Office/Unit/Project Description 

Countries around the world are facing increasingly complex and multifaceted development challenges, ranging from climate emergency, lack of trust in institutions and growing levels of inequality. UNDP’s new Strategic Plan calls for adopting system & portfolio approaches as to nurture capabilities of the development sector to support tackling these complex issues & transform the very systems that underpin development. In that context, the Strategic Innovation Unit (SIU) within the Bureau for Program and Policy support (BPPS) has worked with various UNDP teams, governments and other partners on exploring portfolio approaches that can help facilitate system transformation. This work progresses along the two parallel tracks – one that focuses on building capabilities for developing a different value proposition to tackle complex development challenges and another that addresses institutional redesign necessary to enable a shift from projects to portfolios. This critically implies a rewiring of core systems –  from M&E and finance to new capabilities and ways of working.The SIU team does this through the work of its distributed regional and a global team and a network of colleagues embed within country offices and other corporate units. The global SIU team is responsible, among others, for a number of initatives including a seminal Innovation Facility and a more recent investment of the Gates Foundation in the M&E Sandbox that it set up in 2022.

Due to the growing demand of countries and regional initiatives in RBA that wish to embark on Systems and Portfolio design, we wish to onboard an Innovation Specialist (IPSA) to support the additional countries (5 – 7 countries) that will go through Portfolio deep dives (design, implementation, socialization with partners and resource mobilization) in 2024.

Under the overall guidance of the Manager, Regional Programme and Global Policy Network, Regional Service Center for Africa (RSCA), as primary supervisor and the substantive overall guidance of the Chief, Strategic Innovation Unit,  and Programme Specialist Innovation at RSCA, the Innovation Specialist will support strategic design and execution of system transformation work, build partnerships and advocacy, support policy advisory services, and provision of training and capacity building in areas related to innovation, system change.

Key functions include:

• Strategy design and execution
• Partnership and Advocacy
• Policy Advisory, knowledge creation and innovation community building
• Provision of Country Office support

1.Strategy design and execution

• Support setting strategies for the innovation function of the regional hub in support of regional and global programmatic priorities, and in alignment with the global innovation and digital strategies;
• Suppport the formulation of the Regional team’s service offering vis a vis COs and national/local governments and ensure that it meets clients needs and maximises the existing regional assets (sensemaking and system change guidebook, Accelerator Labs, digital stewardship offer);
• Harness and foster bottom up feedback and implications of the strategy in order to ensure continued fit between the direction and demand and needs from the field;

2.Partnership and Advocacy

• Support partnership engagement with governments, CSOs, academia and the private sector; encourage South-South partnerships;
• Support strategic partnerships with UN Agencies and Funds, IFIs, Multilateral development banks, Impact Investors and the Private Sector; leading innovation agencies, think tanks, experts;

3.Policy Advisory, knowledge creation and innovation community building

• Ensure that UNDP’s innovation efforts in the region result in the creation of new knowledge that maintains UNDP’s offering relevant vis a vis governments when dealing with complex development challenges;
• Identify opportunities to scale practices across geographies, in collaboration with the SIU and CDO;
• Ensure that the regional team ‘works out loud’ by continuously sharing challenges, successes, lessons learnt for knowledge sharing across the clients’ base and for active participation in the regional and global international networks;
• Ensure that the region’s innovation community, including the Accelerator Labs, is kept abreast of latest trends, proactively shares insights and experiences and develops compelling knowledge products

4. Provision office Country Support 

• Support offices in the region in identifying new entry points and value-propositions in line with needs in the country and UNDP’s mandate.
• Provide support to offices in the roll-out of the portfolio policy, design of portfolios of interventions, including though designing the process, supporting consultations with stakeholders and facilitating ideation of interventions.
• Organize training and capacity-building workshops for UNDP offices and partners on topics related to system innovation, portfolio design and management, and other related topics.

5. The incumbent performs other duties within their functional profile as deemed necessary for the efficient functioning of the Office and the Organization.

Institutional Arrangement

The incumbent provides the above mentioned support under the guidance of the Regional Innvation specialist, the Regional Hub Director at the Regional service center for Africa (RSCA) and the Strategic Innovation Unit under the Bureau of Policy and Programme Support (BPPS).