UNICEF Internship: Innovations Intern, Office of Innovation, Stockholm, Sweden, 6 months (with the possibility of remote work)

Finance June 5, 2023

0 6 minutes read

Job no: 562411
Contract type: Internship
Duty Station: Stockholm
Level: Internship
Location: Sweden
Categories: Innovation

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 startup thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

UNICEF’s Office of Innovation creates opportunities for the world’s children by focusing on where new markets can meet their vital needs. We do this by:

Connecting youth communities (or more broadly — anyone disconnected or under-served) to decision-makers, and to each other, to deliver informed, relevant and sustained programmes that build better, stronger futures for children.
Provoking change for children through an entrepreneurial approach — in a traditionally risk-averse field — to harness rapidly moving innovations and apply them to serve the needs of all children.
Creating new models of partnership that leverage core business values across the public, private and academic sectors in order to deliver fast, and lasting results for children.

How can you make a difference?

UNICEF takes a portfolio approach to scaling innovations that reflect the most challenging problems faced by children and young people. Each portfolio contains innovative solutions (sourced from across UNICEF and beyond) that have potential to scale and significantly accelerate results for children.

The UNICEF Internship Programme offers eligible/qualified students the opportunity to acquire direct practical experience within the Portfolio, Culture & Scale team at the UNICEF Office of Innovations. The intern will work directly under the supervision of a Portfolio Manager and will be tasked to contribute to support to identify, verify, and scale solutions that can improve UNICEF’s ability to respond to humanitarian emergencies.

The applicant is to identify preference for one or two of the following portfolio areas the intern is most interested in:

Humanitarian Innovations Portfolio: Humanitarian access must be expanded and strengthened to ensure full coverage of the most vulnerable, while simultaneous ensuring that UNICEF has access to some of the hardest-to-reach areas. This portfolio area focuses on how innovations can support increased reach and coverage to people affected by conflict, climate, and public health emergencies. To do this, focus is made on identifying, validating, and scaling innovative solutions that relate to better data governance, ensuring state- of-the-art technologies are deployed and utilized by humanitarians, and supporting solutions to ensure barriers faced by local level first responders to humanitarian crises are minimized.

Youth Innovations Portfolio: There are 1.2 billion adolescents worldwide, the largest cohort ever, with 90 per cent of those living in low-and middle-income countries, and 125 million living in areas affected by armed conflict. Despite progress in advancing the wellbeing and participation of adolescents and young people, there remains an urgent need to empower greater numbers of young people as change agents, promote global connectedness, and support these young people through their civic engagement journey. Youth Innovation Portfolio builds and scale the future infrastructure for scalable, impactful innovations and new technologies for youth and adolescents with UNICEF Country Offices and

Health Innovation Portfolio: The scope of UNICEF’s Health Innovation portfolios includes the biggest problems facing maternal and Child Health (MCH), Adolescent health, Immunization, and Nutrition by supporting the identification, development and scale-up of innovative solutions, to meet the demands and challenges for equitable and quality health care, and the attainment of health-related SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). UNICEF’s health Innovation team is working to identify and scale innovative solutions that will help improve nutrition and adolescent health. Examples of the current innovation pipeline include health data innovation, adolescent girls’ health /sexual reproductive health rights (SRHR), immunization demand generation, healthy food/diets for prevention of child overweight and obesity.

Mental Health & Psychosocial Wellbeing Innovation Portfolio: Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) has been identified as an institutional priority for the UN, and for UNICEF. Indeed, UNICEF’s Strategic Plan (2018-2021) identifies MHPSS as an emerging area of importance and is now working to reaffirm and better operationalize the MHPSS commitments across sectors in development and humanitarian contexts, since mental health conditions affect one in four people over a lifetime and are responsible for more than 10% of the global burden of disease. To prevent and address the mental health and psychosocial needs of children, adolescents, and families, UNICEF has determined that a multi-layered, inter-sectoral MHPSS approach is needed. This approach requires clarifying the linkages between mental health and other sectors, strengthening links amongst MHPSS interventions, and developing innovative approaches to scale up quality MHPSS interventions.

Monitoring, Evaluation, Evidence, Learning and Research (MEELR): MEELR at UNICEF is an essential function to assess if progress is made in achieving the expected results of programs and projects, identify bottlenecks in implementation and make necessary adjustments, promote accountability of results and support continuous learning and improvement. The MEELR team at the Office of Innovation works with innovation portfolios to generate high quality evidence and learnings to inform the pathway to scale.

Main Duties / Responsibilities

The below duties 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 support: The candidate will assist with keeping the Innovation Portfolios data updated for internal use and on INVENT, which is UNICEF’s global digital repository for technology for development (T4D) and innovations.
Knowledge management support: the candidate will assist with general organization of evidence and evaluations, 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 Evaluation support: The candidate will support in the development of a checklist for incoming portfolio projects, 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 analyzing of M&E data, and visualizing key indicators to support evidence-based decision making. The data management and visualization pipeline shall include the development of a system for data capture, submission, cleaning and shaping, and an interactive dashboard.

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.

Please access the full ToR and related information here Download File TOR Internship innovations portfolio 2023.pdf

In the application, please indicate:

What is your current location?
Are you available to intern on site at the UNICEF Office of Innovations in Stockholm?
Are you available to work remotely online?
Which portfolio area is your first preference to intern with?
Which portfolio area is your second preference to intern with?
When are you available to start?
How long are you available to intern for? Max 6 months.

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.
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.
Additional consideration will be given for any related experience.
Have excellent communication and writing skills.
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.

Conditions

Individuals must have proof of medical insurance covering the time and location of their internship.
This internship expects a full-time commitment.
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.