REQUEST FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST (REOI) - ESMASP APPLICATIONS OFFICER

Vanuatu Affordable and Resilient Settlements Project (VARS)
REQUEST FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST (REOI)

Individual Selection of Consultant

Assignment Title: ESMASP Applications Officer
Duty Station: PMU, Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources,Port Vila, Vanuatu
Date of Publication: 15 th September 2026
Deadline for submission: 29 th September 2026 at time: 1400 Hours.
Reference Number: VU-MLNR-568292-CS-INDV

1. BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECT:

The Elol Etas Subdivision Marketing, Allocation and Sale Process (ESMASP) is the government- led process for the transparent marketing, allocation and sale of residential lots in the Elol Etas (Etas Gardens) Subdivision. It is implemented by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources (MoLNR), with operational and administrative support from the Project Management Unit
(PMU) of the Vanuatu Affordable and Resilient Settlements (VARS) Project, financed by the World Bank. The ESMASP Office operates visibly as a MoLNR function, reinforcing that the subdivision is a Government of Vanuatu-led project.

The ESMASP is delivered by a three-person core implementation team — the ESMASP Manager, an ESMASP Project Officer and an ESMASP Applications Officer — supported by the VARS PMU and MoLNR and complemented by a defined set of allied in-house resources drawn from the PMU and the Ministry: nominated outreach leads, a pool of PMU interns providing outreach and intake support, in-house database, web-administration and IT support staff, and PMU vehicles. Public awareness, marketing and community engagement are delivered in-house
by this team; no external NGO delivery partner is engaged. Applications are received through a single, controlled channel — in person at the ESMASP Office, where they are entered directly into the application system by ESMASP staff (subject to Project Steering Committee confirmation of the in-person-only channel). Given anticipated oversubscription in the order of 20:1, the integrity of the selection process is the single most important deliverable of the ESMASP, and all positions carry explicit transparency, conflict-of-interest, and documentation obligations.

The ESMASP Applications Officer holds the application-management role within the team and leads the ESMASP Office as the single point of application registration. The position was restored as a dedicated role in recognition of the application-management workload implied by the anticipated 20:1 oversubscription and the sustained reserve-list reallocation function that runs through to settlement. Under the in-house delivery model, the Office carries a larger share of the applicant-facing workload than previously planned, and the Officer supervises the interns assigned to Office reception, application terminals, data entry and scanning. The role also provides internal separation between application processing and the outreach and grievance-intake functions held by the Project Officer, in support of the segregation-of-duties controls in the Implementation Manual.