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Posted 4 years ago |
Head of Exploration is needed at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
JOB TITLE: Head of Exploration
Job ID: 30197
LOCATION: Lagos
Practice Area – Job Family: Management – Exploration
Grade: NOB
Vacancy Type: FTA Local
Posting Type: Common System
Contract Duration: 1 Year with possibility for extension
Background
The UNDP Strategic Plan embraces the complexity of development and commits the organization to helping countries find faster, more durable solutions to achieve Agenda 2030. Important development trends like urbanization, climate change, and rising inequalities pose significant challenges on our path to achieve the 2030 agenda of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
UNDP has begun incubating a number of strategic initiatives aimed at ensuring UNDP is ‘fit for purpose’ to deliver a new generation of solutions in line with the challenges the world faces. One such key strategic initiatives is the UNDP Accelerator Lab Network which operates as part of UNDP’s sustainable development offering.
US:
- We are building the largest and fastest learning global network on development challenges. We have already set up 60 labs in 78 countries) embedded within UNDP’s global architecture and country platforms. We are now recruiting for a second cohort of 30 labs to be based in UNDP around the world
- We use the power of the crowd, machine learning and distributed decision making to support partners to understand problems, develop new solutions, promote more inclusive decision making, and provide better oversight of what is done. We identify grassroots solutions and stretch their potential to accelerate development.
- We apply experimentation closely with government partners to grow this as a mode of operating to reduce costs of large-scale public sector reforms. Experimentation helps us learn whether particular assumptions are accurate before deploying solutions at scale, especially in the rapidly evolving contexts that often dominate development progress.
The Accelerator Labs will be comprised of a core team with niche capabilities that focus on exploration, experimentation and grassroots innovation. Within the first 6-8 months of the Lab fully functioning, each member of the Core team will take the lead on one of the following functions:
- Coordination
- Training
- Communications.
The Core team of the Accelerator lab will have capabilities in:
- Experimentation: Instituting rapid learning about emerging challenges through design and running of a portfolio of experiments that is coherent with the type of challenges that are part of UNDP’s strategic plan, and
- Mapping Solutions: Ethnographic methods and immersion in community dynamics, identification of and work with lead users, and implications of bottom up solutions for the policy design
- Exploration: The exploration function focuses on discovery and sensemaking of emerging trends, implications for systemic impacts and risks, and their potential for accelerating progress toward SDGs. Its work feeds into the portfolio of experiments ensuring its coherence with the emerging risks and opportunities and connects local dynamics and solutions into the broader national and international ecosystem of potential funders, partners, and allies thereby increasing the chances for acceleration. While critical for the functioning of the Accelerator Lab, the exploration function will also service the Country Office as determined and agreed with the UNDP senior management.
Required Skills and Experience
Education:
- Master’s Degree in Social Sciences, Data Science, Statistics, Physics, Computer Science, Business Intelligence, or related field and minimum of 2 years of professional experience in development programming or policy; social innovation; partnership building; engagement (public and private sector) and/or resource mobilization
OR:
- Bachelor’s Degree in Social sciences, Data science, Statistics, Physics, Computer Science, Business Intelligence, or related field and minimum of 4 years of professional experience in development programming or policy; social innovation; partnership building; engagement (public and private sector) and/or resource mobilization.
Experience:
- Professional experience in development programming or policy and social innovation;
- Demonstrated capacity in horizon scanning;
- Demonstrated capacity in data analysis and visualization.
Experience in following areas is desirable but not necessary:
- Proven professional knowledge and experience in social innovation approaches such as Systems Thinking, Ethnography, Crowdsourcing, Collective Intelligence Design, Citizen Science, Positive Deviance, Social Network Analysis, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
- Professional experience in partnership building and engagement (public and private sector)
- Demonstrated capacity to use open data, mobile data, geospatial data, drone & satellite data, citizen data for informing policy making, strategic planning, or programme design.
- Proven professional knowledge and experience in at least one of the following: Future thinking and Foresight, Design Research, and Systems Mapping;
- Key awareness of key global and regional trends;
- Demonstrated access to networks of edge innovators.
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Job Features
Job Category | NGO / Community Services |
Deadline | 2nd June, 2020. |