Re-advertisement: Consultancy - Deployment at Scale Specialist (More Water More Life), Home-based, Office of Innovation, 16 weeks (full-time)

Contract

This is a Consultancy contract. More about Consultancy contracts.

**This is a re-advertisement in order to expand the candidate pool. Previous applicants need not reapply as their original application will be duly considered.**

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.

For every child, innovate

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 (OOI) 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 startup thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

UNICEF's OOI 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, lasting results for children.

UNICEF’s Global Innovation Portfolios

Matching Today’s Challenges with Tomorrow’s Solutions ensures that all investments we make in innovation fit with our global aim of ensuring that every child can survive, thrive, and live and learn in a safe, inclusive space, and that innovation is applied to the most pressing problems faced by some of the most vulnerable children and young people. In line with the Global Innovation Strategy, UNICEF’s innovation portfolio management approach aligns technical and financial resources to promising projects from across the organization that can accelerate results for children.

Through the development of UNICEF’s Global Innovation Strategy, nine portfolios focus areas were identified: learning, water, and sanitation (WASH), maternal and newborn health, immunization, climate change, gender equality, humanitarian, youth, and mental health and psychosocial support. Through a problem-driven approach guided by the respective UNICEF Programme Groups (PG), each portfolio is committed to supporting the identification, development and scale-up of country-level innovative solutions, to meet the demands and priorities in line with UNICEF’s Strategic Plan 2022-2025, and ultimately the attainment of related SDGs.

Each portfolio will contain solutions that use new approaches, tools and technology that address key problems UNICEF is trying to solve for and with children and young people, and that have potential to scale and significantly accelerate results. Innovation solutions within the portfolios are selected based on their potential to accelerate results for children across multiple countries and regions. There can be one or more different categories (or types) of innovation in a portfolio, including digital innovation, social innovation, data innovation, physical products, innovative finance, and frugal innovation.

WASH Innovation Portfolio

Universal access to basic sanitation services by 2030 is the goal, but the current annual rate of progress needs to be doubled to achieve that. The provision of safe water, sanitation and hygienic conditions play an essential role in protecting human health during all infectious disease outbreaks, including the current COVID-19 outbreak. UNICEF has identified problems that, if solved, will unlock faster progress. Innovation is key to co-creating new solutions to problems like lack of handwashing stations, leaks in water networks, climate-resilient sanitation services, remote monitoring of water or wastewater systems, remote sensing, and other technologies for locating water sources in water scarce environments, fecal sludge management in humanitarian settings, absence of adequate sanitation products and accessible menstrual health information for women and girls.

More specifically, the WASH innovation portfolio aims at addressing the following four problems, out of which the groundwater mapping project addresses the second problem.

1. Access for vulnerable populations to resilient WASH services in emergencies

How might UNICEF and partners best support vulnerable populations gain and maintain access to resilient WASH services in emergencies? Achieving the SDG 6.2 of ensuring universal and equitable access to sanitation requires effective management of human excreta along the whole sanitation service chain including containment, emptying, transportation, treatment, disposal and potentially re-use. This applies for both development and humanitarian settings. The greatest challenge of achieving this ambitious goal is lack of appropriate approaches, products, and services for effective fecal sludge management (FSM) in humanitarian setting due to the various logistics required to set up an effective FSM system.

2. Tackling foreseen climate change impact on WASH services delivery and access

How might UNICEF and partners best tackle foreseen climate change impact on WASH services delivery and access? Climate Change is already having a detrimental impact on the access to, and sustainability of WASH services. This is because of direct changes in the climate i.e., changes in the precipitation patterns (timing, intensity, duration, and predictability), sea level rise etc.; as well as indirect impacts e.g., increased water demands (domestic and irrigation), and saline intrusion (due to the lowering water levels). There is an urgent and increasing need to invest in climate-proofing the WASH sector.

3. Monitoring WASH service delivery

How might UNICEF and partners best monitor WASH service delivery? In the last decade, the WASH sector has achieved very encouraging results in terms of data availability, However, availability of WASH data often does not translate into evidence-based planning. The data is generated mostly in response to an issue and isn’t a comprehensive recognized and standardized system. The overall aim is to improve WASH planning, with two specific objectives: (a) better strategic targeting and prioritization in both development and humanitarian interventions, as well as (b) timely course-correction and rapid response through stronger needs monitoring and early warning systems.

4. Shaping water, sanitation, and hand hygiene markets

How might UNICEF and partners best shape water, sanitation, and hand hygiene markets? Sanitation markets in which customers seek to purchase their own sanitation systems from local businesses have delivered much of the basic sanitation gains achieved in many developing countries. Ideally these markets should provide choice amongst appropriate and affordable high-quality sanitation goods and services for those who lack a basic sanitation service level. By building such markets, we can increase sustained access to and use of basic sanitation with a focus on low-income populations. It does this by supporting sustainable, competitive businesses to better reach and serve the unmet sanitation needs of low-income households.

More Water More Life – Groundwater Mapping initiative

Drought is a major disaster affecting East and Southern Africa (ESA) region, resulting in water insecurity which in turn causes disruption of livelihoods, increased risk of diseases, food insecurity, and loss of life. Groundwater is the largest water resource in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs) areas of the region, having the greatest potential for providing water security and socio-economic benefit. However, there are major deficiencies in knowledge and understanding of groundwater suitability areas/ locations and how to mobilize the resource in a sustainable way in the face of a changing climate. Due to complex geology and hydrogeological context, drilling success rates have been poor - with records from previous drilling using conventional hydrogeological survey methods recording less than 50% success rate.

In this initiative, a new approach piloted in Afar region in northern Ethiopia and southern region of Madagascar to map deep aquifers will be scaled-up in Ethiopia and replicated in ASAL regions in Angola, Kenya, and Somalia. The approach combines remote sensing, weighted GIS overlay analysis, hydrogeological mapping, and geophysical surveying, that has significantly increased the success rate of drilling ground water. In this phase, water quality will also be investigated within the remote sensing and the GIS analysis. The objectives of the groundwater mapping include:

• Regional investigation of the groundwater flows and recharge characteristics in selected transboundary and in country aquifers in the project areas in the Horn of Africa of Ethiopia, Kenya to inform groundwater potential, water security and water balance in the project areas
• Risk assessment and monitoring of the groundwater abstraction in the test wells under the project to provide multi-village water schemes and simulation of impacts and hazards to inform sustainability of the program
• Monitoring and analysis of water quality and its dynamics to inform better water abstraction techniques and to inform managed aquifer recharge to improve water quality to support productive wells for multi-village schemes

Other products from the mapping exercise, such as harmonized geological maps and socio-economic data and water demand maps are expected to inform development of long-term plans such as water supply master plans. The exercise further informs delineation of localities with no or minimum groundwater potential and required water quality so that strategies for alternative water sources (surface water, rainwater, or conveying water from long distance) are put in place. The project is also supporting the development of an online database for boreholes and hydrogeological data, which will improve geological and hydrological knowledge, and lead to improvements across the drilling sector. The project will lay ground for expansion of underground water development in the target countries (Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia) by providing data and other related information demonstrating underground water potential.

This initiative contributes to UNICEF’s climate resilient WASH priority area and addresses the climate change portfolio problem statement on integrating climate resilience in development and humanitarian services.

How can you make a difference?

The incumbent will produce the Groundwater Mapping Deployment at Scale Toolkit to provide UNICEF Country Offices with a template to replicate and adapt this innovative approach to climate resilient WASH programming.

UNICEF defines a scalable deployment model as a series of strategic steps which have been designed to be replicated across several geographical locations (i.e., different countries, different regions in a country, different districts in a region), with several national and international partners, and with different types of beneficiaries (different language, race, gender, religion). A scalable deployment model is usually composed of a deployment process/journey (set of standardised sequenced steps necessary to deploy a proven innovation into a new geography) to a deployment package/toolkit (set of templates, guidance documents, TORs, sample MoU for partners, technical guidance documents).

The incumbent is expected to 1. collate and compiling key documentation and templates developed by the ESA Regional Office, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Angola UNICEF country offices; 2. strategically organize the collated documentation in a step-by-step process to the benefit of new country offices; 3. templatize key documents for the benefit of new UNICEF country offices using past UNICEF’s deployment journey as example reference; 4. upload key collated documentation and step-by-step process in a user-friendly SharePoint page.

The incumbent will work closely with the UNICEF East and Southern Africa Regional Office management and technical staff to identify and develop programming options and recommendations for the successful replication of the programming. The incumbent will also work closely with ESA Country Offices technical staff. As well as written material showcasing what has been achieved and learnt, s/he is encouraged to uncover and summarize what difficulties and failures were experienced. This report will be for both internal and external publication, to inform the scale up of the project to other areas, countries, and regions.

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

• Postgraduate qualifications in innovation and/or water and sanitation (WASH)
• *A first University Degree in a relevant field combined with 2 additional years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree
• At least 8 years of relevant experience in knowledge management for social innovations
• At least 8 years of relevant experience in implementing innovative WASH solutions for the not-for-profit sector
• Experience in developing toolkits / scaling models for innovative solutions
• Experience managing and implementing WASH programming in UNICEF and/or in another UN agency is considered an advantage
• Significant experience working with Sub-Saharan African firms – particularly in providing technical quality assurance on GIS, hydrological, geological, and geographical studies is considered an advantage
• At least 8 years of relevant working experience in the subject matter, including WASH innovation
• Strong analytical background including planning for and conducting analytical exercises
• Experience in conducting reviews or evaluations of innovation programmes, ideally experience in deploying innovative, participatory, youth-led and other non-traditional monitoring and evaluation methods in development contexts
• Experience conducting qualitative research (including key informant interviews) analysing large quantities of data/documents and synthesizing them
• Experience working with the UN system, NGOs, governments in the development/humanitarian context
• Experience in working with multiple countries and with multiple stakeholders an asset.
• Excellent written English and verbal communication skills required.
• Experience with processing large amounts of information and synthesizing it
• Strong interpersonal and networking skills. Ability to work collaboratively in a team and in a diverse work environment.
• Knowledge of United Nations - particularly UNICEF - programming, processes and work streams an asset.
• Fluency in English is required, strong written and verbal competency is necessary.
• Working knowledge of another UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish) an asset.

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.

Payment details and further considerations

• Monthly payment, based on monthly tasks and progress reports, approved upon monthly review with supervisor.
• Consultant is responsible for his/her own health and travel insurance
• Consultant is eligible for standard DSA for all work-related travel

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.