The Government of Afghanistan has undertaken several measures to bring strong focus on child nutrition including strengthening community-based nutrition interventions to address child under-nutrition. Among other measures, Public Nutrition Department (PND) of MoPH through support from development partners focused on improving the facility based and community-based nutrition specified and Nutrition sensitive interventions via several approaches, but recently the MoPH-PND noticed poor nutrition support, advocacy and coordination in the country.
In order to improve the nutrition services top to down from Policy makers to the community level, it is critical to improve the awareness and enabling environment for involving multi-sectoral organizations, such as MAIL,MRRD, Education, on provision of political, financial and technical support on nutrition interventions, also to provide on time nutrition counselling, follow up, screening and referring. Therefore, the MoPH-PND is looking for an individual consultant to, communicate, coordination, improve and enable the environment for nutrition interventions. This piece of work will enable the Ministry of Public Health to deliver targeted nutrition interventions.
The objective of this position is to enhance the coordination mechanism and create enableing environment for nutrition and design innovative approaches for nutrition related advocacy programs and events. At the sometime, provide technical advices to the public nutrition department for further enhancement of technical and managerial capacities.
Advocacy:
- To follow SUN movement related activities
- To follow AFSeN Agenda, by participating at the related forums and providing technical support
- Assist MoPH / PND in development of advocacy plan in the light of nutrition strategic plan
- Assist the MoPH /PND with the implementation of advocacy events for nutrition specific and nutrition sensitive interventions.
- Conducting nutrition advocacy events.
- Establish, lead and organize the advocacy working group within the frame of MoPH-PND.To develop working relationships with the MoPH-Policy and plan department and all stakeholders who are involved in the area of nutrition advocacy.
Coordination:
- To map all available resources for Nutrition coordination.
- To ensure that existing nutrition resources are used effectively by partners.
- To collaborate with representatives of other nutrition component`s (including IYCF, micronutrients, IMAM, growth monitoring, and surveillance) for effective coordination
- To explore different approaches for increasing the coverage of facility and community-based nutrition activities.
- To explore different strategies to strengthen sustainable nutrition implementation mechanism.
- To attend nutrition and Policy and plan meetings and other relevant events in-side and out-side the country and to represent MoPH-PND.
M&E:
- To perform monitoring and supportive supervision of nutrition activities and providing appropriate inputs
- To collect nutrition and health data from different sources including HMIS, nutrition database, nutrition surveillance, nutrition cluster and relevant assessment reports.
- To provide recommendations for key indicators and information that should be assessed as part of nutrition assessment/ monitoring and supervision.
- To keep abreast of relevant nutrition policies and guidelines and communicate necessary updates to all PND`s staff, PNOs and the NGOs focal points.
- To participate in assessments of nutrition activities that includes travel in highly insecure provinces.
- A minimum of 3 years of relevant experience in the field of public nutrition
- Good analytical skills
- Excellent computer skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SPSS)
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
- Excellent analytical and writing skills in English, Pashtu and Dari