UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential. 

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone. 

And we never give up. 

For every child, we innovate

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives. The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the start-up thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

Our team

We're an interdisciplinary team around the world tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling new technologies and practices. With our partners, we focus on convening and collaborating on new and different solutions, low- and high-tech, by:

• Looking at the 2-5 years horizon to evaluate emerging and trending technologies and to see how UNICEF can work with the private sector on doing better business while improving essential services for children.
• Investing in early-stage solutions that show great potential to positively impact children in the 02 years future including the Venture Fund that invests in open-source technology solutions from start- ups based in UNICEF’s programme countries.
• Identifying proven solutions that can be implemented at national scale in multiple countries – taking the ideas that help thousands in one country, bringing them to dozens of countries across multiple sectors, and impacting the lives of millions of children.”

How can you make a difference? 

The intern will gain hands on experience carrying out functions to work in one of the various portfolio areas hosted at the Office of Innovations. The applicant is to identify preference for first priority and second priority areas most interested to work with from the following thematic and portfolio areas:

Humanitarian Innovation

Innovation for humanitarian action is crucial to effectively reduce vulnerabilities to shocks and build resilience, particularly in a context of dwindling resources and ever-increasing number of ongoing crises. To help accelerate results for children in humanitarian contexts, the Humanitarian Innovations Portfolio at UNICEF works to transform humanitarian action to ensure cutting-edge ideas are applied to use cases in the humanitarian space. By identifying key major challenges in the humanitarian field today, UNICEF:  

• Supports Country Offices to pilot, accelerate and scale innovative solutions to address their most pressing challenges 
• Team up with partners to bring the latest tech from the private sector and adapt it for humanitarian action 
• Leverage the humanitarian innovations ecosystem across UNICEF and beyond                                           

This portfolio area focuses on how innovations can support increased reach and coverage to people affected by conflict, climate, and public health emergencies, while ensuring inclusive humanitarian action of vulnerable populations and the hardest-to- reach children. The current solutions of the portfolios focus on, but not limited to, equal access to energy supply in conflict settings, remote tracking tools in humanitarian supply chains, digitalizing feedback mechanisms to inform humanitarian programming, machine learning translation for a more inclusive humanitarian response.  

  Climate, Energy and Infrastructure portfolio

Almost every child on earth is exposed to at least one of the major climate and environmental shocks and stresses. From megadroughts and blistering heatwaves to staggering flooding, half of the world's children, totaling one billion, are deemed to be at extremely high risk due to a deadly combination of high exposure to climate hazards and inadequate services to support them.

The UNICEF global climate innovation portfolio aligns with a diverse partner network to champion impactful solutions, especially with and for communities in the over 190 countries where we have presence. With a shared purpose, we catalyze increased investments to source, pilot, iterate, and scale solutions so that they help change these communities’ realities and hopes around climate change. UNICEF’s climate change innovation portfolio is currently scaling transformational climate solutions across 22 countries in four thematic areas: Air Pollution, Climate Policies for Children, Waste Innovation & Circular Economy, Disaster Preparedness and Risk Reduction.

  Health Portfolio

Global inequities in access to maternal and child health services affect pregnancy and childbirth outcomes, routine immunizations, and protection against sexually transmitted infections.

The Health Innovation Portfolio addresses these challenges by equipping of local health workers with high-resolution data and advanced analytics to better understand and meet health needs. It also supports providing health services that are tailored to the needs of adolescents, including sexual and reproductive health and rights. To ensure that every child survives and thrives the UNICEF Health Innovation portfolio contributes by:

• Developing and scaling transformative health innovations that address the specific challenges faced by children and young people, ensuring effective impact.
• Strengthening the innovation capacity of UNICEF health programs and partners within local health and innovation ecosystems.
• Catalyzing thought leadership and partnerships in health innovation by facilitating dynamic networks of innovators, academics, and industry leaders

The portfolio currently focuses on innovation in health systems, achieving universal health care (UHC), particularly through innovation at the community level, and innovation in major health priorities (maternal, child, newborn, adolescent), and communicable and non-communicable diseases.

  Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning / Knowledge Management team

The goal of the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL)/Knowledge Management (KM) team is to maximize the impact of UNICEF's innovations globally through rigorous, data-driven evidence. In short, we care about what works in innovation, and why. And we care about bringing these insights to UNICEF globally and beyond. Our work spans across an expansive range of initiatives, from generating direct evidence on our innovation initiatives, to providing thought leadership in innovation scaling and providing corporate guidance on measurement and evidence in innovation.

  Governance Portfolio

Innovation Governance coordinates and supports the Global Innovation Portfolios and Innovation across UNICEF as a three-tier system – thematic team, innovation steering committee and global innovation board. The Governance Secretariat is a crucial mechanism for the coordination of UNICEF-wide efforts for innovation action and scale with the thematic portfolios.  By coordinating across all portfolios, division and partners, UNICEF aims to:  

• Drive the implementation of organization-wide innovation action and priorities aligned with UNICEF programme
• Create an enabling environment and ecosystem for innovation with governments and partners
• Build innovation maturity and scaling pathways leveraging portfolios, partnerships and people.

This work currently focuses on cross-portfolio initiatives, governance set-up/operationalization, collaboratives and ecosystem strengthening.

Upshift

UPSHIFT is a UNICEF global skill development solution. It empowers young people to devise real-world solutions to the challenges they see around them by providing them with the tools, mentorship and hands-on experience to help turn ideas into action. UPSHIFT is operational across 56 countries, has graduated 5.2 million young people to date and is on track to reach another 1.5 million in 2025 with the acceleration of results being driven by UPSHIFT integration into Education Systems across 13 countries and transition to digital blended delivery models to increase scale and lower costs.

 Design function

The design function within UNICEF Office of Innovation works across thematic innovation portfolios. Our in-house designers who work with the innovation portfolios support with:

• 1) How to best innovate by ensuring innovation processes (from problem framing and user research to ideation and rapid prototyping of solutions) are inclusive and participatory, equitable and agile.
• 2) What innovative solutions are most desirable and relevant by our stakeholders by keeping people at the center and (re)designing solutions for local contexts.
• 3) designing for strategic direction and decision-making.

As designers within the Office of Innovation, we bring a unique set of mindsets, principles and expertise which strengthens UNICEF’s capacity to be co-creative and co-innovative. Our workflows are informed by human-centered design, strategic design thinking, creativity and lean startup frameworks, to mention a few. We are platform agnostics by nature, and our design support and services are tailored to each, unique context to ensure the children and their communities always stay at the center of UNICEFs innovative impact work.

Main responsibilities include:

The below responsibilities are examples of how/where the intern can support. Responsibilities will be agreed to in discussion with the Portfolio Manager once the intern is recruited.

• Research support: The candidate will assist with collating, reviewing, and presenting research findings for both internal and external publication. The candidate will provide primary and secondary research support through a variety of methods including interviews and scanning of solutions by market intelligence.
• Project Coordination and knowledge management support: the candidate will assist with general organization of evidence and project management materials, that are both carried out by UNICEF and by external actors, to ensure an updated resource depository.
• Drafting of documents: The candidate will support with drafting of concept notes, landscape reviews of innovative solutions, presentations and slide decks, and other documents are needed. The selected intern will also be work with developing briefing notes and other relevant documents.
• Communications support: The candidate will support designing, conceptualizing communication assets for visibility and digital media amplification.
• Online community hosting: assist with facilitating communication and engagement, monitoring community activity, Collecting and sharing feedback. Including organizing events or activities and facilitating introductions between members.
• Project review support: The candidate will support in the development of a checklist for incoming portfolio solutions, as well support the portfolio manager with employing the checklist to evaluate the absence/presence of features for consideration in early-stage and accelerated project.
• Event support: The candidate may support preparation for various events that may occur during the internship period.
• Information management and visualization: The candidate will support in the development of a system that will support M&E teams at the country office and regional level to collect data in real time, enable the storage, processing and analysing of M&E data, and visualizing key indicators to support evidence-based decision making.
• Knowledge Management: The candidate will support the development of a dedicated SharePoint resource page organized as a deployment journey to support UNCIEF in country offices to have easy access to key documents, assets and lessons learned with the secondary objective of ensuring rapid dissemination of latest assets. The role will include interaction with country offices and user testing of the final product.

As a UNICEF Innovation Intern, you will:

• Get to work on a specific project of strategic value to the team. You’ll get to present your ideas and outputs to the team at the end of the internship.
• Gain hands-on experience working with a new team supporting the role out of innovative products at scale.
• Have a fun and inspiring internship experience to learn and discuss how innovative solutions can be applied in the humanitarian context.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have… 

• Be enrolled in an undergraduate, graduate or Ph.D. degree programme or have graduated within the past two years particularly in health, political science, environmental sciences, youth development, education development studies or other related fields.
• Have good academic performance as demonstrated by recent university or institution records.
• Familiarity with humanitarian contexts and the global development sector is considered an asset.
• Fluency (written and verbal) in English. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

Travel:

• No travel is expected for the intern(s)

Conditions:

• Age: Interns must be at least 18 years
• Have good academic performance as demonstrated by recent university or institution records.
• Have no immediate relatives (e.g. father, mother, brother, sister) working in any UNICEF office.
• Have no other relatives in the line of authority which the intern will report to.
• Individuals must have proof of medical insurance covering the time and location of their internship.
• Individuals are expected to provide their own laptop.
• Selected candidates will receive a monthly stipend (unless already in receipt of any support for the internship from a third party).
• Individuals must fund their own travel and living expenses.
• Individuals are responsible for arranging any visa or immigration requirements.
• There is no expectancy of employment at the end of the internship.

 Employment: There is no expectancy of employment at the end of the internship.

Please see attached Terms of Reference (TOR)  TOR - Innovations Intern - Portfolio, Culture and Scale .pdf

How to apply:

• Interested applicant is required to submit an application via the online portal.
• Please clearly state from which date you are available to begin the internship.

For every Child, you demonstrate…

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS).

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:  

UNICEF appointments are subject to medical clearance. Issuance of a visa by the host country of the duty station, which will be facilitated by UNICEF, is required for IP positions. Appointments may also be subject to inoculation (vaccination) requirements, including against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid). Government employees that are considered for employment with UNICEF are normally required to resign from their government before taking up an assignment with UNICEF. UNICEF reserves the right to withdraw an offer of appointment, without compensation, if a visa or medical clearance is not obtained, or necessary inoculation requirements are not met, within a reasonable period for any reason.

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process. 

Contact: For any queries, please contact: swe-ooi-recruitments@unicef.org