Head of Solutions Mapping
Lilongwe
- Organization: UNDP - United Nations Development Programme
- Location: Lilongwe
- Grade: Junior level - NO-B, National Professional Officer - Locally recruited position
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Occupational Groups:
- Development Cooperation and Sustainable Development Goals
- Social Affairs
- Poverty Reduction
- Communication and Public Information
- Civil Society and Local governance
- Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction
- Innovations for Sustainable Development
- Managerial positions
- Social Entrepreneurship
- Closing Date: Closed
Background
- 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.
Duties and Responsibilities
- 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;
- 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.
- 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;
- 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.
Competencies
- Ability to make new and useful ideas work : Level 4: Adapt with complex concepts and challenges convention purposefully.
- Ability to persuade others to follow : Level 4: Generates commitment, excitement and excellence in others.
- Ability to improve performance and satisfaction : Level 4: Models independent thinking and action.
- Ability to listen, adapt, persuade and transform : Level 4: Synthesizes information to communicate independent analysis.
- Ability to get things done while exercising good judgement: Level 4: Meets goals and quality criteria for delivery of products or services.
- 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.
Required Skills and Experience
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- Coordination
- Training
- Communications
- 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.
Disclaimer
Important applicant information
All posts in the GS categories are subject to local recruitment.
Applicant information about UNDP rosters
Note: UNDP reserves the right to select one or more candidates from this vacancy announcement. We may also retain applications and consider candidates applying to this post for other similar positions with UNDP at the same grade level and with similar job description, experience and educational requirements.
Workforce diversity
UNDP is committed to achieving diversity within its workforce, and encourages all qualified applicants, irrespective of gender, nationality, disabilities, sexual orientation, culture, religious and ethnic backgrounds to apply. All applications will be treated in the strictest confidence.
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