Comprehensive Sexual Education

The 2018-2021 UNFPA strategic plan set as goal to “achieve universal access to sexual and reproductive health, realize reproductive rights, and reduce maternal mortality to accelerate progress on the agenda of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, to improve the lives of women, adolescents and youth, enabled by population dynamics, human rights and gender equality”. Through the Outcome 2; “Every adolescent and youth, in particular adolescent girls, is empowered to have access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights, in all contexts”; UNFPA works with governments to implement comprehensive sexuality education, both in schools and through community-based training and outreach. UNFPA also promotes policies for, and investment in, sexuality education programmes that meet internationally agreed standards.  

The Benin Country Office is about to start a new country programme 2019-2023 Benin is committed at the highest level to meeting the unmet need for contraception of the population and the respect of human rights through the National Population Policy (2013-2025. The 9th program of cooperation between the Government of Benin and UNFPA, highlights the realization of the rights and the improvement of the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents and young people, and the development of the full potential of these as a national priority and pillar of the capture of the demographic dividend by 2030.

This requires investments in the provision of information, services by different actors of sexual and reproductive health among others and daily monitoring of the results of interventions.)

One of the main initiatives of this 9^th programme, is a 5 years project on Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE) with the Netherlands. As such, this project will help UNFPA Benin on the first hand to better deliver on his new country programme Output 3“Young people, especially adolescent girls, have the skills and abilities to make informed choices about their well-being and their sexual and reproductive health and rights” Starting with a 24 pilot schools, the project aims at the end to be deployed in 500 schools across the country to support the improvement of sexual and reproductive health services for young people and adolescents.

On the other hand, this project is meant to accompany and mainstream the national policy of introduction of digital education complete the traditional pedagogy for better results. Benin is one of the countries with the fastest telephone and internet penetration. This supposes that it will be easier to communicate until the last kilometer without necessarily having to move. Schools will experience with e-learning in Sexual Health Education in particular, but more generally to confront educators and learners to digital education.

Thus, to support the implementation of this project and strategically accompany the country scale up digital education, UNFPA Benin recruits an international consultant in collaboration with the Ministry of Secondary, Technical and Professional Education.

In view of the of the nature of the assignment, and based on the national policy on digital education the consultant will be expected, to support the government of Benin, through UNFPA, in the implementation of its digital education policy.

More specifically, the consultant will have to:

• Scan the environment in terms of technical, legal and administrative arrangements for digital education in Benin;
• Make an inventory of the various stakeholders in the Benin digital education system with;
• Scan the ecosystem of actors involved in educational technologies;
• Define a mechanism to make digital platforms dynamic and interactive;
• Offer solutions for the physical security of IT tools but also in terms of protection against accessing to sites and content not recommended for young people;
• Coordinate with partners and support cyber health and cyber education strategies in Benin;
• Offer solutions for remote access control of the use of the computer tool;
• Propose a mechanism for ongoing monitoring of tools and activities for collecting data on the use of digital tools;
• The proposal of computer equipment to provide schools and students
• Evaluate the suitability of the computer equipment and tools installed in the 24 facilities and make recommendations for scaling up;
• Propose an action plan for scaling up digital education;
• Propose a digital redeployment strategy at the Ministry of Education level.

Expected Travel:  as needed, potential travel within duty station

Required Qualifications and Exeprience

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems with strong skills in Education, Project management, Communication, or a related discipline
• At least 5 years of professional experience in digital education
• Experience of learning management systems and developing e-learning content.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office suite products and eLearning authoring tools;
• Excellent mastery of learning principles, traditional and modern training methods, tools and best practices
• Experience of communicating with a diverse range of internal and external stakeholders
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills as well as written and oral communication skills
• Ability to reconcile multiple projects and changing deadlines, to remain open-minded and adapt,
• Ability to present new ideas, execute new solutions and processes;
• Be bilingual French-English.

            How to Apply:

            Applicants are required to submit cover letter and CV by e-mail to   benin@unfpa.org, by 5 March 2019 with title: "Comprehensive Sexual Education Consultant"