Consultancy: Innovative MEL Consultant, Office of Innovation, 6 months (Remote/full time)

UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children’s lives, defend their rights, and help them fulfill their potential, from early childhood through adolescence.

At UNICEF, we are committed, passionate, and proud of what we do for as long as we are needed. Promoting the rights of every child is not just a job – it is a calling.

UNICEF is a place where careers are built. We offer our staff diverse opportunities for professional and personal development that will help them reinforce a sense of purpose while serving children and communities across the world. We welcome everyone who wants to belong and grow in a diverse and passionate culture., coupled with an attractive compensation and benefits package.

Visit our website to learn more about what we do at UNICEF.

For every child, the right to 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 (OoI) works to catalyse UNICEF's and all its partners’ expertise and resources against key children-outcomes bottlenecks, with a view to continuously ideate and scale the most effective solutions with transformational potential at scale to achieve the child-related SDGs. The office is doing this by continuously exploring new ways of accelerating results for children, investing across a range of early stage solutions, and harnessing internal and external expertise towards continuously iterating and finetuning the most promising solutions for children through a systematic portfolio management approach, and leveraging all stakeholders’ innovation energy, knowhow and resources from intergovernmental, multilateral, private sector and non-governmental organizations. This takes place across 160 country offices.

Our team
The consultant will be working with the Innovation Manager in the Office of Innovation’s Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL)/Knowledge Management (KM) team. Our goal 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.

How can you make a difference? 

Your main responsibilities will be:

Under the supervision of the Innovation Manager and in close collaboration with other Office of Innovation teams and UNICEF Country Offices, the consultant will:

• Support the generation of high-quality evidence across UNICEF’s innovation pipeline by providing technical inputs into research design, ethical reviews, methodology selection, and data collection planning. Ensure approaches are stage-appropriate, user-centered, and aligned with the Innovation MEL Toolbox.
• Develop and test innovative, tech-enabled methods for evidence generation by exploring the application of tools such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and remote sensing. This includes supporting pilot initiatives with Country Offices to assess their feasibility, added value, and ethical implications in real-world settings.
• Map and engage external partners and firms offering innovation-enabled MEL services and contribute to the design of Long-Term Agreements (LTAs) or partnership models to support scalable, ethical, and efficient evidence generation.
• Promote the use of innovative technologies for evidence generation, such as AI-assisted data collection and analysis, blockchain-based validation, remote monitoring, and predictive analytics. Identify use cases, pilot approaches, and collaborate with technical partners and vendors to implement and assess their value in UNICEF’s context.
• Synthesize pilot results and emerging insights into strategic guidance for the broader organization, including a consolidated summary of innovation-for-evidence pilot activities and their implications for future programming and scale-up.
• Produce practitioner-oriented resources and guidance to support the responsible integration of emerging technologies into MEL practice. This includes authoring