Social and Behaviour Change Specialist

UNICEF, also known as the United Nations Children's Fund, is a United Nations agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide. The agency is among the most widespread and recognizable social welfare organizations in the world, with a presence in 192 countries and territories. UNICEF's activities include providing immunizations and disease prevention, administering treatment for children and mothers with HIV, enhancing childhood and maternal nutrition, improving sanitation, promoting education, and providing emergency relief in response to disasters.

UNICEF leverages Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) function, to respond to the triple burden of malnutrition and child food poverty challenges by engaging with communities and collaborating across multiple systems—such as health, food, social protection, WASH, and education. This approach aims to understand and address the cognitive, social, and structural barriers to optimal maternal and child nutrition. SBC is central to the 2022-2025 UNICEF Strategic Plan, driving accelerated efforts towards achieving the SDGs and upholding children’s rights, particularly their right to good nutrition. Additionally, SBC is a cornerstone of UNICEF’s novel initiatives, like First Foods Africa, where it plays a critical role in promoting the production and consumption of locally produced nutritious first foods and food supplements.

UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO) SBC and Nutrition teams are seeking the support of an SBC specialist to assist on key areas aimed at improving children’s quality of diets, food environments, and food practices, while also increasing demand for and utilization of nutrition services, including in humanitarian context. The focus will be on transforming the environments in which families and children live, making it easier to adopt food and nutrition practices that safeguard children’s health, nutrition and development.

Under the supervision of the Regional Adviser Social and Behaviour Change and in close collaboration and guidance of the Nutrition Regional Adviser, the SBC Specialist is responsible for assisting UNICEF Country Offices in ESAR in the design, management, monitoring, and evaluation of evidence-based, human-right oriented, and measurable SBC interventions in relation to regional nutrition agendas such as maternal and young child feeding, school-age children and adolescent nutrition, nutrition emergencies, overweight and obesity prevention, food systems for children, and climate change. The specialist will provide technical assistance in using various SBC programmatic approaches to address multiple barriers to behavior change, including but beyond SBCC, including community engagement, service improvements, social movements, social marketing, and influencing public policies, system strengthening. In the context of multiple Level 2 and Level 3 emergencies in the region, including the El Nino, public health outbreaks, and conflicts, the specialist will support risk communication, community engagement interventions, and will assist with strengthening social accountability to affected populations during humanitarian responses to public health emergencies, climate change, drought, and floods.

The incumbent will have the following major duties and responsibilities:
1. Technical assistance:
a. Assist COs in developing national nutrition SBC strategies with multiple stakeholders
b. Support COs integrating SBC into the design of all nutrition programmes, including:
i. Emergencies: Include SBC approaches within emergency preparedness plans, including adapted SBC messages that address likely challenge that people will face to positive health and nutrition behaviors.
ii. First Foods for Children: contribute to developing social marketing approaches for first foods for Children and other essential nutrition commodities.
iii. School-age children and adolescent nutrition: support SBC related to the five priority programmes (nutritious foods, micronutrient supplementation and deworming, design and/or revise nutrition educational materials, healthy school food environment policies, healthy dietary practices).
iv. Food environments and overweight and obesity prevention: support SBC alongside key priority food policy changes (marketing restrictions, fiscal policies, front of package labelling, healthy school food environments) through strategies such as public awareness campaigns and youth engagement.
2. Support the generation and analysis of data for programming in ESAR COs:
a. Use SBC methods and designing tools to collect social and behavioural data to inform evidence-based, socially relevant SBC plans/interventions with robust M&E frameworks.
b. Developing behaviourally informed policies: Conducting research to ensure policies are based on a realistic view of human behaviour, including understanding how people react and behave in different situations, as well as cultural norms, values and traditions in the region.
c. Assist to strengthen systems to collect community feedback, distribute information through digital tools (U-Report, RapidPro, IoGT).
3. Support community engagement, drive action and policy change
a. Design approaches to engage and mobilize a wide range of actors with an influence on nutrition and other priority behaviours within households and communities, and decision- and policy makers.
b. Support initiatives that empower youth to take action in their local community (social mobilisation) or get involved with advocacy to bring about a healthier food and physical activity environment.
4. SBC capacity strengthening:
a. Support COs to organize and deliver in-country training of CO staff, government, academia and other key stakeholders on implementing, monitoring, and evaluating best-practice and contextualized SBC approaches for improved maternal and child health and nutrition.
b. Assist COs in appropriate and feasible scale up of SBC initiatives.
5. Resource mobilization and Programme Management for SBC:
a. Support ESARO in regularly engaging COs to update their funding needs, level of expenditures and spending plans to support future resource mobilisation efforts.
b. Support SBC Programme Management to ensure smooth implementation and monitoring of grants and partnerships.