About this role
Child Protection Specialist (Legal & Policy Frameworks), NOC, FT, #138495, Kingston, Jamaica, Multi-Country Office for the Caribbean
The Child Protection Specialist (Legal & Policy Frameworks) is part of the Protecting Children from all forms of Violence working group. This group seeks to reduce widespread, gender and intergenerational violence against children and adolescents through stronger child protection systems, integrated services and transformed social and gender norms. Its function is to develop and scale prevention, detection and child-centred response models across social protection, justice, education and health systems, aligning legal and policy frameworks with international standards and improving the availability and quality of services, including MHPSS in contexts of violence.
The team is led by the Assistant Representative, P4, accountable for the Programmatic priority No. 2 - Protecting Children from All Forms of Violence, and is supported by five NOC specialists: two Child Protection Specialists (Social and Gender Norms, based in Belize and Trinidad and Tobago), two Child Protection Specialists (Social Workforce Strengthening in Guyana and Suriname) and one Child Protection Specialist (Legal and Policy Frameworks, Jamaica). The P4 post is anchored in Guyana, where violence-related deprivations are particularly severe and where the presence of CARICOM headquarters provides a strategic platform for regional norm-setting and child-protection policy engagement.
The legal and policy specialist is located in Jamaica to remain close to MCO senior leadership and the regional legal environment, enabling Caribbean-level legislative and judicial dialogue from the MCO’s governance center. The two Social and Gender Norms Specialists, within a comprehensive Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) strategy of the MCO, lead the design and implementation of evidence-informed, child- and adolescent-centred approaches that combine community engagement, strategic communication and partnerships with civil society, faith leaders and youth groups to shift harmful norms and promote positive, inclusive behaviours across the subregion. They are based in Belize and Trinidad and Tobago, contexts with documented prevalence of gender-based violence, corporal punishment and other harmful norms, and with diverse cultural settings that are critical for community-level norms-change work in the western and southern/eastern Caribbean.
The social workforce specialists sit in Guyana and Suriname, countries facing significant shortages of trained social workers and fragmented case-management systems, where embedded technical presence is required to engage ministries and extend social-workforce strengthening efforts to indigenous, Maroon and other underserved communities; from these duty stations, all posts carry a regional mandate across the full MCO platform. Collectively, the team’s localization ensures coverage of contexts with the highest violence burdens and system gaps, while providing complementary expertise along the continuum from norms change and legal reform to social workforce strengthening and integrated, survivor-centred child protection services
How can you make a difference?
The Child Protection Specialist reports to the Assistant Representative, P4, accountable for the outcome no. 2 -Protecting Children from All forms of Violence in Georgetown, Guyana, in close functional coordination with the Deputy Representative (Programme coordinator), P5, in Kingston, Jamaica.
This position provides specialized technical expertise in strengthening child protection legal, policy, regulatory and budget frameworks across the Caribbean MCO. The role brings substantive depth in child protection law and policy reform, alignment with international child rights standards, and institutional and accountability frameworks to strengthen the prevention of and response to violence, exploitation, abuse, neglect and harmful practices affecting children and adolescents.
The Child Protection Specialist supports governments and partners across the 12-coun