Senior Strategic Adviser – Digital Education, Equity & Evidence, Stockholm, Sweden, Office of Innovation, 5 months (remote)

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 Education

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.
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.

The Office of Innovation specifically looks to form partnerships around frontier technologies (like drones and UAVs, blockchain, 21st century skills, urban technologies, new banking tools, wearables and sensors, or 3D-Printing) that exist at the intersection of $100 billion business markets, and 1 billion person needs – and to identify how they can grow and scale profitably and inclusively.

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-year 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-year 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 purpose of this consultancy is to provide strategic advice, analytical contributions, and intellectual leadership to UNICEF’s global digital education agenda.

The Senior Strategic Adviser will:

• Contribute to the Digital Education Strategy and its implementation, with attention to equity measurement, monitoring and evaluation, sustainability, and principles for engagement with technology companies
• Support UNICEF’s partnership engagement and global positioning through thought leadership and contributions to events and dialogues
• Lead a substantive contribution to a report chapter on “Evidence of Equity”, examining how EdTech can support or hinder equitable outcomes and how digital divides can be measured and addressed

Your main responsibilities will be:

• Consolidated advisory inputs to the Digital Education Strategy and its implementation plan, covering M&E, equity measurement, sustainability, and engagement with technology companies
• Thought-leadership and event-related contributions supporting UNICEF’s digital education partnerships and positioning
• Draft “Evidence of Equity” chapter/section, revised b