Local Stakeholder Engagement and Facilitative Dialogue Expert

Yemen is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world due to a combination of extreme environmental fragility, protracted conflict, and weak institutional capacities. The country faces growing exposure to climate hazards, including recurrent droughts, water scarcity, desertification, sea level rise, and flash floods. These challenges exacerbate existing socioeconomic issues, such as food insecurity, public service degradation, displacement, and gender inequalities. Despite its high vulnerability, Yemen lacks a comprehensive and integrated framework for medium- and long-term adaptation planning. While the country prepared a National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) in 2009 and included adaptation priorities in its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), these efforts have remained fragmented and limited in scope, coverage, and institutional integration. Recognizing this gap, Yemen’s Climate Finance Country Programme (2025–2030) identifies the formulation of the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) as a strategic outcome to enhance climate resilience. The NAP is a key instrument for institutionalizing adaptation planning, improving climate risk governance, and strengthening the integration of adaptation across national, sectoral, and subnational development processes. To support this, the Ministry of Water and Environment (MWE), through its Climate Change Unit (CCU), and with the support of our client and funding from the Green Climate Fund (GCF), is implementing a Readiness and Preparatory Support project to formulate Yemen’s NAP. The NAP process aims to strengthen institutional coordination, integrate climate risks into development planning, improve climate data and vulnerability assessments, and enable the country to access larger-scale adaptation finance. A core element of the NAP process is strengthening structured, inclusive, and participatory stakeholder engagement. This will involve coordination with institutional stakeholders, organizing national and subnational consultations, engaging technical committees, and thematic groups within sectoral ministries (e.g., water, agriculture, health, education), civil society, academic institutions, private sector actors, and vulnerable communities, particularly women and youth. The engagement process must account for Yemen’s conflict-affected context and institutional fragmentation, requiring well-designed, gender-responsive, and locally grounded approaches. Additionally, stakeholder engagement must be conducted in a conflict-sensitive and do-no-harm manner, ensuring balanced representation from authorities and communities across both northern and southern governorates where feasible, and applying facilitation methods tailored to Yemen’s fragile and politically divided landscape. This consultancy is intended to operationalize the stakeholder engagement elements of the NAP roadmap by supporting inclusive dialogues, enhancing interinstitutional coordination, and ensuring local knowledge and priorities are integrated into the technical components of the NAP. The overall objective of this assignment is to support and facilitate an inclusive, transparent, and coordinated stakeholder engagement process that strengthens national ownership and intersectoral alignment across sectors to facilitate the formulation of Yemen’s NAP. The specific objectives of this assignment are:

• Support our client, Climate Change Unit, and experts in the identification and engagement of relevant stakeholders from public institutions, civil society, academia, private sector, and vulnerable groups at national and subnational levels.

• Conduct inclusive consultations and dialogues and gather stakeholder perspectives on climate risks, vulnerabilities, adaptation priorities, and institutional roles. Consultations should be designed to meaningfully include women, youth, and marginalized groups, using facilitation methods that are culturally appropriate and sensitive to the local political and social context.

• Analyze the consultation engagement session data to assess the quality of participation, identify the stakeholders involved, and highlight any underrepresented groups or gaps in engagement.

• Ensure that stakeholder feedback is systematically documented and integrated into NAP deliverables such as vulnerability assessments, institutional frameworks, adaptation option prioritization, and financing strategies.

• Promote women and youth empowerment and inclusive governance through targeted outreach and facilitation strategies that engage women, youth, and marginalized communities.

• Provide facilitation support to NAP consultants and technical experts, enabling effective stakeholder engagement and collaboration to ensure successful achievement of the consultancy’s objectives and deliverables.

• Strengthen the linkages and communication channels between the project team, our client, Climate Change Unit in the MoWE, and the sectoral technical committees.

The consultant will work under the supervision of the Project Manager from our client and in close coordination with the Climate Change Unit, Ministry of Water and Environment (MoWE). The consultant will collaborate with national consultants, technical advisors, and thematic experts supporting the NAP development process to ensure alignment between engagement activities and technical deliverables. The scope of work includes mapping and analysis, designing an inclusive engagement strategy and plan, engaging all relevant stakeholders, enhancing coordination with institutional platforms, facilitating consultations to inform the NAP process, ensuring gender mainstreaming throughout the consultations, documenting stakeholders’ inputs across workstreams, and contributing to knowledge sharing and capacity building. The assignment is for ten months, during which the consultant will be based in the Climate Change Unit at the MoWE, Aden. The tasks and responsibilities of the consultant are detailed in the following section.

The consultant will be responsible for performing the following tasks to support the development of the NAP process:

• Conduct stakeholder mapping, analysis, and profiling across government, civil society, academia, private sector, and development partners, ensuring engagement with a broad base of relevant stakeholders. This includes assessing each stakeholder's role, influence, interests, and capacity to contribute to the NAP process.

• Develop a coordination mechanism to ensure inclusive adaptation planning and create a detailed stakeholder engagement plan outlining consultation strategies, communication tools, participation mechanisms, and an inclusive engagement schedule.

• In coordination with the project team, facilitate inclusive consultation events, meetings, dialogue sessions, focus group discussions, surveys, etc., across all sectors under the NAP, ensuring the integration of gender-responsive and conflict-sensitive facilitation methods.

• Liaise between the CCU, our client’s project team, and the technical and sectoral committees, ensuring timely flow of information and effective coordination.

• Support national institutions and thematic technical groups and experts in aligning engagement events with technical milestones and information needs.

• Develop consultation materials, including background documents, presentations, briefing notes, templates and forms, and questionnaires, to ensure stakeholders are fully aware of the NAP process and ensure their effective participation and engagement.

• Develop and apply tools (e.g., feedback forms, questionnaires, templates) to collect, document, and systematize stakeholder inputs into a structured database or matrix for use by the project team and technical consultants.

• Ensure inclusive participation of women and youth by applying participatory approaches that actively engage these groups and by ensuring their perspectives, needs, contributions, and priorities are reflected in all stakeholder processes and incorporated into the NAP process.

• Facilitate consultations with stakeholders to gather inputs for M&E system design; ensure inclusivity and consensus-building.

• Prepare detailed documentation and reports, including consultation minutes, meeting summaries, participants' lists, documentation of concerns, recommendations, engagement progress updates, and input logs. A participation database disaggregated by gender, age, governorate, and institution must be maintained throughout the engagement process.

• Develop a mechanism for providing feedback to stakeholders on the utilization of their inputs and contributions.

• Prepare a final stakeholder engagement report reflecting achievements, best practices, lessons learned, and recommendations, linked to the areas of stakeholders' capacity development to enhance knowledge sharing and institutional capacity for adaptation planning and implementation.

The consultant will report to the NAP Project Manager at our client and will work in close coordination with the Climate Change Unit, Ministry of Water and Environment (MoWE), technical advisors and experts, line ministries and authorities, sectoral experts, and other relevant stakeholders engaged in the NAP process, ensuring successful consultations, enhanced coordination and structured stakeholder engagement aligned with the project objectives.

• Demonstrating/safeguarding ethics and integrity

• Demonstrate corporate knowledge and sound judgment

• Display cultural, gender, religion, race, nationality and age sensitivity and adaptability

• Self-development, initiative-taking

• Acting as a team player and facilitating teamwork

• Facilitating and encouraging open communication in the team, communicating effectively

• Creating synergies through self-control

• Managing conflict

• Learning and sharing knowledge and encourage the learning of others

• Promoting learning and knowledge management/sharing is the responsibility of each staff member.

• Strong interpersonal skills, communication and diplomatic skills

• Strong facilitation skills and proven experience of bringing together different stakeholders to carry forward complex processes

• Openness to change and ability to receive/integrate feedback

• Ability to organize and prioritize work

• Strong analytical, reporting and writing abilities

• Excellent drafting, reporting, facilitation and presentation skills

• knowledge of Microsoft Office (word, excel, and outlook)

• Results driven, ability to work under pressure and to meet required deadlines

Qualified female candidates are encouraged to apply for this role.