Tenders are invited for Vetted Roster Update - Individual Consultants: Gender Equality and Womens Empowerment

Vetted Roster Update - Individual Consultants: Gender Equality and Womens Empowerment As the development network of the United Nations, UNDP supports African countries in developing national and local capacities to advance human development and accelerate progress towards the achievement of SDGs and the Africa Development Agenda 2063. It is our aim to help the region to achieve rapid inclusive growth by encouraging a strong private sector, social protection for the most vulnerable and employment opportunities, especially for the young. In addition, UNDP promotes agricultural transformation to bolster food security and incomes across the region. It also helps to empower women so they can participate in all spheres of activities, from the economic to the political. Secondly, UNDP aims to strengthen the resilience of African societies by working to prevent conflict, build peace and pave the way for long-term recovery, ensuring development progress is preserved and built upon. The organisational also helps to minimise the impact of natural and climate-related disasters, collaborating with countries to prevent losses and help them to recover wherever these events occur. In doing so. Gender equality and womens empowerment is regarded as one of the core strategies for achieving Africas development. UN DP, Regional Service Centre for Africa, is supporting African member states, the African Union and to adopt and implement gender equality and womens empowerment policy reforms and initiatives. Underpinning this approach is the need for a transformative and sustainable strategies for gender equality. Indeed, a policy and programming focus on harnessing the potential of women is an important economic and social driver for more inclusive and sustainable development. It is UN DPs view that, policies and programmes that unintentionally leave out or disenfranchise women will never be successful over the long term. Nor can inclusive growth be achieved if womens empowerment is compartmentalized or seen as a separate activity from what are traditionally perceived as the core functions of government. Despite widespread recognition of womens rights and the benefits that accrue to all of society from equitable treatment and access to resources and opportunities for women and men, inequalities persist. At the regional and national levels, there is growing recognition that as African women attain higher measures of economic and social well-being, benefits accrue to all of society; despite this growing understanding, removing inequalities for women has not kept pace. Significant gaps between mens and womens opportunities remain a major challenge and a severe impediment to structural economic and social transformation that is still the goal of all African countries. With continued commitment on gender equality and womens empowerment, UNDP has successfully been undertaking several programmes aimed at supporting both the African Union and African member states address gender inequality and womens empowerment as well as worked strategically with civil society organisations and the UN agencies initiating transformative programme interventions. The Regional Programme for Africa and two other specific projects on Gender and Womens Empowerment are a good example of some of the existing initiatives, with a focus on; i) the Fostering Inclusive Participation and the Effective Contribution of Women in Economic and Political Empowerment and ii) Building an enabling environment for womens economic empowerment and political participation in Africa. To ensure continued support to our initiatives, UN DPs Regional Service Centre for Africa (RSCA) invites candidates to send their applications for inclusion in a Vetted external experts roster. The process of including candidates in the Expert Roster are described in the later sections of this advertisement To be considered for inclusion in the roster, applicants would need to have expertise in one or more of the followingareas