Country: Somalia
Closing date: 28 Feb 2019
The National Development Plan set the bar high – aiming to realize an ambitious set of development objectives in a three-year period. Major problems continue to bedevil the economic and development front. For example, high youth unemployment, weak development of business in the agriculture sectors (fisheries, farming, livestock), unsustainable forest and water management, very large numbers of IDPs coming to the urban centers, and limited public service provision.
The traditional ways of working will not be sufficient to realize the NDP objectives nor to achieve the Agenda 2030 principle of “leaving no one behind.” Innovative approaches are needed to turn these challenges into serious social and economic ventures that can make a positive impact that ripples across the country, including for those most marginalized and at risk, like low-income women, youth, and IDPs.
UNDP Somalia in collaboration with the Federal Government of Somalia Ministry of Planning, Investment and Economic Development and the Ministry of Trade and Industry launched the “**Innovate for Somalia**” project in July 2017 and successfully organized the several Social Innovation Camps in Somalia.
Within this context, social innovation is a potential force for widespread engagement and collaborative solution-seeking and can be leveraged to address four key issues:
· Limited window of opportunity. The window of opportunity in Somalia, as in any fragile setting, is limited. After the protracted conflict, citizens have very high expectations of the new government, which is to replace the previous unorganized and often predatory governance arrangements. Citizens expect the government system to provide - or to ensure - that non-state actors provide services and opportunities that have a direct impact on their quality of life in a manner that is commensurate with their expectations concerning service delivery.
· Collaboration between state and non-state actors required. The government system is still very young, still in the process of establishing itself fully and is faced with a very low level of revenue (estimated to be some 4 to 5% of GDP). Even while the financial position of the government is improving, it will take several years before the government will generate sufficient revenue to engage in large enough investment and service delivery to satisfy the expectations of the citizens. Hence, collaboration and engagement with non-state actors is essential.
· Unlock the most efficient and effective approaches. Even if the Government would have sufficient revenue to invest, this still might not be the most efficient and effective manner to stimulate private sector development, create employment and provide services to improve the living conditions. Non-state actors might be better placed and more effective in identifying the actual needs and the opportunities and existing resources. Collaborative approaches, based on solid understanding of roles and responsibilities and commensurate with implementation capacities of the involved agencies, in the context of Somalia, are likely to prove to be a constructive avenue ahead.
· The usual versus the unusual suspects. Most development initiatives evolve within a limited network of professionals (the ‘usual suspects’) who know each other and who regularly meet in coordination settings. Innovative approaches have the capacity to reach out to potential actors that do not circulate in these networks (the ‘unusual suspects’), and – importantly – can engage ordinary citizens directly into the problem or opportunity identification and subsequent solution design, building a much more inclusive, transparent and open development arena.
The UNDP Strategic Plan 2018-2021 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, displacement, 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 Country Accelerator Lab Network. The initiative is a recognition that increasingly interrelated development challenges require going beyond business as usual and single point, linear and silver bullet responses in development. Instead, they call for an interdisciplinary approaches and non-linear solutions that crowd in the collective efforts of variety of partners and tap into local insights and the knowledge of people closest to the problem and the solutions. The initiative is also a recognition and an investment in the emerging momentum among a growing number of UNDP Country Offices around joining together disruptive, cutting edge methodologies with contextual, country-based insights and expertise to accelerate impact and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.
US:
We are building the largest and fastest learning global network of Accelerator Labs (initially setting up 60 labs in 60 countries) embedded within UNDP’s global architecture and country platforms. The new offering builds on the latest thinking from the fields of complexity science, lead user innovation and collective intelligence to accelerate development impact.
Our network will surface and reinforce locally sourced solutions at scale while mobilizing a wide and dynamic partnership of actors contributing knowledge, resources and experience. The idea is to transform our collective approach by introducing new protocols, backed by evidence and practice, which accelerate the testing and dissemination of solutions within and across countries. This will enable the global community to collectively learn from local knowledge and ingenuity at a speed and at a scale that our societies and planet require. This will be achieved by:
Building on locally-sourced solutions, finding things that work and expanding on them;
Rapid testing and iteration to implement what works and go beyond the obvious solutions;
Combining the best understanding, ideas and expertise to generate collective knowledge;
Accelerating progress by bringing expertise, creativity and collective intelligence to bear.
The Accelerator Lab will undertake i) external facing interventions addressing priority development challenges, and ii) internally facing experiments to embed new ways of doing development within the existing UNDP portfolio.
You:
You are capable and excited about starting, design and managing activities, direct engagement with local communities and collaboration across global networks. You are driven by learning new things, figuring out how they work and translating them across sectors. You tell stories of emergent solutions and you gravitate to solving global development challenges.
You have a natural inclination to interdisciplinarity, cross cultural mindset and cross sectoral experience with the cosmopolitan attraction for diversity. You are driven by a strong sense of purpose and commitment to make change happen and a keen eye to identify emerging opportunities and ‘at the edge’ trends. You are open to discovery and exploration, capable of articulating insights and ideas through visual thinking, open to serendipity and discovery yet are pragmatic and constructive working with public sector authorities. You are comfortable with ambiquity, capable of zooming out for context and zooming in for content and execution- sharp in pursuit of objectives, fast at adapting and changing course when needed. You have superb compentencies in program and portfolio management, are at ease with decision-making processes and dynamics of different models of governance.
You are curious, quirky and fun, natural strategic thinkers and a talented designer. You understand systems, the good, the bad and the ugly, and are capable of working within bureaucracies to make change, leverage technology to extend, enhance and multiply exploration, discovery and execution. You are digitally savy, you hack tools, and you are keen to be a part of a large global organization exhibiting United Nations values.
III. Duties and Responsibilities
1.Lead lab efforts in deep community immersion, collective intelligence and solutions mapping
· Developing and sustaining positive relationships with a range of local community and citizen groups
· Identifying and training local volunteers, recruiting Universities and think tanks for sustaining long term community outreach and engagement and identification of lead users, providing training and mentoring
· Translaton of ethnographic and field research findings into learning and action for the acceleration lab activities
· Design specific field research and participatory methods to focus on the most vulnerable populations and those not usually engaged in public policy debates on development methods
· Explore, document and increase understanding on emerging methods of tapping into collective intelligence for sustainable development
2.Convene the processes of solution intake, assessment and designing prototypes for diffusion
· Design and implement methodology for intaking indigenous knowledge and local solutions, consolidating, screening and further describing incoming ideas
· Design criteria/metrics for assessing consolidating incoming local solutions
· Conduct field research to determine best methods fo making solutions transferable
· Test the solutions and potential ideas in real life context to understand potential channels of spreading (including identifying private and public sector venues for uptake)
· Analyse system level issues that local solutions address (and don’t address, therefore exposing gaps)
· Design of ‘things and tools’ needed to successful scale indigenous knowledge, lead user solutions, turning its insights into systemic change
· Design methods for integrating collective intellengence into UNDP programmes and engage with programme and project managers to translate ideas into concrete practice
3.Undertake cultural and behavioral analyses for the accelerator lab portolio of experiments
· Advise on the accelerator lab’s experiment portfolio to ensure experiments are designed based on people’s knowledge, behaviors and peer to peer methods of managing and diffusing knowledge about sustainable development issues.
· Ensure ethics framework is implemented for the lab’s portfolio of experiments
· Design methods to test accelerator ideas for their applicability and diffusion
· Integrate cultural norms, peer to peer methods and behaviorial insights into technology based experiments
· Convene a broad range of new partners with UNDP including artists, community organizers and emergent movements to explore areas for collaboration on sustainable development
4.Work out loud and Organizational Learning
· Lead communication efforts and proactively use blog and social media to share findings from field research
· Ensure UNDP’s communication efforts respect privacy and ethics considerations
- Liaise with the broader Accelerator Lab network and the support team to share learnings and insights from the country-specific experience
· Help embed solutions mapping lead user methodology within the CO portfolio, design and provide trainings that include various methodologies and steps to identify and work with lead users
IV. Competencies and Selection Criteria
Description of Competency at Level Required
(For more comprehensive descriptions please see the competency inventory)
\
Core
Innovation
Ability to make new and useful ideas work
Level 4: Adept with complex concepts and challenges convention purposefully
Leadership
Ability to persuade others to follow
Level 4: Generates commitment, excitement and excellence in others
People Management
Ability to improve performance and satisfaction
Level 4: Models independent thinking and action
Communication
Ability to listen, adapt, persuade and transform
Level 4: Synthesizes information to communicate independent analysis
Delivery
Ability to get things done while exercising good judgement
Level 4: Meets goals and quality criteria for delivery of products or services
Technical/Functional
Innovation
Ability to manage organizational resources and deployment in pursuit of innovation approaches and initiatives
Level 5: Originate: Catalyzes new ideas, methods, and applications to pave a path for innovation and continuous improvement in professional area of expertise
V. Recruitment Qualifications
Education:
Master’s degree in Anthropology, Sociology, Behavioral psychology, Design, Communications 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 Anthropology, Sociology, Behavioral psychology, Design, Communications 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:
· Demonstrated ability to undertake field research in remote communities and document ethnographic evidence and honor expertise in usual places
· Demonstrate ability to work in participatory methods, follow the lead of people as experts in their own sustainable development
Experience in following areas is desirable but not necessary:
· Professional experience in development programming or policy and social innovation.
· Proven professional knowledge and experience in approaches such as Ethnography, behavioral insights, Qualitative and Quantitative User Research, service journeys or human centered design
· Demonstrated ability to work with partners to help surface unarticulated needs
· Proven ability to design ethical frameworks for managing public sector experiments
Language Requirements:
Proficiency in written and spoken English & Somali
Other:
* The Accelerator Labs will be comprised of a core team with niche capabilities that focus on exploration, experimentation and ethnographic solutions mapping. 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:
1) Coordination
2) Training
3) 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
· Ethnographic solutions mapping: deep 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 (direct collaboration with the Experimentation Lead), and connects local dynamics and solutions (link with the Ethnography Lead) 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.
How to apply:
Applications to be submitted online at:
https://jobs.partneragencies.net/erecruitjobs.html?JobOpeningId=20619&hrs_jo_pst_seq=1&hrs_site_id=2