Senior Consultant on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) Innovation, Office of Innovation, 12 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.

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...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.

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 consultant will play a central role in accelerating UNICEF’s efforts to scale effective Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) innovations that deliver tangible results for children. By working closely with the Climate Resilience Centre of Excellence and the Office of Innovation, the consultant will help build a coherent organisational approach to identifying, testing, documenting, and scaling innovations that strengthen the climate resilience of essential services and national systems. This includes innovations related to early warning systems and anticipatory approaches as part of broader DRR and CCA efforts. The assignment will directly contribute to UNICEF’s Strategic Plan (2026–2029) and the Sustainability and Climate Change Action Plan (SCAP).

Key Outputs

1. Comprehensive stock take of DRR and CCA innovations across UNICEF and outside
2. Organisational mapping of DRR/CCA expertise and resources across divisions, ROs, and COs.
3. Global guidance on globally tested DRR/CCA innovations with relevance for UNICEF’s sectors.
4. Practical tools, briefs, and case studies for sca