Senior Consultant-Catalytic Financing Facility Design Partnerships Enablement, New Delhi, India. 12 Months. Office Based (Open for Nationals of India Only).

This consultancy will provide senior technical and strategic support to UNICEF India to design and operationalise the early phase of a catalytic financing facility.

The aim is to accelerate two key priorities in India: (1) nutrition programming; (2) multisectoral programming (nutrition, health, education, child protection and WASH) in India.

The assignment is deliverable-based, time-bound, and linked to defined outputs, consistent with UNICEF consultant modalities.

Responsibilities

- The consultancy will provide senior technical, strategic, and partnership enablement support to UNICEF India to design and operationalise the early phase of a catalytic financing facility.
- Develop and refine catalytic/cutting-edge financing models tailored to the Indian context across multiple UNICEF priority functions (including but not limited to nutrition).
- Strengthen UNICEF India's ability to originate, assess and structure innovative financing opportunities through market scanning, risk/feasibility analysis, and partner mapping.
- Engage with central and state government stakeholders to validate appetite, readiness, and feasible adoption pathways for staged financing approaches.
- Design feasible governance, risk management, compliance and verification/learning approaches that make models credible and scalable.

- Produce high-quality, audience-specific knowledge products, briefs and materials for internal decision-makers and external partners to support mobilisation and positioning.
- Nutrition Programming: Developing an India-specific financing approach that is feasible within India's compliance and regulatory context to address nutrition financing gaps, including programme modeling, generation of evidence for decision making, system strengthening and behaviour change communication.
- Nutrition Programming:



Designing and implement the operational mechanism of a staged financing approach with Option A (Pooled Grant Facility) as the core mechanism; Option B (Match/Multiplier) and Option C (Outcome-Based Financing) introduced selectively and only when systems and verification mature; Option D (Blended Finance) considered only later and only if a clear market bottleneck is demonstrated.

- Nutrition Programming: Ensuring all recommendations respect both Government of India compliance and regulatory context and UNICEF rules and procedures; e.g. UNICEF can host/manage pooled and match funds, but cannot host/manage repayment-based instruments (e.g. Outcome based financing/Blended finance).

- Multisectoral programming: Building on what has been identified for Nutrition programming, exploring India's financing opportunities for social sectors on interest for UNICEF, including nutrition; either separately or in combination, within India's compliance and regulatory context.
- Multisectoral programming: Developing examples of financial models and their potential management mechanisms either as single options or through a staged financing approach that could be considered as feasible options to address financing gaps in key social sectors; this could be for 1 sector or multiple sectors together.
- Multisectoral programming: Ensuring that the proposed options are in line with India's and UNICEF's compliance, regulatory and procedures context.

- Scope of Work: Under UNICEF supervision, the consultant will deliver outputs across the following workstreams:
- Nutrition Programming:



Designing the Nutrition Programming Facility based approaches and staged instrument architecture.
- Nutrition Programming: Propose / design financial mechanisms options that seem most adapted for Nutrition Programming (single option and/or staged), pros and cons, opportunistic timeframe for each mechanism and organizational arrangements essential for smooth operationalization both for nutrition and for all sectors.

- Nutrition Programming: Translate these designs into implementable operating models (windows, governance, decision gates, and criteria to move from pooled grants, match selective, outcome-based financing, blended financing) and consider parallel windows approaches if staged or mix models are not practical.
- Nutrition Programming: Describe independent verification, associated terms of reference and potential instruments to be used for each of the different financial mechanisms options presented.
- Nutrition Programming: Ensure that the designs reflect UNICEF constraints regarding hosting/management of different instruments.

- Nutrition Programming: Realise an appetite check mapping of donors / philanthropic / CSR partners / multilateral institutions if relevant and practical adoption pathways aligned with existing performance-linked incentive models referenced in discussions.
- Government Engagement: Exploring Government's engagement and readiness (Centre + States): Develop a structured approach to identify and engage states/districts ready to commit to performance pathways and to sense-check feasibility with central/state counterparts.

Skills

- Financing models
- Market scanning
- Risk/feasibility analysis
- Partner mapping
- Governance design
- Compliance
- Verification/learning
- Stakeholder engagement
- Programme design

Disclaimer: This job posting has been aggregated from external source. Role details, content, and availability are subject to change. Applicants are advised to confirm the latest information directly on the company website before applying.

📌 Sr Consultant - Catalytic Financing Facility Design (New Delhi)
🏢 UNICEF
📍 New Delhi