Youth Innovation Consultant, Office of Innovation, 1 year (Remote)

Consultant Programme & Policy Innovation

Overview

Support the sourcing and management of youth innovation solutions.

You have:

• Advanced University Degree in a relevant field (Social Sciences, Humanities, International Relations, Economics, Business, etc.). A first University Degree combined with 5 years of professional experience may be accepted instead of an Advanced University Degree.
• 3 years of professional work experience in innovation, gaming industry technology, mental health product development, content development, or working with young people.
• Demonstrate care about learning, education, and youngsters meeting their potential.
• Ability to adopt ideas and implement them fearlessly.
• Resourcefulness in an ambiguous environment.
• Excellent time management and strong organizational skills, able to handle multiple tasks under tight deadlines.
• Experience working with multiple countries and stakeholders.
• Fluency in English is required; strong written and verbal skills necessary.
• Knowledge of another official UN language or a local language is an asset.
• Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergencies is considered an asset.

Contract

This is a Consultancy contract. More about Consultancy contracts.

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 and lasting results for children.

Within the Office of Innovation, the Portfolio, Culture and Scale Team has a crucial role in ensuring groundbreaking innovations meet children and young people’s most urgent needs. By managing UNICEF’s global innovation portfolios, we help identify priorities for the application of innovations. We also strengthen the capacity of UNICEF offices to scale proven innovations to millions.

In line with the Global Innovation Strategy, UNICEF uses an innovation portfolio management approach to align technical and financial resources to promising projects in various categories of innovation, including digital innovation, social innovation, data innovation, physical products, innovative finance, and frugal innovation. UNICEF will invest in health, immunization and nutrition innovations and support the development and scale up of new and promising solutions to the most pressing problems facing children, in line with UNICEF programming.

The scope of UNICEF’s Youth Innovation portfolio includes solving the biggest problems facing Adolescents and youth by supporting the identification, development and scale-up of innovative solutions.

How can you make a difference?

Guided by UNICEF’s innovation portfolio management approach, this role will work under the general direction of the Innovation Manager (Youth), to provide support to the sourcing of new innovation solutions, as well as management of existing solutions in the Youth Innovation portfolios, primarily FunDoo – a digital virtual coach for youth. This includes providing direct technical assistance and guidance, facilitating regular engagement with project counterparts and stakeholder, and supporting project reporting. This role will also support the development of a strategic and conceptual design of the forthcoming global youth innovation hub.

Scope of work

UNICEF Office of Innovation is seeking to obtain the following services from a consultant with extensive expertise of working on the youth innovations to:

1. Technical coordination, monitoring for FunDoo: Support programme teams in roll-out of FunDoo content, coordination of FunDoo global deployment team, monitoring and reporting for counterparts and partners.
2. Country office scale up: Support country offices in deployment and launch FunDoo
3. Knowledge Management & Capacity Building: Roll-out of key capacity building and community sessions for country offices, Ensuring INVENT content is up to date in relation to the portfolio.
4. Support in sourcing and scale up of other Youth Innovations: namely SMS BIZ, Learn2Act, Youth Hub and more.

Your main responsibilities will be:

• Technical coordination, scale and monitoring for FunDoo
• Country office scale up
• Knowledge Management and Capacity Building:
• Support in sourcing and scale up of Youth Innovations

Please access the full ToR and related information here Youth Innovation Specialist - OOI Final.docx

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

• Advanced University Degree in a relevant field (including Social Sciences, Humanities, International Relations, Economics, Business or other relevant field). A first University Degree combined with a total of 5 years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree.
• 3 years of professional work experience in a relevant field, such as innovation, gaming industry technology, mental health product development, content development, or working with young people.
• Care about learning, education and youngsters meeting their potential.
• Can pick up ideas and take them to reality fearlessly.
• Are resourceful in an ambiguous environment.
• Excellent time management and strong organizational skills and ability to handle multiple tasks under tight deadlines.
• Experience in working with multiple countries and with multiple stakeholders.
• Fluency in English is required, strong written and verbal competency is necessary.
• Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergency is considered an asset.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

Travel:

• The consultant is expected to travel to six countries [Sweden (4 nights), DRC (5 nights, Abu Dhabi (tbd) (2 nights), Uzbekistan (5 nights), India (3 nights), Mozambique (5 nights) a through the duration of the assignment.
• The consultant is responsible to arrange his/her own travel, including visa and travel insurance.

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.

Please find attached the financial proposal template Consultancy Financial Offer template.docx

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.

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.

Apply now

Potential interview questions

Added 3 years ago - Updated 1 year ago - Source: unicef.org