United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Job Recruitment

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the United Nations’ global development network. It advocates for change and connects countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life for themselves. It provides expert advice, training and grants support to developing countries, with increasing emphasis on assistance to the least developed countries. It promotes technical and investment cooperation among nations.

Headquartered in New York City, the status of UNDP is that of an executive board within the United Nations General Assembly. The UNDP is funded entirely by voluntary contributions from UN member states. The organization operates in 177 countries, where it works with local governments to meet development challenges and develop local capacity.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Stress Counsellor

Job ID: 30205
Location: Abuja, Nigeria
Practice Area – Job Family: Management – STRESS
Grade: SB4
Vacancy Type: Service Contract (SC)
Posting Type: Common System
Contract Duration: 1 Year with possibility for extension

Background    

• The stress counsellor  is being sought to support the psychosocial and organisational behaviour of UN staff in Nigeria:
  • To develop and maintain a sustainable stress management system applicable to all UN Agencies operating in Nigeria and to improve the critical incident stress management preparedness of the UN security system in case of emergencies.
  • To provide efficient and effective psychological counselling to staff requiring support related to work-place difficulties or personal issues. A large emphasis is placed on extensive engagement with staff and promotion of staff well-being
  • The challenges of working in difficult conditions to bring the much-needed support to our recipients while inherently rewarding, can place a great deal of pressure and stress on UN staff particularly those working in challenging environments.
  • The key purpose is to identify and address psychological risk factors in the workplace through the provision of counselling services to staff members and whenever necessary, their dependents.
  • The UN Common System in Nigeria under the Operations Management Team is looking for a highly qualified Staff Counsellor to join the UN Nigeria based in Abuja with coverage to all field-based offices.
• Under the administrative supervision of the UN Health Manager and the technical guidance of the CISMU Regional Stress Counsellor, the field stress counsellor will administrate a wide range of stress management activities, actively participating in emergency preparedness in the country in collaboration with UNDSS and the UN emergency coordination group as per the UNDSS CISMU standard operational procedures on the Management of Stress and Critical Incident Stress (MSCIS).
• A key requirement of the position will be the ability to summarize data and trends to develop programs and policies that are designed to support staff.
• Frequent travel is required from the Staff Counsellor to support the field offices, at times on short notice based on operational needs, and also at times to remote and difficult locations to provide support to staff based in the deep field.

Duties and Responsibilities
Under the administrative supervision of the UN Health Manager and the technical guidance of the CISMU Regional Stress Counsellor, the field stress counsellor will administrate a wide range of stress management activities, actively participating in emergency preparedness in the country in collaboration with UNDSS and the UN emergency coordination group as per the UNDSS CISMU standard operational procedures on the Management of Stress and Critical Incident Stress (MSCIS);

• Provide culturally sensitive psychosocial support to individuals, groups of staff and/or their immediate family members, to ensure staff members are assisted in difficult situations and that comprehensive assessments and treatment plans are prepared.
• Provide active psychosocial support during emergencies and/or after critical incidents to ensure continued staff well-being.
• Actively engage with management and staff to establish relationships based on trust and respect.
• Contribute to the staff readiness for undertaking challenging assignments in deep field duty stations through briefings, counselling sessions and other activities to ensure proactive support is extended to staff.
• Deliver workshops, trainings, and information sessions on a wide range of topics (e.g. stress management, team-building, problem-solving, conflict resolution, etc) to ensure that staff regularly receive relevant information and are aware of sources where to find information or assistance.
• Contribute to the design of corporate policies and guidelines, design information booklets/materials to increase awareness of important themes and promote staff welfare.
• Lead the establishment of Peer Helpers (PH) network and manage capacity building of this group.
• Prepare comprehensive reports, plan budget for missions, trainings and plan and implement other staff counselling activities to ensure the provision of cohesive counselling services.
• Hold accountability for maintenance of professional confidentiality at all times, practice ethics, actively engage with staff, listen to their concerns, and stay approachable.
• Contribute to the development of policies and guidelines, as well as written and visual materials to increase awareness regarding important themes and topics related to Staff Wellness

Competencies
Core Innovation:

• Ability to make new and useful ideas work.
• Adept with complex concepts and challenges convention purposefully

Communication:

• Ability to listen, adapt, persuade and transform.
• Synthesizes information to communicate independent analysis

Delivery:

• Ability to get things done while exercising good judgement .
• Meets goals and quality criteria for delivery of products or services

Professionalism:

• Knowledge of a range of humanitarian assistance, emergency relief and related human rights issues, including approaches and techniques to address difficult problems.
• Capacity to analyze and articulate the humanitarian dimension of issues which require a coordinated UN response. Ability to identify issues and judgment in applying technical expertise to resolve a wide range of problems.
• Ability to conduct research, including ability to evaluate and integrate information from a variety of sources and assess impact on the humanitarian rights situation in assigned area.
• Ability to work under extreme pressure, on occasion in a highly stressful environment; ability to provide guidance to new/junior staff; ability to provide advice to senior level officials.
• Shows pride in work and in achievements; demonstrates professional competence and mastery of subject matter; is conscientious and efficient in meeting commitments, observing deadlines and achieving results; is motivated by professional rather than personal concerns; shows persistence when faced with difficult problems or challenges; remains calm in stressful situations.
• Takes responsibility for incorporating gender perspectives and ensuring the equal participation of women and men in all areas of work. Demonstrate corporate knowledge and sound judgment.

Communication:

• Speaks and writes clearly and effectively; listens to others, correctly interprets messages from others and responds appropriately; asks questions to clarify and exhibits interest in having two-way communication; tailor’s language, tone, style and format to match audience; demonstrates openness in sharing information and keeping people informed.

Planning & Organizing:

• Develops clear goals that are consistent with agreed strategies; identifies priority activities and assignments; adjusts priorities as required; allocates appropriate amount of time and resources for completing work; foresees risks and allows for contingencies when planning; monitors and adjusts plans and actions as necessary; uses time efficiently.
• Acting as a team player and facilitating teamwork.
• Creating synergies through self-control, sharing knowledge and encourage the learning of others.

Required Skills and Experience
Education:

• Advanced University degree in Psychology, Psychiatry. The candidate must hold active licensure/registration as a mental health professional with a recognized governing association and be a member of that organization in good standing.
• Additional training or certification in a broad range of related fields, such as alcohol/substance abuse, resilience, cross-cultural communication, conflict resolution, mediation, trauma etc. will be an advantage.
• Registration as a Psychologist, Psychiatrist, in the country of origin is required.

Experience:

• Five (05) years or more of relevant experience in the field of mental health including experience in working in UN or other humanitarian organizations.
• Experience in hardship duty stations providing counselling services to staff working in difficult and hazardous environments is required.
• Broad knowledge of all facets of the field of counselling and ability to provide an environment in which others can talk confidentially and act without fear or repercussions within a climate of established trust.
• Specialist expertise in the assessment of mental health needs and the assessment of risk.
• Ability to manage crisis situations that involve diverse actors and stakeholders.
• Ability to identify clients’ needs and suggest appropriate solutions.
• Excellent communication skills (oral, written and presentations, very good working knowledge of technology tools such as PowerPoint, Excel and Word etc) including the ability to defend and explain difficult issues and positions to staff at all levels.
• Ability to communicate effectively with people of both genders and diverse national and cultural backgrounds.
• Ability to establish and maintain productive partnerships with clients.
• Must be an excellent team player and value working with a multidisciplinary and culturally diverse team.
• Ability to operate effectively across organizational boundaries and establish and maintain effective working relationships in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic environment with sensitivity and respect for diversity.
• Skills in conflict resolution and mediation skills.
• Skills in designing and delivering trainings/information sessions on a number of subjects and ability to adapt those to different audiences.

Language:

• Proficiency in writing and verbal communication in English is required and French (desirable).
• The local language is an asset

How to Apply
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online

Job Title: Head of Experimentation

Job ID: 30202
Location: Abuja, Nigeria
Practice Area – Job Family: Management – EXPERIMENTATION
Grade: NOB
Vacancy Type: FTA Local
Posting Type: Common System
Contract Duration: 1 Year with possibility for extension

Background

• The UNDP Strategic Plan 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, 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 UNDP Accelerator Lab Network which operates as part of UNDP’s sustainable development offering.

US:

• We are building the largest and fastest learning global network on development challenges. We have already set up 60 labs in 78 countries) embedded within UNDP’s global architecture and country platforms. We are now recruiting for a second cohort of 30 labs to be based in UNDP around the world. We use the power of the crowd, machine learning and distributed decision making to support partners to understand problems, develop new solutions, promote more inclusive decision making, and provide better oversight of what is done. We identify grassroots solutions and stretch their potential to accelerate development.
• We apply experimentation closely with government partners to grow this as a mode of operating to reduce costs of large-scale public sector reforms. Experimentation helps us learn whether particular assumptions are accurate before deploying solutions at scale, especially in the rapidly evolving contexts that often dominate development progress.
• The Accelerator Labs will be comprised of a core team with niche capabilities that focus on exploration, experimentation and grassroots innovation. 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:
  • Coordination
  • Training
  • 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
• Mapping Solutions: Ethnographic methods and 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 and connects local dynamics and solutions 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.

You:

• You are capable and excited about starting, designing 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, a natural strategic thinker and a talented do-er.  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.

Duties and Responsibilities
Experiment portfolio design:

• Works with UNDP and partners in mapping the context and nature of development challenges, with a particular focus on understanding systemic issues beyond traditional silos and classifications and identifying drivers of change, and levers for intervention
• Mapping systems and assets, identifying levers and logic for intervention, building hypotheses of change that are a fit to the system level challenges identified
• Identify logic against which to asses fit and coherence of the individual portfolios with the frontier challenges on which they are meant to generate learning
• Together with UNDP and development partners, coordinate portfolios of experiments to target multiple domains of complex problems.

Management of tests and experiments for sustainable development challenges:

• Collaborate with UNDP colleagues and stakeholders on the design of experiments across to validate the hypotheses and test the effectiveness of identified prototypes, including (but not limit to) defining variables, formulating hypotheses, and coordinating experimental protocols
• Develop a framework to capture the learning from the experiments in such a way that it favours critical reflection and rapid adaptation over static reporting
• Provide technical guidance for experiment design, roll-out and validation based on the experiment conditions, resources available, and requirements
• Proactively manage risks within experiments including those related to ethics and privacy
• Examine the results from the testing of prototypes and translate them into proposals informing programmatic decisions on next steps and implications for improvement, spin offs and scaling-up, where warrented.

Working out Loud:

• Proactively use blog and social media to share findings from the experiments and portfolio implementation
• Help UNDP and partners disseminate insights from Accelerator lab experiments via social media platforms as a way to regularly reflect and engage with external audiences.
• Liaise with UNDP’s global Accelerator Lab network and share learnings and insights from the country-specific experience
• Jointly with the CO, support lab partners to develop an emerging pipeline of new initiatives, support other activities related to the design and operation of the Lab
• Design and deliver engaging and meaningful methods for reflection on learning from experiments
• Proactively use blog posts and social media to share insights, attract partners and help position Accelerator Lab at the forefront of the exploration of new trends.
• Lead other activities related to the design and operations of the Accelerator Lab

Organizational learning and interface with the core business of UNDP:

• Help embed a portfolio logic in clients’ work including the existing UNDP Country Programme (as determined and agreed with the senior management)
• Working with clients to encourage reflection and capturing of insights from individual experiments, as they related to the overall portfolio logic
• Work together with your Accelerator Lab colleagues and experts to codify and advance the Accelerator Lab practice and portfolio design in particular.
• Provide technical consultation and training for national partners and the CO  through various phases including asset mapping, developing a strategic portfolio logic, experiment design, prototype testing, and evaluation;
• Design and deliver engaging and meaningful methods for reflection on learning from experiments
• Lead other activities related to the design and operations of the Accelerator Lab.

Competencies
Core Innovation:

• Ability to make new and useful ideas work.
• Adept with complex concepts and challenges convention purposefully

Leadership:

• Ability to persuade others to follow.
• Generates commitment, excitement and excellence in others

People Management:

• Ability to improve performance and satisfaction.
• Models independent thinking and action

Communication:

• Ability to listen, adapt, persuade and transform.
• Synthesizes information to communicate independent analysis

Delivery:

• Ability to get things done while exercising good judgement.
• 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.
• 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
Education:

• Master’s degree in Social Science, International Development, Environmental Science, Transition or Complexity Science, Engineering, Design (e.g. industrial or service design, architecture, urban planning), Psychology or a related area 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 Social Science, International Development, Environment Science, Engineering, Design (e.g. industrial or service design, architecture, urban planning), Psychology or related area 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 design experiments, validate hypotheses and test prototypes;
• Professional experience in development programming or policy and social innovation.
• Experience in following areas is desirable but not necessary:
• Proven professional knowledge and experience in social innovation approaches such as Systems Thinking, Behavioral Insights, Qualitative and Quantitative User Research, Co-creation, Prototyping, Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Data Empowerment, and Collective Intelligence
• Demonstrated ability to work with clients to help surface unarticulated needs
• Demonstrated ability to apply a portfolio logic to experiments
• Demonstrated ability in running co-design sessions and capacity-building in experimental design, lean iteration and impact evaluation.

Language Requirements:

• Proficiency in written and spoken English.

Deadline: 8th May, 2020.

How to Apply
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online

Note: Qualified female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply.