Humanitarian Affairs Assistant (Reporting)

OCHA Pakistan’s overall objective is to save lives, alleviate suffering and promote a life with dignity through improved efforts to coordinate the humanitarian response to affected people. . In 2024 and 2025, OCHA Pakistan will focus more on building capacity of the Government partners including local government organizations to respond to the most vulnerable and help them prepare for extreme events; humanitarian access and promote the protection of people in all humanitarian action.

OCHA will also support efforts to address the needs of flood-affected people.

It will continue to work closely with the Resident Coordinator’s Office who have increased field presence and play a critical role in building humanitarian and development synergies. Operationally, OCHA Pakistan will have field presence in only 3 locations (Karachi, Quetta and Peshawar) that can be scaled up when needed.

In 2022, Pakistan experienced another large-scale flood disaster, resulting in a significant humanitarian crisis that affected over 33 million people, with 7.9 million displaced. The situation demanded immediate humanitarian and protection assistance, along with support for basic services. Recurrent monsoon induced floods in 2023 resulted in 892,802 people being impacted, and claimed 223 lives, with 329 people being injured across Pakistan. Additionally, 5,784 houses were damaged, and 1,260 livestock perished. This meant that a certain percentage of people impacted by 2022 floods relapsed to vulnerability in 2023 due to multiple vulnerability exposure factors.

Pakistan is facing several other challenges, such as food insecurity impacting over 10.5 million people according to Integrated Phase Classification (IPC 2023), 4.5 million lacking access to clean drinking water, 3.5 million children under the age of 5 suffering from severe malnutrition, and 23 million children not attending school. More than 1.5 million children urgently require Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) services to address the effects of malnutrition (FRP Final Report 2023). The vulnerability of the affected population is further exacerbated by the absence of a comprehensive protection approach for the most vulnerable families. Pakistan, prone to the impacts of climate stress, is vulnerable to the inevitability of future disasters. While some strides have been made in bolstering the government’s capacity to respond, the current level of progress remains insufficient. Consequently, significant attention must be directed towards further strengthening this capacity.

OCHA has been scaling up its operations in Pakistan focusing on its key functions of coordination, information management, resource mobilization and advocacy. At the national level, OCHA plans to enhance its reporting, analysis and communication capacity to increase situational awareness of the flood emergency, including on-going efforts in preparedness, contingency plan, anticipatory action, and pooled fund. This has necessitated OCHA to request for the services of UNV Humanitarian Affairs Assistant to support reporting, analysis, and communication aimed at strengthening its humanitarian coordination function.

The UNV Humanitarian Affairs Assist will work with OCHA Pakistan supporting reporting and humanitarian coordination and should have strong analytical and writing skills. This includes providing the following duties.

· Prepare periodic reports, including external updates, donor reports, internal sitreps, briefing notes for senior managers, and activity-specific analytic reports as required.

· Take meeting minutes for coordination forums like the HCT, ISCG, Emergency Working Group and other humanitarian coordination forums.

· Support the development of briefing notes, speeches, fact sheets, talking points, advocacy messages, notes for file, readouts and concepts notes.

· Support in writing flash updates, situation reports, operational updates and humanitarian updates.

· Capture notes and follow up on agreed action points and ensure meeting deadlines.

· Prepare briefings and reports and support different units in OCHA.

· Develop and maintain working relationships with the government, NGOs, donors and UN agencies to ensure cooperation in inter-agency related activities.

· Support the interagency coordination and activities by preparing and distributing minutes, assisting in the organization of meetings; and serving as secretariat.

· Explore and leverage new communication technologies that would be useful for the team.

· Co-organizer in donor ceremonies, launches, project closures, field missions, supporting the drafting of necessary communication products and ensuring adequate photographic documentation for external use.

· Assist in finalizing documents for timely publication, including selection of photos and facilitating lay-out and design for publication.