Child Protection Specialist (Social Workforce Strengthening)

UNICEF

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Contract type

• Fixed Term Appointment

Locations

Latin America and Caribbean Region

• Suriname

Functional Area

Programme

• Child Protection
• Social and Behavior Change

Position level

• NO-3

Child Protection Specialist (Social Workforce Strengthening), NOC, FT, #138564 Suriname, Multi-Country Office for the Caribbean

Apply now Job no: 596050

Contract type: Fixed Term Appointment

Duty Station: Paramaribo

Level: NO-3

Location: Suriname

Categories: Child Protection, Social and Behavior Change

UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children’s lives, defend their rights, and help them fulfill their potential, from early childhood through adolescence.

At UNICEF, we are committed, passionate, and proud of what we do for as long as we are needed. Promoting the rights of every child is not just a job – it is a calling.

UNICEF is a place where careers are built: we offer our staff diverse opportunities for professional and personal development that will help them reinforce a sense of purpose while serving children and communities across the world. We welcome everyone who wants to belong and grow in a diverse and passionate culture, coupled with an attractive compensation and benefits package.

Visit our website to learn more about what we do at UNICEF.

For every child, the right to strength

UNICEF’s Caribbean Multi-Country Office (MCO) serves twelve English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. As part of UNICEF's Future Focus Initiative, the Caribbean MCO brings together policy influence, technical expertise and strategic partnerships to advance results for children across the region through one integrated programme, one management structure and a shared pool of resources. The Multi-Country Programme 2027-2031 focuses on three shared outcomes: equitable access to primary health care, learning and skills; protection of children from all forms of violence; and child poverty reduction and resilience strengthening.

Children across the Caribbean face interconnected challenges including learning losses, mental health concerns, violence, child poverty and increasing exposure to climate-related disasters. Despite many countries being classified as upper-middle or high income, significant inequalities persist, particularly for vulnerable children, adolescents, indigenous communities and those living in remote areas. Small island developing states also face fiscal constraints and heightened vulnerability to economic and climate shocks, requiring stronger regional cooperation and system-based solutions.

The Caribbean MCO’s management strategy is governed by four principles that together translate the new business model into concrete ways of working:

• Impact-driven: technical expertise is organized in shared multi-country working groups rather than replicated in each country, with enabling functions aligned around UNICEF’s strongest comparative advantages.
• Effective and agile: parallel country ecosystems are replaced by harmonized systems and flexible cross-country staffing, keeping management lean and decisions close to implementation.
• Grounded: regional scale is balanced with national depth through country-specific workplans, Heads of Office in each duty station, and matrix management that anchors authority and accountability at country level.
• People-centered: structural and managerial choices are guided by staff wellbeing, transparency and inclusion, with clear role definitions, meaningful consultation, and continuous investment in learning and development.

The operational expression of this model is the working group model. Rather than replicating similar roles across four separate country offices, technical and operational expertise is organized into 16 thematic and functional working groups, each distributed across different duty stations and each serving the full 12-country MCO — not just its host location. Roles are designed around three organizing principles: shared regional service, meaning every specialist contributes to the wider MCO; complementary expertise, meaning team capabilities reinforce each other rather than repeating the same profile in multiple places; and agile presence, meaning the workforce can be rapidly deployed across countries through travel, surge support or remote modalities in line with evolving needs and priorities. This working group model is the foundation of a fundamentally new way of working for UNICEF in the Caribbean: depth replaces duplication, and shared capacity replaces fragmented country-by-country coverage.

The Child Protection Specialist (Social Workforce Strengthening) is part of the Protecting Children from all forms of violence results 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, strengthening the capacity of frontline providers, case management and referral systems, 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 Outcome 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 outcome No. 2 - Protecting Children from all forms of violence in Georgetown, Guyana and each position will work in close day-to day coordination with the respective in-country lead in each Duty Station

This position provides specialized technical expertise in strengthening the social service workforce — including social workers, case managers, probation officers and other frontline child protection actors — to improve the quality, coordination, reach and continuity of child protection services across the Caribbean MCO. The role brings substantive depth in workforce development, professional standards, supervision, mentoring and institutional capacity strengthening for child protection and social