Business Strategy Mentor Consultant, Office of Innovation, 9 months (Remote)

Contract

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UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives.

The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the start-up thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

UNICEF's Office of Innovation creates opportunities for the world's children by focusing on where new markets can meet their vital needs. We do this by:

• Connecting youth communities (or more broadly -- anyone disconnected or under-served) to decision-makers, and to each other, to deliver informed, relevant and sustained programmes that build better, stronger futures for children.
• Provoking change for children through an entrepreneurial approach -- in a traditionally risk averse field -- to harness rapidly moving innovations and apply them to serve the needs of all children.
• Creating new models of partnership that leverage core business values across the public, private and academic sectors in order to deliver fast, and lasting results for children.

The Office of Innovation specifically looks to form partnerships around frontier technologies (like drones and UAVs, blockchain, 21st century skills, urban technologies, new banking tools, wearables and sensors, or 3D-Printing) that exist at the intersection of $100 billion business markets and 1 billion person needs – and to identify how they can grow and scale profitably and inclusively.

Our team

We're an interdisciplinary team around the world tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling new technologies and practices. With our partners, we focus on convening and collaborating on new and different solutions, low- and high-tech, by:

• Looking at the 2–5-year horizon to evaluate emerging and trending technologies and to see how UNICEF can work with the private sector on doing better business while improving essential services for children.
• Investing in early-stage solutions that show great potential to positively impact children in the 02-year future including the Venture Fund that invests in open-source technology solutions from start-ups based in UNICEF’s programme countries.
• Identifying proven solutions that can be implemented at national scale in multiple countries – taking the ideas that help thousands in one country, bringing them to dozens of countries across multiple sectors, and impacting the lives of millions of children.”

How can you make a difference?

The UNICEF Venture Fund (the Fund) has been specifically designed to finance early stage, open-source technology that can benefit children. The core motivation of the Venture Fund is to identify "clusters" or portfolios of initiatives around emerging technology - so that UNICEF can both shape markets and also learn about and guide these technologies to benefit children. We invest in solutions that can impact the lives of the most vulnerable children. We find these solutions clustered around $100 billion industries in frontier technology spaces, such as: UAVs, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, nanosatellites, and human dynamics.

With $35M (+ ETH 2267 + BTC 8) raised to date, the Venture Fund is scaling its investment portfolio with the aim of investing in 20 start-ups every year. The current portfolio of 73 companies consists of several cohorts of companies developing and piloting solutions in virtual and augmented reality, data science and artificial intelligence, blockchain, UAVs, IoT, and in assistive technology.

Your main responsibilities will be:

UNICEF Venture Fund is looking for a seasoned business mentor to support the Fund’s business strategy related activities and to guide a number of Venture Fund portfolio companies on developing and implementing an effective business strategy, for example by testing and identifying user groups, and metrics, as well as revenue generation. This may include:

• Onboarding portfolio companies into business strategy curriculum, monitoring progress, and providing feedback.
• Providing technical assistance to portfolio companies on business-related topics through regular mentoring sessions and other modalities
• Developing workplans with each portfolio company for the investment period and evolving where necessary
• Contributing new content to and maintaining existing content in the Business Mentor Toolkit and contribute to development of best practice mentorship approaches within the wider team.
• Developing external relationships which may be useful for the Venture Fund.
• Providing strategic support to the Venture Fund team in other business-related areas which aim to improve portfolio outcomes, operational approaches etc.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

1. An advanced university degree (Master’s or higher) in entrepreneurship, business administration, finance, macroeconomics, business other or other relevant field. *A first University Degree in a relevant field combined with 10 years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree.
2. A minimum of 8 years of relevant professional experience in business strategy, financial modeling or a relevant field
3. Experience in consulting and advising on relevant technical areas
4. Previous experience in starting and growing technology companies
5. A track record of providing mentorship and assistance to start-ups
6. Development of identifying and developing technical assistance tools for companies
7. Experience with open-source technologies, open source business models and cultivating open source communities
8. Strong written and verbal communication skills, excellent technical communication with peers and non-technical stakeholders
9. Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergency is considered an asset.
10. Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

Please access the full ToR and related information here: TOR - Business Strategy Mentor.pdf

Payment details and further considerations

Payment of professional fees will be based on the submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.

How to apply:

Interest applicant is required to submit a financial proposal with all-inclusive fee.

Financial proposal must include travel costs (economy class) and daily subsistence allowance, if travel is required as per TOR and any other estimated costs: visa, travel/health insurance

Applications without a financial proposal will not be considered.

For every Child, you demonstrate…

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS).

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

The competencies required for this post are….

1. Applying technical expertise – Level 3
2. Creating and Innovating – Level 2
3. Entrepreneurial Thinking – Level 3

UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws.

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.