Technical Expert - Digital Health to deliver Global COVID Certificate Network

Contract

This is a International Consultant contract. More about International Consultant contracts.

Background

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is the UN’s global development network, advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience, and resources to help people build a better life. We are on the ground in 170 countries and territories, working with governments and people on their own solutions to global and national development challenges to help empower lives and build resilient nations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on global travel and global supply chains. This has had particularly negative impacts on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), who rely on tourism and international connectivity for economic survival. However, worldwide reopening efforts have made slow progress - with LMICs especially struggling in building the necessary digital infrastructure to re-join the global economy. To-date, multiple and competing COVID-19 certifications have been developed to attempt to restart travel at scale. However, these are fragmented and have issues recognising each other in a trusted manner.

There are also no existing and established trust chains for COVID certificates, or universal standards, policies, or governance mechanisms. This is a very fragmented landscape, with no interoperability between the various specifications. Without global leadership, there is a risk that the standards, policies, and technologies led by the Global North become the default – potentially marginalising lower-income countries who are not resourced to implement such approaches, thereby entrenching the digital and broader divide.

Countries are also having to pursue convergence on a bilateral basis, agreeing to the interoperability of COVID certificates individually. These discussions and decisions will understandably be driven by economic priorities – with countries keen to re-open to priority markets for trade and tourism. This risks lower-priority countries being excluded from such agreements due to the limited capacity for civil servants to negotiate technical and policy compatibility. The costs of discussions and technical development are also prohibitive for many lower-income countries.

To enable an inclusive global reopening, we need a global trust architecture, to bring all these disparate centralised ecosystems together and to provide a mechanism that allows countries and other verifiers to determine who they trust and then access trusted parties’ signing keys to verify COVID certificates. This architecture requires a new approach. There needs to be a discovery mechanism for trust building as well as a way for countries and other COVID certificate issuing entities to easily and securely access each other’s signing keys once they decide to trust one another.

Duties and Responsibilities

Each country has largely developed their own credentialling approach. These are fragmented and have issues recognizing each other in a trusted manner. Related to this, is the negative impact for developing countries – who do not have the civil service capacity or bandwidth to invest in bilateral discussions with every other country in order to recognise each others certificates.

Recognising this, UNDP is collaborating with the Linux Foundation for Public Health to deliver a Global COVID-19 Certificate Network (GCCN). This will provide:

• Targeted functionality, allowing different COVID-19 certificate ecosystems to find each other on a multi-stakeholder network while providing a way for COVID-19 certificate verifiers to:
• A discovery mechanism to locate existing COVID-19 certificate issuers and issuing networks
• Mechanisms for countries and other verifiers to calidate their COVID-19 certificate policies and decide whether to accept their certificates/whose certificates to accept, and
• A list of trusted issuers and access their public keys for certificate verifications

It will also leverage a number of underlying processes and technologies. This includes the Trust Management Infrastructure developed by the European Self Sovereign Identity Framework Labs that supports all types of ‘Roots of Trust’, self-defined ‘Trust Schemes’ and Trust Schemes such as eIDAS, Pan Canadian Trust Framework.

As part of this work, UNDP is hiring a Technical Expert to lead key components of the GCCN. In particular, the scope of work will include:

1. Working with the UNDP team to clearly define the scope of the pilots and validate the functional requirements against underpinning technologies.
2. Directing and working with pilot ‘client’ technology partners to:
   1. Specify and implement the GCCN Client software screens and API interfaces
   2. Specify and implement the GCCN Client software testing cases
   3. Specify and implement the GCCN Client software integration and deployment plan
3. Directing and working with pilot TRAIN infrastructure technology partner to:
   1. Specify and implement the GCCN Authorization and Access infrastructure
   2. Specify and implement the extension of the TRAIN API, as required
   3. Specify and implement the GCCN Trust Registry DNS infrastructure
   4. Specify and implement the test cases for Trust Service Provider list CRUD operations
   5. Document, with the TRAIN infrastructure technology partner, the infrastructure operations outline
4. Working with pilot participants to ensure that all necessary documentation has been correctly ‘onboarded’ into the pilot.
5. Managing the overall pilot technical delivery, ensuring timely completion of deliverables, efficient resource allocation, and clear communications and feature demonstration to stakeholders.
6. Working with the UNDP team, pilot participants and stakeholders to establish progress milestones and success criteria.

The IC shall work closely with UNDP staff and partners (particularly the relevant UNDP Country Office(s) that are involved in the pilot – or scaling) for this assignment.

Competencies

Corporate

• Demonstrates integrity by modelling the UN’s values and ethical standards.
• Promotes the vision, mission, and strategic goals of UNDP.
• Displays cultural, gender, religion, race, nationality and age sensitivity and adaptability.

Functional

• Strong research, analytical, writing, and communication skills, including ability to produce high quality technical reports and knowledge products,
• Ability to work independently, produce high quality outputs in a timely manner.
• Professional experience in one or more of the areas of the access to treatment.
• Relevant experience strengthening the capacity of civil society or government officials on access to treatment would be highly advantageous.

Required Skills and Experience

• Academic Qualifications: Master’s degree in computer science, data science, engineering, or related technology field is desirable
• Work experience: At least five years of demonstrated experience in technical architecture, particularly in a context of open-source technologies; knowledge of technologies and approaches relevant to open-source.
• Language: Excellent English writing and presentation skills are required. Working knowledge of another UN language is considered an asset;

Scope of Price Proposal and Schedule of Payments

All proposals must be expressed as a total lumpsum amount, including all the deliverables identified above. This amount must be “all-inclusive”. Please note that the terms “all-inclusive” implies that all costs (professional fees, living allowances, communications, consumables, etc.) that could possibly be incurred are already factored into the final amounts submitted in the proposal.

Payment:

Payments will be made on a lump sum basis upon submission of a certification of payment (CoP) form duly certified and confirmation by the reporting manager of satisfactory performance of achieved work (deliverables/outputs).

Schedule of payments:

Deliverables/ Outputs

% of payment (total contract value)

Defining the scope, technical architecture, and functional requirements of the 1-2 GCCN pilots.

40%

Providing technical expertise, oversight, and quality assurance to ensure the successful delivery of the above pilots.

40%

Documenting all necessary technical aspects and components to ensure other pilots can be quickly launched – including without direct UNDP involvement.

20%

Recommended Presentation of Offer

Interested individual consultants must submit the following documents/information to demonstrate their qualifications. Candidates that fail to submit the required information will not be considered.

Duly completed Letter of Confirmation of Interest and Availability using the template provided by UNDP, which includes the financial proposal as annex 2.

Financial Proposal that indicates the all-inclusive fixed total lumpsum price, by breakdown of costs (including any local permitting or other costs), as per template provided. If an Offeror is employed by an organization/company/institution, and he/she expects his/her employer to charge a management fee in the process of releasing him/her to UNDP under Reimbursable Loan Agreement (RLA), the Offeror must indicate at this point, and ensure that all such costs are duly incorporated in the financial proposal submitted to UNDP.

Cover Letter and Personal CV or a duly completed P11 form, indicating how consultant meet the requirements and demonstrate the relevant experience to deliver this ToR, including examples of similar projects and writing samples, ideally of similar documents to those requested under this ToR, as well as proposed methodology to meet the deliverables under this ToR and proposed timelines. In addition, contact details (email and telephone number) of the consultant and at least three (3) professional references.

Criteria for Selection of the Best Offer

Evaluation Criteria:

Applicants will be screened against qualifications and competencies specified below through a desk review. The award of the contract would be made to the individual consultant whose offer has been evaluated and determined as:

• Only those applications which are responsive and compliant will be evaluated;
• Offers will be evaluated according to the Combined Scoring method – where the desk review will be weighted at 40%, an interview will be weighted at 30% and the financial offer (based on a quoted all-inclusive daily fee) will be weighted at 30%;
• Desk review Criteria weight; 40%
• The candidates obtaining a minimum of 70% (28 points) of the maximum obtainable points for desk review (40 points) shall be considered for the interview;
• Candidates obtaining a minimum of 70% (70 points) of the maximum obtainable points for technical score ,desk review and interview (70 points) shall be considered for the financial evaluation;
• Please note that only shortlisted candidates will be contacted;

Desk Review weight – 40% (maximum 40 points)

Criteria 1: Minimum 5 years of relevant work experience in technical architecture (25 points)

Criteria 2: Knowledge of technologies and approaches relevant to open-source (10 points)

Criteria 3: Relevant educational and/or professional qualification (5 points)

Interview weight – 30% (maximum 30 points)

Financial evaluation – Total 30% (30 points)

Annex

Annex I - TOR - IC Technical Expert for Global COVID Certificate Network

Annex II - General Terms and Condition for Individual Contractor

Annex III - Offerors Letter to UNDP Confirming Interest and Availability

Annex IV - UNDP P11 Template (Optional)