Job Description

POSITION: - State Consultant Family Based Alternative Care

LOCATION: Mumbai

DURATION: 21 months

CLOSING DATE: 2nd April 2025

Background & Purpose of Assignment:

Purpose of Activity/Assignment:

This Technical Assistance (TA) aims to strengthen child protection systems and build the capacity of stakeholders to implement family-based alternative care, including rehabilitative sponsorship, kinship care and foster care. It will focus on improving case management, family strengthening practices, and deinstitutionalization procedures. The TA will support collaborative efforts to enhance the aftercare ecosystem, generate evidence, manage knowledge, and develop resources related to family-based alternative care. The TA will also support collaborative efforts to strengthen the police response to cases involving children and enhance the capacity of legal aid functionaries to improve legal services for children to prevent family separation.

Scope of Work (Include Background/Rationale/Key Objectives of the Assignment):

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 and Mission Vatsalya of the Government of India emphasizes the principles of best interest of the child; of family responsibility; of institutionalization as a last resort and for a minimum duration; and the principle of restoration or family reunification aligned with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC) and the UN Guidelines for the Appropriate Use and Conditions of Alternative Care for Children.

UNICEF, Maharashtra with the Department of Women and Child Development (DWCD), Maharashtra are working collaboratively to strengthen the ecosystem for family-based alternative care. This involves strengthening the capacities of non-institutional care workforce and providing guidance to district workforces on effectively implementing family-based alternative care services, including sponsorship, foster care, kinship care, aftercare, community care. The focus is on strengthening case management.

Technical Assistance is required to support scaling kinship and community-based care services, systematic capacity building of stakeholders for family-based alternative care services particularly foster-care. The Technical Assistance extends to knowledge building, knowledge products for family strengthening, family-based care.

Technical Assistance is also required to support strengthening the Special Juvenile Police Units across the State to promote non-custodial measures and child-friendly policing for children who come into contact with the Juvenile Justice System. Similarly, Technical Assistance will support strengthening child-friendly legal services.

The Technical Assistance is directed to the following objectives:

Support evidence and knowledge building around family strengthening, family-based alternative care including foster care and after care services.

Develop capacity building resources for child protection stakeholders for family- based alternative care including after care services.

Support capacity building for strengthening child-friendly policing and legal services

Duty Station: Mumbai

Official travel:

The consultant will need to travelto District Travels: Pune Kolhapur, Solapur, Sangali Satara, Nashik, Jalgaon Nandurbar, Mumbai City, Mumbai Sub Urban, Thane, Palghar, Raigad, Ratnagiri, Nagpur, Wardha, Gadchiroli, Aurangabad, Amravati,, Ahmednagar, Latur, Washim, Osmanabad, Akola, Nanded, Yavatmal, Hingoli, Buldhana, Sindhudurg and Yavatmal

Qualification: A Master degree in Social Work, Social Sciences or other related fields

Knowledge/Expertise/Skills required:

A Minimum of 5 to 7 years of work experience and technical capacity in, family based alternative care, family strengthening, aftercare, social service workforce strengthening and child protection programming.

Experience of engaging effectively with state government; non-profit organizations; universities; professional associations and other key stakeholders.

Experience with UN agency is an advantage.

Good research skills with data collection and analysis.

High level of writing and editing skills, analysis and reporting. Skill set of working in MS Excel, MS PPT.

Fluency and command over spoken and written English is mandatory. Ability to speak Marathi would be an essential qualification for this assignment.

Application Procedures

(1)  Qualified female/male candidates are requested to please indicate their ability and availability to undertake the terms of reference above.

(2)  We request you to please inform us where you have seen this advertisement.

(3) Your application should be sent to mumbai.consultants@unicef.org  by COB 2nd April 2025 with subject line "State Consultant Family Based Alternative Care" in separate files consisting of:

Cover letter

CV (clearly mentioning relevant experience and any experience with UN/International/ Bilateral agencies)

The General Terms and Conditions of Contract (Consultants) GTC.pdf

P11 Form Personal History P11 Form.docx

Technical Proposal & sample of previous work

A financial proposal in PDF format indicating deliverable based fee as per template attached. Please mention your name in the file name while saving.

(4) The selection will be based on technical evaluation & financial proposal in the ratio of 75:25. The technical criterion for evaluation is as follows:

Educational Qualifications (10)

Technical proposal to understand the competencies, communication skills both written/verbal, ability to work with different media (25)

Interview (30)

Relevant Experience: ( 10)

Total Score is 75.

Minimum overall qualifying score should be 56.

(5)  The financial proposals of only those candidates, who are found technically responsive, will be opened.

(6) Any attempt to unduly influence UNICEF’s selection process will lead to automatic disqualification of the applicant.

(7) Joint applications of two or more individuals are not accepted.

(8) Please note, UNICEF does not charge any fee during any stage of the process.

For any clarifications, please contact: mumbai.consultants@unicef.org 

About Company

India’s growth over the last two decades has contributed phenomenally to global human development. Extreme poverty in India reduced to 21 per cent, infant mortality has more than halved, some 80 per cent of women now deliver in a health facility and two million fewer children are out-of-school.
These are significant achievements for a country that is home to nearly a sixth of the world’s population. But challenges still remain and India’s economic successes have not resulted in improved quality of life for everyone everywhere, especially women and children.
Children from rural areas, slums and urban poor families, scheduled castes, tribal communities and other disadvantaged populations suffer from multiple deprivations related to poverty, malnutrition, access to quality health services, child marriage, poor school attendance, low learning outcomes, lack of sanitation facilities, hygiene, and access to improved water.

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