Innovation Support Officer

Eligibility criteria

Minimum age: 25 years old. Nationals of the country of assignment are not eligible, except the assignments in Headquarters duty stations.

Description of task

Under the overall supervision of the Hub Manager and the direct supervision of the Programme Advisor/Manager a.i. of the Sahel Governance Offer/Promise in collaboration with the Governance and Peacebuilding Team and with other Hub Units working on the Sahel, the Innovation Support Officer will support the implementation and delivery of results of the Sahel Governance Offer/Promise and perform the following tasks:

1. Be responsible for developing and managing innovative digital projects and undertaking policy-focused research, data analysis and advocacy in line with the UNDP Governance Offer and Strategic Plan to accelerate sustainable development in the targeted countries with the help of innovation, partnerships and digital tools and technology.
2. Identify, initiate, implement and facilitate innovative projects activities in cooperation with key stakeholders and partners.
3. Track and analyze developments related to public innovation, digital transformation, innovation ecosystems, digital governance, and progress on the Sustainable Development Goals through the Governance Programme.
4. Identify and develop research-led content, data visualizations, thought leadership and interactive tools particularly relevant to policy and decision-making purposes.
5. Facilitate the delivery of innovation and digital transformation and technical assistance initiatives.
6. Identify and forge good working relationships with key stakeholders and partners at the regional and national levels.
7. Help develop and manage a UNDP Innovation Awards and Innovation Newsletters.
8. Identify and explore new technical cooperation and innovation funding opportunities.
9. Support the identification of new sources of evidence and insights, analyse and visualize patterns in unstructured sources of data, present new insights in accessible and comprehensive ways to enable sensemaking and analysis.
10. Proactively explore and identify the new methods/approaches and frontier knowledge to tackle development challenges, collaborate with the communication and M&E colleagues to turn these into learning options and opportunities for addressing specific policy issues in the targeted Sahel countries.
11. Contribute to the strengthening of the country offices Accelerator Labs’ service lines in connection with the RP and the Sahel Governance Offer/Promise based on findings from horizon scanning, systems’ mapping, and local knowledge.
12. Explore the diversification of funding and investment sources through proactively mapping potential partners and building value proposition for their investment in the CO Labs and portfolio of experiments.
13. Share findings from the exploration on future trends, new methodologies/approaches, potential partnership, funding opportunities, and others within UNDP and with partners.
14. Proactively use blog posts and social media to share insights, attract partners and help position Accelerator Lab at the forefront of the exploration of new trends.
15. Explore, document and increase understanding on emerging methods of tapping into collective intelligence for sustainable development.
16. Advise on the COs accelerator lab’s experiment portfolio on Governance to ensure experiments are designed based on people’s knowledge, behaviours and peer to peer methods of managing and diffusing knowledge about sustainable development issues.
17. Provide technical guidance for experiment design, roll-out and validation based on the experiment conditions, resources available, and requirements.
18. Proactively manage risks within experiments including those related to ethics and privacy.
19. Examine the results from the testing of prototypes and translate them into programmatic decisions on next steps and implications for improvement, spin-offs and scaling-up where warranted.
20. Support lab partners to develop an emerging pipeline of new initiatives, support other activities related to the design and operationalization.
21. Provide technical consultation and training for national partners and the COs through various phases including asset mapping, developing a strategic portfolio logic, experiment design, prototype testing, and evaluation
22. Any other related tasks as may be required or assigned by the supervisor.

Qualifications/Requirements

Required degree level:
Bachelor degree or equivalent

Education – Additional Comments:

Business Administration, Information Systems, Economics, Development Studies, or other related Social sciences study.

Required experience:
36 Months

Experience remark:

Language skills:

Area of expertise:
Development programme/project administration, Resource mobilization, partnership and donor coordination

Area of expertise details:

Driving license:

No

Competencies values:

Application procedure: