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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.
For every child, innovate…
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 startup 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 Global Innovation Strategy 2.0 strategy aims to achieve critical shifts in the way UNICEF currently works on innovation, building on what has been successful, while also addressing lessons learned and capitalizing on new opportunities. These critical shifts are:
- Setting global priorities based on the needs of children and young people, focusing on those areas with the largest need.
- Focusing on scaling innovations
- Catalysing inventions where no known solution exists.
- Connecting the organization and convening critical stakeholders to solve the most pressing challenges facing children and young people.
These shifts will be enabled by:
- Establishing a portfolio management approach
- Innovative funding and financing and the application of financial engineering
- Ensuring rapid learning and fostering collaboration
- Building innovation culture and competence across UNICEF.
How can you make a difference?
This role within the Portfolio, Culture & Scale team will support the development and management of the Humanitarian Innovation Portfolio, aiming to source, accelerate and scale solutions that can improve UNICEF’s ability to respond to humanitarian emergencies.
UNICEF takes a portfolio approach to scaling innovations that reflect the most challenging problems faced by children and young people. Each portfolio contains innovative solutions (sourced from across UNICEF and beyond) that have potential to scale and significantly accelerate results for children.
The UNICEF Internship Programme offers eligible/qualified students the opportunity to acquire direct practical experience within the Portfolio, Culture & Scale team at the UNICEF Office of Innovations. The intern will work directly under the supervision of the Humanitarian Innovations Portfolio Manager and will be tasked to contribute to support to identify, verify, and scale humanitarian solutions that can improve UNICEF’s ability to respond to humanitarian emergencies and meet its Core Commitments for Children (CCCs).
About the Humanitarian Innovations Portfolio
An estimated 340 million people are in need of humanitarian support due to severe and complex armed conflicts that are turning into forgotten protracted crises, fueled by climate change and economic turmoil. Meanwhile, the gap between global needs and humanitarian funding continues to increase.
The Humanitarian Innovations Portfolio focuses on how innovations adopted and adapted across the organization to improve coverage support people, and in particular women and girls, affected by conflict, climate, and public health emergencies. To do this, UNICEF takes a portfolio approach to identifying, validating, and scaling innovative solutions for improving humanitarian action.
Support for transition to scale of innovations is prioritized among solutions that relate to key problem statements at UNICEF. This includes better data governance, ensuring state- of-the-art technologies are deployed and utilized by humanitarians, and supporting efficient and practical solutions to ensure barriers faced by local level first responders to humanitarian crises are minimized and that local responders may contribute to innovations themselves as well, with a particular regard for disability, gender and social inclusion.
Your main responsibilities will be:
You will work under the leadership of the P5 Senior Advisor, Innovation (Portfolio, Culture and Scale). You will work in close collaboration with other Portfolio Managers, EMOPS, and technical solution leads to:
- Carry out annual Portfolio Review Process to ensure corporate alignment of portfolio, problem statements, and solutions, while working closely with UNICEF Office of Emergency Programmes (EMOPS).
- Actively manage, and update quarterly and annually resource needs and allocations, priorities for partnerships, and country level support for moving humanitarian innovations from pilot to scale, while simultaneously supporting the identification and scaling of critical solutions that will accelerate outcomes for children.
- Oversee and facilitate performance management for the portfolio overall, and reporting for specific relevant solutions within the Humanitarian Innovation Portfolio.
- Act as global focal point for humanitarian innovations, and ensure close engagement with technical solutions leads (e.g., for Kits that Fit and Voices of Change).
- Idem on collaborating with broader humanitarian community of partners and practice to track, support and contribute to innovative trends and solutions for humanitarian action.
- Work with the Partnerships team to support resource mobilization and communications opportunities for the Humanitarian portfolio.
- Engage with Country Offices regarding capacity development to adopt and adapt innovations in the humanitarian space – including through business modelling and prototype of solutions.
- Establish frameworks to identify emergency humanitarian innovations ready for scale.
- Strategic support and other tasks for Office of Innovation around Humanitarian Innovation.
Please click here to access the full JD and related information. 
TOR TA- Humanitarian Innovation Portfolio Manager.pdf
To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…
- An advanced university degree (master’s or higher) in in a relevant field (International Development; social sciences, engineering, law, international relations, business administration; or related practical experience).
*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. - A minimum of eight (8) years of relevant professional experience in with humanitarian programmes supporting and coordinating project activities across a large organization and with other international development organizations.
- Experience in implementing and delivering humanitarian action is considered an asset.
- Demonstrated ability to identify, source, and scale innovations across international organizations.
- Strong track record for applying principles of innovation, particularly in humanitarian contexts.
- Experience of working within humanitarian preparedness/response, ideally for an NGO in humanitarian contexts or UN agency.
- Track record of innovating, ideally in humanitarian / low resource contexts.
- Familiar with data collection in low resource settings.
- Demonstrated ability to manage relationships with UNICEF Country and Regional Offices, programmes and partners, including government, universities, UN organizations, NGOs and the private sector.
- Proven skills in communication, networking, strategic thinking, advocacy and negotiation, and ability to relate this to children and young people.
- Proven capacity to work with diverse teams across different locations and with different technical skills.
- Strong writing and communication skills and the aptitude to handle competing messages and priorities with multiple audiences.
- Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.
For every Child, you demonstrate…
UNICEF’s Core Values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust and Accountability and Sustainability (CRITAS) underpin everything we do and how we do it. Get acquainted with Our Values Charter: UNICEF Values
UNICEF competencies required for this post are…
(1) Builds and maintains partnerships (2) Demonstrates self-awareness and ethical awareness (3) Drive to achieve results for impact (4) Innovates and embraces change (5) Manages ambiguity and complexity (6) Thinks and acts strategically (7) Works collaboratively with others.
During the recruitment process, we test candidates following the competency framework. Familiarize yourself with our competency framework and its different levels: competency framework 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.
We offer a wide range of benefits to our staff, including paid parental leave, breastfeeding breaks and reasonable accommodation for persons with disabilities. UNICEF strongly encourages the use of flexible working arrangements.
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 is committed to promote the protection and safeguarding of all children. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks, and will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles. 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.
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.
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