WHO turns to Central Asia training to bind environmental health to One Health practice
The World Health Organization is seeking an external consultant to develop a policy- and practice-oriented training course that places environmental health inside the center of One Health work in Central Asia. The assignment is not a general awareness exercise. It is built to help governments and technical staff translate environmental evidence into governance, surveillance, prevention, and implementation across the human health, agriculture, and environment sectors.
The training package is meant for policymakers and technical audiences, with content shaped around the region’s practical decision-making needs. WHO wants the course to reflect climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, water and sanitation, food systems, emergency preparedness, and the broader pressures that shape disease emergence and population risk. In effect, the consultant will be asked to turn a complex multisectoral concept into a usable curriculum that can be delivered, taught, and applied.
The scope is broad because the problem is broad. Environmental exposures do not stay within one ministry’s mandate, and neither do the consequences.
Course content is designed around risk pathways, governance, and prevention
WHO wants the course to explain the One Health concept and the specific role of environmental health within it, then move quickly into the mechanisms that connect environmental change to human, animal, agricultural, and ecosystem outcomes. The curriculum must cover the One Health Joint Plan of Action and its implementation guide, the triple planetary crisis, and the environmental drivers that shape risk: climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, land degradation, water stress, and ecosystem disruption.
The training also has to address agriculture as a One Health sector, including crop and livestock systems, as well as zoonotic disease interfaces and the environmental determinants of spillover. Food systems will sit alongside food safety and food security, while antimicrobial resistance must be treated through its environmental pathways rather than as a siloed clinical problem. Ecosystem services, biodiversity, and nature-based solutions are also part of the syllabus, but the course is expected to evaluate them through a health lens, including possible risks as well as co-benefits.
Integrated surveillance and early warning will be another core pillar. The consultant must build modules that bring together monitored data from water, soil, air, food, waste, and ecosystems, then show how those streams can inform risk assessment and prevention. Governance, policy coherence, financing, and accountability are not optional extras; they are central to whether any One Health agenda survives contact with routine public administration.
The curriculum must teach practitioners how to act before emergencies begin
The competency list in the vacancy notice makes the practical intent unmistakable. By the end of the course, a One Health practitioner should be able to identify environmental hazards before they become health emergencies, locate sources of exposure and pathways of transmission, interpret climate, biodiversity, and ecological data, and assess wildlife and habitat-related risks. The course also has to support joint zoonotic-risk assessments, identify environmental reservoirs and pathways of antimicrobial resistance, and inform agricultural, food-safety, and livestock interventions.
Just as important, the curriculum must train participants to design prevention measures at source. That moves the focus upstream, where environmental health usually has its strongest effect and where delayed action is most expensive. A curriculum built around source control, exposure mapping, and prevention can give ministries a shared vocabulary for action before outbreaks, contamination events, and ecological shocks compound into larger crises.
The consultancy also calls for explicit attention to vulnerable communities and livelihoods. In Central Asia, that requirement matters because environmental stress, food insecurity, and health risk often accumulate in the same places and affect the same households. The training must therefore make space for equity, community participation, regional cooperation, and country-level action planning.
Eight to ten modules, 30 to 36 hours, and a WHO-style course package
WHO is asking for a structured product, not a loose set of slides. The consultant will first produce an inception note and workplan, then a detailed course outline with 8 to 10 modules that can be delivered in 30 to 36 hours. Draft module descriptions will need learning objectives, content elements, methods, and expected outputs. After that, the assignment extends to a full presentation deck for each module, facilitator notes or speaking points, a final facilitator-oriented course outline, a short reference list of WHO and Quadripartite sources, and a revised final package incorporating WHO feedback.
The deliverables are staged across the first half of 2027. The inception note is due in December 2026, the course outline by late February 2027, draft module descriptions by the end of March, slides by the end of April, facilitator notes and final outline by the end of May, and the revised package by the end of June. The timetable signals a deliberate, iterative development process rather than a one-off document review.
WHO is looking for technical depth, instructional design, and regional fluency
The qualifications are equally explicit. WHO is seeking an advanced university degree in public health, environmental health, veterinary public health, epidemiology, ecology, health policy, or a related field. The candidate should have at least seven years of experience in One Health, environmental health, or multisectoral public health capacity building, along with demonstrated experience developing training or capacity-building materials for policymakers and technical audiences.
Instructional design skills are listed as essential, along with knowledge of environmental health and/or One Health challenges in Central Asia and proficiency in Microsoft PowerPoint. Expert English is required. Knowledge of Russian, or another Central Asian language, is desirable.
The vacancy is for an off-site consultant with no travel expected, and the contract is set at 60 working days. Remuneration is listed at USD 350 to 499 per day, depending on experience, under consultants’ pay band level B. WHO also states that the vacancy may be used to identify candidates for other similar consultancies at the same level.
The recruitment notice carries the familiar administrative and compliance requirements that frame all WHO contracting, including integrity screening, background verification, vaccination-related conditions, and recognition of qualifications from institutions listed in the World Higher Education Database. Those details sit around the assignment, but the core task is straightforward: build a course that helps Central Asia’s policy and technical workforce connect environmental evidence to One Health action.
A curriculum like this will only matter if it can move beyond terminology and into decision-making. The hard part is converting multisectoral theory into a tool that ministries can actually use.