Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) Learning Expert

With its establishment on 7 April 1948, WHO works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable. WHO’s goal is to ensure that a billion more people have universal health coverage, to protect a billion more people from health emergencies, and provide a further billion people with better health and well-being.

The WHO European Centre for Preparedness for Humanitarian and Health Emergencies (PHHE) works to strengthen the capacity of Member States across the WHO European Region to prepare for and respond to humanitarian and health emergencies. The Centre emphasizes innovative, inclusive, and sustainable approaches to emergency preparedness, with a strong focus on building workforce competencies, promoting coordination, and providing technical support.

In alignment with PHHE’s objectives and the United Nations’ commitment to leaving no one behind, the Centre seeks to ensure that its learning materials, policy outputs, and technical resources reflect principles of gender equality, disability inclusion, intersectionality, and accessibility.

Under the overall guidance of the Learning Team Lead, and in close coordination with the Gender Experts, Inclusivity Experts and other teams related with GESI, the UN Volunteer will:

1. Gender and Inclusion Review of Learning Materials:
• Review and revise existing training content and learning products to ensure gender sensitivity, cultural relevance, and social inclusion.
• Integrate intersectional perspectives (gender, age, disability, ethnicity, etc.) into learning approaches.
• Develop practical checklists and guidance tools on how to create inclusive, gender-sensitive, and accessible learning materials.

2. Instructional Design and Inclusive Learning:
• Provide input on instructional design from a GESI lens, promoting universal design for learning (UDL) principles.
• Collaborate with technical teams to ensure learning approaches are participatory and tailored to diverse learners, especially those from marginalized groups.

3. Disability-Inclusive Content and Document Accessibility:
• Conduct accessibility assessments of reports, training materials, policy briefs, and key documents.
• Ensure documents meet the UN Disability Inclusion Strategy standards, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and compatibility with assistive technologies.
• Format and structure documents to enhance screen-reader compatibility by:
o Applying proper heading hierarchies
o Adding descriptive alternative text for visuals
o Optimizing color contrast and text readability

4. Technical Guidance and Quality Assurance:
• Provide detailed recommendations and practical guidelines for producing inclusive, accessible documents going forward.
• Quality assure written outputs to ensure they meet professional standards in language, design, and accessibility.
• Provide technical input from a gender equality and disability inclusion perspective for policy briefs and strategic documents.





Furthermore, UN Volunteers are encouraged to integrate the UN Volunteers programme mandate within their assignment and promote voluntary action through engagement with communities in the course of their work. As such, UN Volunteers should dedicate a part of their working time to some of the following suggested activities:
- Strengthen their knowledge and understanding of the concept of volunteerism by reading relevant UNV and external publications and take active part in UNV activities (for instance in events that mark International Volunteer Day, 5th of December).
- Be acquainted with and build on traditional and/or local forms of volunteerism in the host country.
- Provide annual and end of assignment self-reports on UN Volunteer actions, results and opportunities (for instance at https://vra.unv.org),
- Contribute articles/write-ups on field experiences and submit them for UNV publications/websites, newsletters, press releases, etc.
- Assist with the UNV Buddy Programme for newly arrived UN Volunteers.
- Promote or advise local groups in the use of online volunteering or encourage relevant local individuals and organizations to use the UNV Online Volunteering service whenever technically possible.