Cluster Development Expert

​Requisition ID: 2158 
Grade: SB4 - Local Professional (Junior & Mid Level) 
Country: Pakistan 
Duty Station: Karachi 
Category: National Consultant 
Type of Job Posting: Internal/External
Employment Type: Non-staff Regular
Contract Duration: 6 months (with the possibility of extension)
Application deadline: 18-May-2023  

Vacancy Announcement
TEMPORARY APPOINTMENT OF PROJECT PERSONNEL

Only nationals or permanent residents of the country of the duty station are considered eligible. 
Female candidates are particularly encouraged to apply.
 

ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) is the specialized agency of the United Nations that promotes industrial development for poverty reduction, inclusive globalization and environmental sustainability. The mission of UNIDO, as described in the Lima Declaration adopted at the fifteenth session of the UNIDO General Conference in 2013 as well as the Abu Dhabi Declaration adopted at the eighteenth session of UNIDO General Conference in 2019, is to promote and accelerate inclusive and sustainable industrial development (ISID) in Member States. The relevance of ISID as an integrated approach to all three pillars of sustainable development is recognized by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will frame United Nations and country efforts towards sustainable development. UNIDO’s mandate is fully recognized in SDG-9, which calls to “Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”. The relevance of ISID, however, applies in greater or lesser extent to all SDGs. Accordingly, the Organization’s programmatic focus is structured in four strategic priorities: Creating shared prosperity; Advancing economic competitiveness; Safeguarding the environment; and Strengthening knowledge and institutions.

Each of these programmatic fields of activity contains a number of individual programmes, which are implemented in a holistic manner to achieve effective outcomes and impacts through UNIDO’s four enabling functions: (i) technical cooperation; (ii) analytical and research functions and policy advisory services; (iii) normative functions and standards and quality-related activities; and (iv) convening and partnerships for knowledge transfer, networking and industrial cooperation. Such core functions are carried out in Departments/Offices in its Headquarters, Regional Offices and Hubs and Country Offices.

The Directorate of Technical Cooperation and Sustainable Industrial Development (TCS), headed by a Managing Director, oversees the Organization's development of capacities for industrial development as well as industrial policy advice, statistics and research activities and the Organization's normative contribution to Member States and global development community in achieving the SDGs. The Directorate also ensures the application of strategies and interventions for sustainable industrial development related to Environment, Energy, SMEs, Competitiveness and Job creation, as well as Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence. Through coordination in-house and with Member States and industry stakeholders, it ensures that the services provided in these areas contribute toward effective and appropriate technical, business and policy solutions and are focused on results and on realizing any potential for scaling up and positioning UNIDO as a leading platform for industrial development in developing countries and global fora.

The Directorate houses the technical Divisions of Capacity Development and Industrial Policy Advice (TCS/CAP); Circular Economy and Environmental Protection (TCS/CEP); Decarbonization and Sustainable Energy (TCS/DSE); SMEs, Competitiveness and Job Creation (TCS/SME); and Digital Transformation and AI Strategies (TCS/DAS). The Directorate also ensures close coordination and collaboration among the Divisions as well as with relevant entities in the Directorate of Global Partnerships and External Relations (GLO) and the Directorate of SDG Innovation and Economic Transformation (IET).

This position is located under the Competitiveness, Quality and Compliance Unit (TCS/SME/CQC) which builds national and regional production and quality infrastructure systems, with an emphasis on providing internationally recognized services, facilitating SME participation in regional and global value chains; strengthening institutional quality infrastructure capacities (i.e. standardization, metrology, and accreditation); building conformity assessment capacities (testing, inspection, certification, calibration, etc.); and supporting trade facilitation and quality awareness with the public sector, economic operators and consumers, placing a special emphasis on capacitating SMEs.

PROJECT CONTEXT

/Overview/UNIDO Project Summary/Project Purpose>

Poverty Alleviation and Inclusive Development Across Rural Sindh (PAIDAR) is a five-year programme funded by the European Union to support the Government of Sindh (GoS), Pakistan in the implementation of its Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS). The long-term objective of PAIDAR is to contribute to sustainable poverty reduction and improvement of livelihoods of poor women, men, and young people across the Sindh province.  The PRS has three pillars: 1) Community Driven Local Development 2) Addressing Urban Poverty, including Urban Economic Clusters, and 3) Rural Growth Centres.

The purpose of the PAIDAR programme is to support the GoS to implement its poverty reduction strategy as a whole and sub-strategies that aim at:

• Fostering economic development, enterprise development and job creation with the objective of increasing income of the poor women, men and young people
• Optimizing public service delivery to enhance access to livelihood improving services such as water, electricity, health services and education with the ultimate objectives of both improving living conditions and quality of life and reducing poor household’ expenditure that arises as a cost resulting from lack of access to such services and poor living conditions.

To this end, the programme will:

• Provide necessary technical assistance, capacity building and financial support to a significant number of micro and small enterprises in target RGCs with the objective to overcome COVID-19 impacts on enterprises, support enterprise development and business development.
• Contribute technically and financially to building and upgrading public infrastructure for improvement in delivery of basic service with direct impact on poor people’s livelihood as well as services to support business development.
• Strengthen capacity of the GoS at provincial and local level for implementation of the PRS and assist the GoS to strengthen internal coordination and monitoring capacity, and to optimize provincial public resources allocation towards meeting PRS objectives.

PAIDAR will deliver on the above objectives through utilization of three key mechanisms:

• Co-financing public investment projects of the GoS aiming to build and/or upgrade public infrastructure for delivery of basic services with high impact on livelihood improvement and poverty reduction, as well as for delivery of services with high potential to contribute to economic development of the target RGCs and foster enterprise development.
• Provision of grants to support MSMEs investment projects which demonstrate strong potential for enterprise development, income generation, job retention and creation.
• Technical assistance to the GoS and the MSMEs to ensure investment projects (both co-financed public infrastructure development projects and financially supported MSME investment projects) are designed, planned and implemented to deliver results in line with the objectives of the PRS; and to strengthen GoS capacity to plan, implement and monitor results PRS

ROLE OF CLUSTER DEVELOPMENT EXPERT

The Cluster Development Agent (CDA) is the local PAIDAR staff in target districts who would be instrumental in achievement of programme objectives in their assigned districts. The CDA is the face of PAIDAR in the eyes of the final beneficiaries of the programme. Therefore, they must promote values of UNIDO and the PAIDAR programme through a consistent, professional, transparent, trusted and value-adding performance. The CDAs role can be summarized as below:

1. Stakeholder management: the CDA will work with a range of actors from the public sector, private sector and the civil society. He or she must build a comprehensive knowledge of the who-is-who in their target districts. The CDA will understand the relations between each actor group and the level of influence they exert over each other. The CDA will gauge each actor’s level of interest and power to influence the local economic development process. Based on the above, the CDA will engage with relevant stakeholders throughout the delivery of the programme activities. Above all, the CDA must build a trusted, transparent and unbiased relationship with all stakeholders. The CDA must ensure he or she is seen as a neutral broker and facilitator of local economic development, without any particular interest or preference towards any particular stakeholder.  The CDAs are agents of PAIDAR and must ensure portraying a positive image of PAIDAR among local stakeholders.

2. Assessment and investigation: for the CDA as the local agent of change, it is critical to have an in-depth understanding of livelihood challenges and opportunities on one hand, and income generation and enterprise development challenges and opportunities on the other. This knowledge and understanding is built overtime. Nevertheless, the CDA must use various resources such as poverty related data, census data, own interviews and data collection, secondary resources, etc. to build such knowledge. The CDAs must apply available diagnostic and assessment tools as much as possible to investigate the major livelihood and business development opportunities and challenges. In this effort, the CDAs will be assisted, where needed, by specialized technical experts who can support the CDAs to investigate specific sectors/fields in more depth.  

3. Building common vision: the CDA’s knowledge of the livelihood and business development challenges and opportunities can lead into local economic development results only if such knowledge is shared between stakeholders and lead to creation of a common vision for local economic development in the area. Therefore, it is an important role of the CDA to actively share information and knowledge with stakeholders through formal and informal channels, to raise their awareness on the livelihood and business development opportunities, and to foster creation of common vision through facilitating dialogue among stakeholders them.  

4. Turing vision into action: the CDA, with the help of technical experts (both in livelihood and business sectors) and in consultation with the local stakeholders (government, communities and businesses) will generate development initiatives to address identified livelihood and business development challenges and opportunities. Such development initiatives may be led by individuals, MSMEs, local government, community organizations, NGOs or networks consisting of two or more actors. Such initiative may be a purely public sector investment, a private sector investment or a public-private-partnership. PAIDAR programme has two main mechanisms to support implementation of the identified development opportunities, namely technical assistance and co-financing support.

5. Mobilizing technical assistance: the CDAs will plan, mobilize and coordinate delivery of technical assistance to support sound planning and execution of development initiatives. Such technical assistance can be acquired from PAIDAR roster of experts, or contracting local support institutions and/or business development service providers, or relevant government institutions. It is responsibility of the CDA to plan provision of timely, efficient and effective technical assistance and with the overall support of the PAIDAR team. The technical assistance proposed by the CDAs do not necessarily have to be linked with grants. For example, the CDA may propose provision of a training programme to local youth on a specific topic with the view to increase their employability.

6. Mobilizing financial support: In addition to technical assistance, PAIDAR can co-finance identified development initiatives through various windows of PAIDAR grant scheme. The CDA can support individuals or group of stakeholders to turn development initiatives and ideas into grant proposals for submission to PAIDAR for co-financing. The CDA must have a thorough understanding of the PAIDAR grant scheme, the procedure and requirements to advise potential grantees. The CDA will have to actively raise awareness about the grant scheme and incentivize the local communities, enterprises and public sector to take advantage of the co-financing support available through PAIDAR.

7. Monitoring and evaluation: The CDA, under the guidance of the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) expert of PAIDAR will undertake continuous monitoring, report and evaluation activities in relation to their own operations as well as technical assistance and co-financing initiatives of PAIDAR. The CDAs will have access to the MEL experts, guidelines and tools that would allow them to undertake their M&E tasks correctly. The CDAs have an important function in learning from and mainstreaming of good practices in the five target districts and beyond. He or she will identify good development initiatives, actively share them within PAIDAR team (community of CDAs) and also identify good practices in other districts that can be replicated in their districts.

8. Communication: with the communication, visibility and outreach framework of PAIDAR, CDAs have a strong role to play. On one hand, with the overall guidance of communication expert of PAIDAR, CDA will perform various communication and outreach activities to ensure the relevant news, message and information reach out to the relevant audience. In addition, CDAs are the focal point for local stakeholders to communicate with PAIDAR. Therefore, CDAs will perform a critical role to ensure PAIDAR stakeholders can communicate their message with PAIDAR.

In order to perform their tasks, the CDAs are not alone. The overall PAIDAR team, and in particular the Cluster Development Expert, with support from international cluster development experts work closely with the CDAs on the ground to ensure, provide guidance and support CDAs to continuously improve their performance and to gradually be able to perform independently. Various technical experts from basic services, livelihood and business sectors are available to support the CDAs in their work. In addition, UNIDO gender, communication, MEL experts etc. will provide guidance and necessary tools to CDAs in support of their work.

Under the overall guidance of the PAIDAR Programme Manager in Vienna and National Technical Advisor in Karachi, and direct supervision of Programme Operation Officer, the Cluster Development Expert is expected to deliver the following duties:

MAIN DUTIES

Work planning:

• Develop annual and quarterly individual work plans in consultation with the CDAs inducted for each of the target districts under the PAIDAR.
• Develop/Consolidate annual and quarterly work plans from individual workplans developed for each of the CDAs in line with the PSC approved work plan of the programme.
• Familiarize him/herself with UNIDO and PAIDAR procedures, ERP systems, and programme management software, as required.

Documentation of clusters and business ideas:

• Guide CDAs on identification of potential clusters/cooperatives/businesses/investors in the target districts.
• Develop criteria for selection of businesses/clusters/cooperatives.
• Guide CDAs on conducting basic analysis of the identified businesses/cooperatives and Clusters.
• Guide CDAs on the development of cluster/cooperatives/businesses/sectors profiles. 
• Develop standardised formats for early business idea documentation.
• Build capacity of the CDAs on consultation process for business ideas generation and documentation (initial feasibility/concept note etc.).
• Guide CDAs on consolidation of information on business ideas generated and progressive entrepreneurs/ clusters/cooperatives/businesses/investors identified.
• Develop a roster of business ideas videos and translate it into standard business idea format. 
• Incorporate all the business ideas and investors related information into the database management system of the PAIDAR programme.

Performance monitoring of the CDAs

• Develop a calendar of progress review meetings in consultation with international experts engaged under the PAIDAR programme.
• Guide CDAs on preparation of reports and presentations for the progress review meetings
• Maintain a two-way communication from international experts to CDAs and vice versa
• Revise workplans of the CDAs based on outcomes of the progress review meetings.

Information assimilation regarding technical assistance:

• Identify training and capacity building needs/opportunities for the local population on the subjects with high potential for employment/self-employment, to be delivered in collaboration with local TVET institutions and other training service providers
• Identify areas of technical assistance needed for the selected businesses and ideas.
• Identify experts for the technical assistance needed and promote application to PAIDAR Roster.
• Draft ToRs for engagement of technical experts to address the technical assistance needed.
• Develop and monitor progress of the technical experts engaged under the programme.

Awareness raising on Grant schemes

• Guide and ensure full understanding of the CDAs on Grant scheme ad procedures, etc.

• Hold consultation sessions with businesses/stakeholders along with the grant team on grant mechanism awareness and dissemination.
• Assist in preparing necessary documentation in consultation with CDAs related to grant application process.

Arrangement of sector/investment seminars/workshops

• Engage clusters/cooperatives and businesses to identify capacity building needs of the businesses.

• Arrange capacity building workshops/seminars for the business groups.

• Guide technical experts and CDAs on the specific objectives of the training/investment workshops.
• Maintain evidence of the activities in the form of minutes/photographs/videos and interviews.

- Consolidate key information into programme briefs and reports updated as per agreed upon timeline.

- Any other task/assignment by the PAIDAR management.

MINIMUM ORGANIZATIONAL REQUIREMENTS

Education: Advanced university degree in business administration, management, engineering, economics, or equivalent.

Experience, technical and functional expertise

• A minimum of 5 years of working experience is required.
• Experience relevant to technical cooperation in developing countries is desirable.  
• Experience in evaluating the needs, conditions and problems in developing countries is desirable.
• Computer proficiency for the preparation of reports/presentations and for correspondence is required.

Languages: Fluency in written and spoken English is required.

REQUIRED COMPETENCIES

Core Values

WE LIVE AND ACT WITH INTEGRITY: work honestly, openly and impartially.

WE SHOW PROFESSIONALISM: work hard and competently in a committed and responsible manner.

WE RESPECT DIVERSITY: work together effectively, respectfully and inclusively, regardless of our differences in culture and perspective.

Key Competencies

WE FOCUS ON PEOPLE: cooperate to fully reach our potential –and this is true for our colleagues as well as our clients. Emotional intelligence and receptiveness are vital parts of our UNIDO identity.

WE FOCUS ON RESULTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES: focus on planning, organizing and managing our work effectively and efficiently. We are responsible and accountable for achieving our results and meeting our performance standards. This accountability does not end with our colleagues and supervisors, but we also owe it to those we serve and who have trusted us to contribute to a better, safer and healthier world.

WE COMMUNICATE AND EARN TRUST: communicate effectively with one another and build an environment of trust where we can all excel in our work.

WE THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX AND INNOVATE: To stay relevant, we continuously improve, support innovation, share our knowledge and skills, and learn from one another.

This appointment is limited to the specified project(s) only and does not carry any expectation of renewal.
Employees of UNIDO are expected at all times to uphold the highest standards of integrity, professionalism and respect for diversity, both at work and outside.
Only persons who fully and unconditionally commit to these values should consider applying for jobs at UNIDO.

All applications must be submitted online through the Online Recruitment System. Correspondence will be undertaken only with candidates who are being considered at an advanced phase of the selection process. Selected candidate(s) may be required to disclose to the Director General the nature and scope of financial and other personal interests and assets in respect of themselves, their spouses and dependents, under the procedures established by the Director General.

Visit the UNIDO website for details on how to apply: www.unido.org
NOTE: The Director General retains the discretion to make an appointment to this post at a lower level.

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