UNICEF and ZIF sign a Standby Agreement
On February 2nd 2023, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Center for International Peace Operations (ZIF) have signed a Standby Agreement. On this basis, ZIF can start to deploy members of the ZIF Expert-Pool with humanitarian expertise to support UNICEFs operations in the field.
With missions and offices in more than 190 countries, UNICEF helps children and adolescents in need worldwide. As one of the United Nations (UN) entities with a dual mandate, UNICEF works in both the sector of humanitarian aid and development cooperation. Since its foundation in 1946, UNICEF can look back on many successes: for instance, the significant reduction of child and infant mortality from 10 per cent in 1980 to 3 per cent in 2018, or the successful measures taken against malnutrition of infants. Nevertheless, in times of more frequent crises and catastrophes and rapidly rising humanitarian needs, the work of UNICEF remains indispensable. The expertise and contribution of personnel with which ZIF, on behalf of the German Federal Foreign Office, can support UNICEF is most urgently needed in profiles such as Nutrition, WASH, PSEA, or Information Management.
The partnership with UNICEF is ZIF’s fifth humanitarian partnership. In 2019, the renewal of the Standby Agreement with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) marked ZIF’s first humanitarian partnership. Since then, ZIF has signed new Standby Agreements and commenced partnerships with the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the World Health Organization (WHO). Reflecting this growing number of partnerships, the number of deployments of humanitarian experts has continuously increased – overall, ZIF deployed 33 humanitarian experts to various missions in 23 countries, among others Sudan, the Philippines and Ukraine.
To adequately respond to this growing number of requests for humanitarian experts, ZIF continues to expand the humanitarian capacities of its roster. Learn more here. The Federal Foreign Office supports the deployments of humanitarian experts as well as the expansion of the ZIF Expert-Pool.