OVC Specialist

Category:  Health Care
Location:  Hawassa, Sidama
Career Level:  Senior Level (5+ years experience)
Salary:  As per the scale of the organization

Job Description

Internal/External Vacancy Announcement

Common Vision for Development Association (CVDA) is an indigenous, non-governmental,  non-for-profit, humanitarian aid association. It was established on October 28, 2005 by a group of dedicated persons from diverse social, economic, professional and religious backgrounds.

CVDA has been re-registered and licensed by the Ethiopian Ministry of Justice, Charities and Societies Agency, on November 30, 2009 as an Ethiopian Residents charity in accordance with the Charities and Societies proclamation No. 621/2009 with registration No. 0588. As per 1113/2019 proclamation also re-registered on July 30, 2019.

It has permission to work at the national level so far operates marginal parts of BenshanguleGumuz Region, SNNPR(13 woredas inWolayta, south Omo, Dawro , Kaffa, Gedeo, Gurage and Silte zones), Sidama region (17 woredas), Oromia Region (16 woredas in West Showa Zone, Borena Zone, Guji Zone, west Guji and west Arsi) Afar Region;  Zone 5; Delfefage, Dewe, Telalek, HadeleEle and SumuRobi  Zone 3 ; Gewane and Gelalo  and City Government of Addis Ababa.

CVDA is member of National Health Forum of NGOs and National Children and Youth Forum of NGOs under CCRDA. Beside this it is member of Consortium of Reproductive Health Association (CORHA), Union of Ethiopian Women Charitable Association (UEWCA), Ethiopian Extractive Industries Transparence Initiative/EEITI/, Ethiopia Civil Society Coalition for Scaling up Nutrition/ECSC-SUN/ and Afar Region Health Partner Forum.

The following are CVDA’s vision, mission, goals, principles and values:

Vision

  •  CVDA’s vision is to see where poverty is alleviated sustainably with favorable living environment in Ethiopia.

Mission

  •  CVDA’s mission is to work with & for the poor community with priority attention for children and women towards alleviating socio-economic problem, food insecurity, reducing unemployment, enhancing productivity, promoting health care, quality education,  environment conservation , peace and democracy building at  various level for sustainable development.

Goal

  •  To contribute to the endeavors of poverty alleviation through its integrated community based development program in different regions of the country.

PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES

CVDA to realize its objectives has engaged in the following programs and activities:

1.Reproductive and Primary Health Program

According to the second Health Sector Transformation Plan (HSTP II 2020/21-2024/25), Primary Health coverage access estimated that one health post covers 5000 persons and one PHCU is for 25,000 and 40,000 populations in rural and urban set up respectively. During the first HSTP (2015/16-2020), the contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) target was to reach 55% but the performance is 41% (HSTP one and the Ministry of health 2018/19 report) which is not achieved and the percentage of live birth delivered by a skilled provider is 50%.With this reality the population of Ethiopia is characterized by one of the fast growing populations in the world. According to the Central Statistics Authority (CSA), if the current trend continues, the population of Ethiopia is expected to be double every 24 years and expected to reach 120 million by the year 2022.

There are considerable numbers of people who are not accessed for basic health service and also there is limited awareness on RH/FP and HIV/AIDS.

  •  Establishing health posts to access the target groups of the community for the primary health service.
  • Raise the awareness of the community on RH/FP and unwanted pregnancy.
  • Promote maternal and child health interventions
  • Give alternative family planning service to hard to reach communities through outreach family planning service.
  • Capacitate health service providers to give quality demand based family planning service
  • Raise the awareness of the community on HIV/AIDS to prevent expansion and to alleviate the stigma. Under this program equal weight will be given to change the behavior of PLHIV to mitigate the personality they develop from their pervious life and to introduce entrepreneurship skill to enable them to be self-supportive.
  • Strengthen referral linkage between community actors and health facility on HIV and RH issues
  • Conduct community based HIV testing
  • Support achievement of zero new HIV infection in 2030
  • Provide care and support for PLWHA & AIDS orphans.

2. Water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) Program

 

According to Ethiopian demographic and health survey (EDHS) 2016 only 64.8% of Ethiopian populations have access to utilize water source and 6.7% of the population have access to improved sanitation facility. Also 48% of the population travel more than 30 minutes to get water source. This shows Ethiopia still off track to achieve SDG target for access to improved water supply and sanitation facility.

  •  Therefore to contribute our country effort to increase access to water and sanitation facilities and promote effective utilization our organization works in the following activities
  • Promotion of hygienic practices of community using different social mobilization and IEC/ BCC.
  • Increase use of sanitation facility of community using CLTSH and other community based approach.
  • Maintaining and building protected water schemes such as borehole, shall well, spring water development, hand dug well, wind pump  by incorporating government and community. At the same time build cloth washing stand, cattle through, shower facility
  • Promote use of household water treatment in the community.
  • Capacitate local community to produce improved sanitation technologies
  • Promote sanitation facilities marketing practice among community

 

3. Food Security, Livelihood Diversification and Natural Resource Conservation Program

 

Securing food and a livelihood is inextricably linked to the exploitation of the natural resources (land, water and forest) in Ethiopia, where over 85 percent of the population live in rural areas and depend on smallholder agriculture. The pressure of intense human activity and improper farming and management practices pose serious threats to the sustainability of the natural resources and maintaining ecological balance. There is a widespread problem related to intensive cultivation, overgrazing and deforestation, soil erosion and soil fertility decline, water scarcity, livestock feed and the fuel wood crisis. These factors often interact with one another resulting in a re-enforcing cycle of the “poverty, food insecurity and natural resources degradation trap”. This problem manifests itself in recurrent drought and famine affecting millions of people, particularly in the Ethiopian highlands. In order to address this problem, a community-based integrated natural resources management approach play significant role, which makes a systematic effort to improve soil and land productivity, agroforestry development and other rural energy sources, low-cost rainwater harvesting, livestock improvement and expanding the livelihood base in the non-farm sector under the existing National Extension Programme.

The community-based integrated natural resources management approach puts equal emphasis on stabilizing yields and reducing vulnerability (by broadening the livelihood base) among the large number of small-scale farmers who live in marginal, degraded and fragile ecosystems. It also provides a more flexible approach and a broad umbrella (not packages) under which extension-research-farmers and community organizations would develop activities/programmes to respond to various agro-ecological zones and local resource endowments and farmers’ capacity to invest in low-cost and environmentally sound soil, water and forest management techniques and livestock improvement in an integrated manner.

  • Livestock extension, forage development, bee keeping, poultry production, livestock health, animal fattening, dairy production, goat and sheep production.
  • Introduce small scale irrigation to enable the framers to produce in all season.
  • Produce and distribute indigenous and exotic tree seedling among the community.
  • Establish community nursery site and enhance afforestation and area closure.
  • Introduce different techniques of soil and water conservation for farmers.
  • Introduce alternative energy source such as biogas technology to replace fire wood.
  • Introduce urban gardening for urban destitute and other target group to access for balance diet and to raise their income.
  • Establish food grains bank for the farmers.
  • Raise the awareness of the farmers on importance of research output and accessing the farmers for research output.
  • Multiply high yield variety seed and distribute to farmers.

Livelihood Diversification

This program focuses particularly to the target group. Under this program equal weight will be given to change the behavior of the beneficiaries to mitigate the personality they develop from their pervious life and to introduce entrepreneurship skill to enable them to be self-supportive.

  •  Establish vocational skill training and access the target group for the training.
  • Access the target group for different skill training such as hair dressing, embroidering, tailoring, pastry, bakery, weaving, and etc.
  • Provide entrepreneurship training and access for startup capital to enroll in different micro business activities upon their interest.

4, Education Program:

Education directly improves productivity, rates of return and earnings of people. In addition to this education has a wide range of indirect effects, which instigate positive changes in people’s attitudes.  It makes it easier for people to learn new skills throughout their lives, and hence facilitates their participation in modern economics and societies. Therefore CVDA focus on the following activities.

  •  Construct schools to reduce the drop out of students and to increase the enrolment of school age children, who suffered a lot by walking long distance and deprived because of limited access.
  • Alternative basic education will be arranged to access the adult illiterate for education.
  • Access the target group of the community for formal education by providing all necessary education materials, and by paying tuition fee.
  • Improve literacy and numeracy skill of primary school children
  • Support schools to improve quality of education
  • Establish community based reading sites
  • Establish nursery school
  •  Promote early  child education

5. Emergency and Relief Program

Traditionally the majority of efforts in Ethiopia have been focused on relief work for droughts, with the formally approved policy on disaster prevention and management, the National Policy on Disaster Prevention and Management (1993) (“the 1993 Policy”), paying little attention to prevention of natural disasters more generally. This approach has now changed, following a series of institutional changes begun in 2007 with the government’s Business Process Re-engineering programme, which led to the establishment of a Disaster Risk Management and Food Security Sector (DRMFSS) under neath the Ministry of Agriculture. The DRMFSS has overseen a large shift in attitude and practice, moving towards an increasingly multi-hazard and multi-sectoral approach, and is overseeing the drafting of a new National Policy and Strategy on Disaster Risk Management (the NPSDRM) that contains a greater emphasis on the delegation of powers to the regional and local levels, as well as community involvement. In particular, it moves away from the 1993 policy’s focus on drought and aims to improve information on community vulnerability and flood preparedness.

The activities of the DRMFSS and the national policies on DRM are only one piece of a wider picture, as the legal framework applicable to DRR in Ethiopia extends far beyond current Ethiopian disaster law. Hence CVDA considering the gap in sector planned to intervene in this program believing that it contribute for sustainable development.

6/ Peace and democracy building

Peace is prominently included in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)6, and is the focus of major new international policies. The recent flagship document Pathways to Peace, produced jointly by the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank, calls for ‘a shift away from managing and responding to crises and toward preventing conflict’. The recognition that achieving all the SDGs depends on achieving peace.8

 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

Many regions of the world continue to suffer untold horror as a result of armed conflict or other forms of violence that occur within societies and at the domestic level.

Peace is the fruit of sustained and long-term peacebuilding efforts by communities, governments, civil society, businesses, international organizations and intergovernmental bodies. While peacebuilding involves using non-violent actions to stop, reduce or prevent immediate violence, this is never enough in itself, as violence can all-too-readily recur. Peacebuilding therefore encompasses longer-term initiatives that contribute to resilience, making conflicts less likely in the future, and strengthening people’s and societies’ ability to handle those that do without resorting to violence.

Democracy provides an environment that respects human rights and fundamental freedoms, and in which the freely expressed will of people is exercised.  Women and men have equal rights and all people are free from discrimination. These values are embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The word democracy itself means rule by the people. A democracy is a system where people can change their rulers in a peaceful manner and the government is given the right to rule because the people say it.

Democracy ensures proper functioning of the government since it is the people who elect them and therefore this makes them more accountable.

By voting, citizens are participating in the democratic process. Citizens vote for leaders to represent them and their ideas, and the leaders support the citizens’ interests.

CVDA will work on

Changes in knowledge and attitudes of the target groups

  • To empower youth to play their role in the society.
  • Raise the awareness of the community on child right.
  • Greater empathy towards, and understanding of people from other groups.
  • Improved understanding of the underlying causes of violence among those affected

Change in behavior

  •  Promote stop using violence, & adopt other methods to resolve conflicts.
  • Promote exhibiting and calling for acceptance of others, active collaboration underway

Structural changes

 

  • Working on norms, systems and institutions in way prevent and manage violence.

Key ACCOMPLISHMENTS

CVDA has successfully implemented different food security, environmental conservation, income generating and HIV/AIDS project in collaboration with different stakeholders.  On environment conservation activity;  highly degraded land rehabilitated through soil and water conservation measure, area enclosure, vetiver grass and indigenous tree plantation, gabion established, stone and soil bund established, conservation agriculture  introduced, biogas   technology introduced and established, fuel wood saving stove established at HH level, spring water developed, washing stand,   shower established.

Food security and Income of target group improved through beekeeping, poultry farm, fruit tree plantation/ apple, mango and orange plantation/, vegetable garden, false banana plantation, vetiver grass bank. Other group established group and individual business such as hair dressing, tea room, sugar and edible oil distribution, dairy farm, stone production, shower room   and etc. On HIV prevention, care and support program target group and large community awareness raised on HIV prevention and living with HIV,  counseling service, economic strengthen and improving balance diet intake, engaging in income generating activities, access for clinical service through referral linkage.

Food security and Income of target group improved through beekeeping, poultry farm, fruit tree plantation/ apple, mango and orange plantation/, vegetable garden, false banana plantation, vetiver grass bank. Other group established group and individual business such as hair dressing, tea room, sugar and edible oil distribution, dairy farm, stone production, shower room   and etc. On HIV prevention, care and support program target group and large community awareness raised on HIV prevention and living with HIV,  counseling service, economic strengthen and improving balance diet intake, engaging in income generating activities, access for clinical service through referral linkage.

 

Over all over 60 projects were implemented in different region and woredas since its establishment. In 2020/21 it has involved about 1762 volunteers and it has 75 full time staffs.

Description of the Vacancy

Common Vision for Development Association (CVDA) is partner with MJE and MENA to implement Family focused HIV prevention, Care and Treatment Services Activities (FFHPCT). The purpose of this grants are to strengthen local HIV epidemic control to achieve 95 percent of individuals living with HIV know their status, 95 percent of persons living with HIV to initiate antiretroviral therapy and 95 percent of antiretroviral therapy clients achieve viral load suppression by 2022.

 

Major duty & responsibility include:

 

  • Provide regular support and supervision to OVC service officers, SSWs and other staff under her or his direct supervision. These include the preparation (development) and follow up of individual work plans based on Family Focused HIV prevention, care and treatment service activity project work plans and/or job descriptions.
  • Build the technical capacity of the project staff under her/his direct line management and delegate tasks for the efficient performance of activities implementation at all levels.
  • Liaise with the local Government institutions, CBOs, CCC and other relevant community groups to select target beneficiaries for the project services (direct services and through referral linkages).
  • Manages the entire case management process in the recruitment and enrollment of target beneficiaries (from identification for enrollment through successful graduation & case closure processes).
  • Ensure the provision of quality service for project target beneficiaries based on each individual household’s case plan and needs identified for Support Groups (SGs). S/he needs to make sure that service delivery is as per the project standards.

Duration of employment: from date of employment up to September 30, 2022 with high possibility of  extension based on performance and availability of fund.

Reports to: Regional coordinator

 

Number of position: 1

Job Requirements

Qualifications

  • First Degree or Masters in Health or in related fields.

Experience and Technical Skills

 

  • BSC/ Master’s in public Health or equivalent 7/4 years with professional experience in health and HIV/AIDS related project management/implementation specially OVC & FFHCT
  • Extensive knowledge of HIV/AIDS situation in Ethiopia and Should have demonstrated experience in working with CCC, Government stakeholders and other community level actors.
  • Demonstrated analytical and report writing skills.
  • Excellent written and oral communication in English.
  • Ability to perform and prioritize multiple tasks, think creatively and strategically.

How to Apply

Application procedure: through email: cvda2005hr@gmail.com CC elsiz2010@gmail.com Write on subject of the email; position & duty station  and also attach summary sheet

Registration place: submit summary of your profile as per format below, copy of application letter, C.V stating 3 work related reference & minimum salary expectation and other confidential: Head office;   Bekele Eshte Tower, which is along Torhailoch Total road 5th floor, Room No.504  For further information contact 0113691051

You can deliver in hand or submit through email.