Social and Behavior Change Officer for Immunization Vacancy-Job Ref: BJHNUNICEF/0306/2025813

Social and Behavior Change Officer for Immunization Vacancy-Job Ref: BJHNUNICEF/0306/2025813

Tegucigalpa (Honduras)

The United Nations General Assembly has entrusted UNICEF with the mandate to promote the protection of children’s rights, help meet their basic needs, and enhance the opportunities available to them so that they can fully achieve their potential.

UNICEF is guided by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and strives to ensure that these rights become enduring ethical principles and international standards of conduct for children. UNICEF reiterates that the survival, protection, and development of children are universal development imperatives and integral to human progress.

UNICEF mobilizes political will and material resources to help countries, particularly developing countries, ensure that children have priority rights to resources and to build capacity to establish appropriate policies and provide services for children and their families. UNICEF strives to ensure that special protection is given to the most disadvantaged children: victims of war, disasters, extreme poverty, all forms of violence and exploitation, and children with disabilities.

UNICEF responds in emergencies by protecting children’s rights. In coordination with United Nations partners and humanitarian agencies, UNICEF provides its unique rapid response services to its partners to alleviate the suffering of children and their caregivers.

UNICEF is a non-partisan organization, and its cooperation is non-discriminatory. In everything it does, it prioritizes the most disadvantaged children and the countries most in need. Through its country programs, UNICEF aims to promote the equal rights of women and girls and support their full participation in the political, social, and economic development of their communities.

Context

Childhood vaccination is one of the most effective pillars of public health worldwide. Since 1974, the expansion of vaccination programs has saved the lives of at least 154 million people, 101 million of whom were children under 1 year of age (WHO, 2024). However, in recent years, multiple crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic have severely affected vaccination coverage in many countries, including Honduras. In 2020 alone, more than 23 million children worldwide missed their routine vaccination schedules.

In recent years, Honduras has seen a sustained decline in childhood vaccination coverage rates. For example, the third dose of the pentavalent (DTP) vaccine reached only 73% in 2023, well below the minimum standard of 95% recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Furthermore, the percentage of children with zero doses increased from 14% in 2019 to 18% in 2021. These trends demonstrate that, in the case of Honduras, the decline in coverage rates extends beyond the pandemic years.

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Despite the fact that the Honduran government carries out major national immunization campaigns each year, and that health centers have the necessary vaccine supply, coverage rates remain low (PAHO, 2021). This suggests that the reasons for the decline could be primarily linked to factors related to the demand for vaccination. As a result, UNICEF, in support of the Expanded Program on Immunization, developed a communication strategy titled “Yo Soy Máximo.” Likewise, a partnership was established with the National Autonomous University of Honduras to study the cultural, social, and psychological aspects that could be influencing this situation, which have been little studied in the country.

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Social and Behavior Change (SBC) at UNICEF is a cross-cutting program strategy that analyzes and addresses the cognitive, social, and structural determinants of individual practices and social change in development and humanitarian contexts. SBC utilizes the latest in social and behavioral sciences to understand people, their beliefs, values, sociocultural norms, and the economic and institutional contexts that shape their lives, with the aim of engaging them and increasing their influence in shaping solutions for change.

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