The Position:
UNFPA recognizes women & youth empowerment, innovation, and technology as strategic enablers to accelerating progress toward global development aspirations. The response to the COVID19 pandemic in Benin also brought to the fore the power of innovation as a driver of community resilience, and particularly of girls and women, with spillover effects nurturing community resilience to external shocks such as gender-based violence, economic crisis, climate change, epidemics, violent extremism, or demographic dynamics.
UNFPA Benin has therefore developed an innovative model of intervention, combining youth/girls’ empowerment and resilience with innovation and technology to accelerate and secure the achievement of the Country programme results, under the overall framework of UN cooperation framework.
The Resilience and Innovation Specialist will be providing fine-tuned technical and advisory services to design, develop and mainstream the resilience and innovation strategic activities across the different components of the country programme. S/he will provide technical support for relevant capacity-building activities, coordinate partnerships, and mobilize strategic support to leverage the power of innovation to foster community resilience, enable life skills education and access to GBV and health services to reach and empower young people, women, and communities at large up to the last mile.
How you can make a difference:
UNFPA is the lead UN agency for delivering a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person's potential is fulfilled. UNFPA’s strategic plan (2022-2025), reaffirms the relevance of the current strategic direction of UNFPA and focuses on three transformative results: to end preventable maternal deaths; end unmet need for family planning; and end gender-based violence and harmful practices. These results capture our strategic commitments on accelerating progress towards realizing the ICPD and SDGs in the Decade of Action leading up to 2030. Our strategic plan calls upon UN Member States, organizations and individuals to “build forward better”, while addressing the negative impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on women’s and girls’ access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights, recover lost gains and realize our goals.
In a world where fundamental human rights are at risk, we need principled and ethical staff, who embody these international norms and standards, and who will defend them courageously and with full conviction.
UNFPA is seeking candidates that transform, inspire and deliver high impact and sustained results; we need staff who are transparent, exceptional in how they manage the resources entrusted to them and who commit to deliver excellence in programme results.
Job Purpose:
As a key member of the diverse and dynamic team of UNFPA Benin, the Resilience and Innovation Specialist will play a vital role in guiding and supporting the design, mainstreaming, and implementation of resilience and innovation interventions.
S/he will provide technical and operational support toward the implementation of global resilience and innovation activities, such as innovative community resilience strategies with a focus on women and youth, social entrepreneurship, support to the local innovation ecosystem, and technology for/by/with women and young people, innovative financing.
S/he will also contribute toward strengthening the overall Resilience and Innovation portfolio of activities, including support on knowledge management, as well as monitoring and evaluation, to document results and create a more agile, open, learning, and change culture at UNFPA.
S/he will also contribute toward internal and external communications activities to showcase stories of impact and learning from the Resilience and innovation portfolio and showing how resilience and innovation approaches can play a powerful and efficient way to prevent and respond to Gender Based violence and other external factors affecting the capacity of girls and women to achieve their full rights and potentials.
Qualifications and Experience:
Education:
Advanced degree (Master’s level) in social sciences, economy, business administration, public health, ICT, data science, international development, or related field.
Knowledge and Experience:
- 5 years of increasingly responsible professional experience, especially in the fields of youth programming, social innovation, frontier technologies, or social entrepreneurship;
- Experience with leading research, evidence, and innovative models on youth, innovation, local resilience, data for decision-making, providers and other users’ skills, especially in relation to sexual and reproductive health
- Commitment to gender-based, culturally sensitive, and human-centered design approaches and methodologies
- Field experience and implementation at country-level of youth programming and empowerment, digital or data innovations, including the appropriate and ethical use of technology for development. Practical experience with emerging or frontier technologies an asset
- Good network with the academic, development, and innovation community an asset
- Strong knowledge of UNFPA’s core mandate an asset
Languages:
-
Fluency in French and English
Compensation and Benefits:
This position offers an attractive remuneration package including a competitive net salary plus health insurance and other benefits as applicable.
Disclaimer:
UNFPA does not charge any application, processing, training, interviewing, testing or other fee in connection with the application or recruitment process. Fraudulent notices, letters or offers may be submitted to the UNFPA fraud hotline http://www.unfpa.org/help/hotline.cfm
In accordance with the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations, persons applying to posts in the international Professional category, who hold permanent resident status in a country other than their country of nationality, may be required to renounce such status upon their appointment.
We are no longer accepting applications for this position.
