS partners and counterparts, coordinating specialist expertise and contributing to the overall coordination of the UNAIDS response in the functional areas described below.

Main tasks and Responsibilities of the Position:

1) Youth-specific focus
-Provides substantive support to countries in coordinating their youth activities by leading, facilitating and promoting efforts to scale up, strengthening and funding of the HIV response by and for young people.
-Provides advice to and engages with regional mechanisms or country-level governments, cosponsors, community led, women-led, and youth-led organizations and networks, on issues related to:
i. youth leadership and engagement.
ii. capacity building and skills development.
iii. investment in youth leadership and partnerships.
iv. comprehensive sexuality education.
v. education and social protection policies and programmes for young people.
vi. removal of policy, legal and societal barriers for adolescents to access services, including age of consent laws and policies.
vii. integration of services.
viii. generation, analysis, and use of data for both youth specific and youth responsive programming and advocacy; and
ix. the overall expansion of youth-led responses.

Supports the establishment of a culture of youth inclusion within UNAIDS and adoption of ‘youth as asset’ perspective including via strengthening and quality assuring of internship and other youth support programmes.
2) Provision of technical advice
Provides technical input into laws, jurisprudence, policies, programmes, plans, frameworks, and others as required in support of UNAIDS’ institutional efforts to advance youth engagement and leadership in the overall health and HIV response, ensuring the highest standards of quality, accuracy, clarity, and presentation. This specifically includes the provision of normative support to regional bodies and regional policy processes.
-Drives the prioritization agenda in the region on youth engagement issues. Supports country offices in the region via the provision of on-call support, sharing of information, guidance, tools, and resources that help strengthen and diversify human rights and youth leadership and engagement reduce discrimination, including in the health sector, stigma and punitive approaches to HIV, and transform harmful social norms.
-Advises on demand creation for the inclusion in National AIDS plans of programmatic interventions addressing the integration and scaling up of youth-led responses, and to advance human rights, gender equality and youth engagement and leadership as central to the HIV response.
-Together with colleagues in the global Equality and Rights for All Practice, Regional Office team and other partners, works towards maximizing the potential of grant opportunities and bilateral aid available at regional and national level in the region to broker aligned, harmonized resources to address key community priorities, and provide knowledge and other resources for youth, youth-led networks and organizations, civil society organizations
-Develop appropriate scorecards and dashboards to monitor cross-country performance on selected youth performance indicators.
3) Partnerships and collaboration
-Identifies needs, plans, coordinates, implements, and evaluates regional capacity building activities for UNAIDS staff, regional and national communities and civil society counterparts and others as required. This particularly refers to organizing regional communities of practice of youth engagement and. Youth-led HIV responses and participating as required in any relevant global communities of practice.
-Provides support to cosponsors and other partners to ensure that: key considerations on how advances in youth engagement affect the HIV response and community priorities are integrated into relevant AIDS response and broader plans, programmes, budgets, and initiatives.
-Facilitate multi-country proposal development and resource mobilization for youth -led initiatives.
4) Advocacy and knowledge management
-Identifies and promotes good practices from within the region and from other regions to benefit the response in countries of the region, in other regions or globally, through appropriate representation of UNAIDS positions on youth engagement and leadership.
-Provides support and guidance to country offices and supports coordination with regional/global partners during human rights crises experienced by communities of young people living with and/or affected by HIV.
-Liaises with the Global Fund, PEPFAR and other partners to facilitate regional learning on, youth -led responses.
Performs other duties as required.

Required Qualifications

Education:

Essential: Advanced university degree at Master´s level in Social Sciences, Public Health, Human Rights, Public Policy or Administration, Business Administration, Law, Gender or Women’s Studies, or another field related to the responsibilities on youth engagement/leadership. A relevant first university degree and 4 years of relevant professional experience will be considered as equivalent for internal candidates only.

DEADLINE: 06 December, 2023


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