Overview
The Public Sector Innovation and Partnerships Specialist will support UNDP Country Offices and partners in developing project pipelines, programmes, and forging new partnerships to scale impact across the region.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the Digital Stewardship Community of Policymakers (Asia Pacific), including maintaining workplans, reporting, and facilitating learning sessions.
- Curate and coordinate story-telling, research, and development, and spotlighting of policymakers’ initiatives.
- Support the co-design and delivery of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and AI Stewards programme.
- Help anchor interdisciplinary teams across ministries to strengthen institutional capacity on digital public infrastructure, responsible AI, and whole-of-government transformation.
- Work with the Digital and AI Hub (DAI Hub) Team in anchoring DPI Safeguards initiative across countries.
- Design and Develop “South-South Digital for Development” Offer by identifying, packaging, and operationalizing DPIs, DPGs, stewardship models, and policy innovations.
- Facilitate cross-country peer learning, learning missions, and expert exchanges.
- Facilitate and Co-Create Public Sector Innovation Offers on Air Pollution, Climate, Health and Cross-Thematic Systems Engagement.
- Anchor and socialize the ‘Transformation Teams’ concept.
- Design and deliver experimenting and capacity building offers for civil service reforms/ innovation.
- Design and deliver initiatives under Policy Labs/ Innovation Labs within the region.
- Support Country Offices/Cross-Team programming on systems and digital innovation for air pollution.
- Coordinate and convene multistakeholder engagements emerging from new workstreams.
- Support strategic communications and outreach by translating technical work into compelling narratives, thought leadership pieces, and policy briefs.
- Contribute to partnership development and resource mobilization by engaging donors, private sector partners, and academia, and supporting proposal development and joint fundraising efforts.
Required Experience
- A minimum of 5 years (with Master’s degree) or 7 years (with Bachelor’s degree) of professional experience in development programming and social innovation in Asia Pacific context.
- Proven experience supporting Governments and engaging diverse stakeholders on policy advocacy and public sector innovation initiatives.
- Experience in facilitating co-design processes and capacity building including exposure to experimental design, iterative approaches, or impact assessment.
- Experience in managing donor relationships, delivering against donor expectations, and supporting resource mobilization for programmes.
- Experience applying digital, data or emerging technologies (including AI) to support public sector innovation or policy making.
- Experience building partnerships and supporting resource mobilization with government, academia, private tech, donors and civil society.
- Strong ability to identify new opportunities and translate them into actionable initiatives or programmes.
- Ability to work effectively in fast-paced environments with competing priorities and deadlines with strong coordination and organizational skills, with the ability to manage multiple workstreams.
- Experience working within the national or local government is an asset.
Qualifications
Advanced university degree (Master’s degree or equivalent) in Global Affairs, International Relations, Development Studies, International Relations/ Public Administration/ Public Policy/ related fields is required. OR A first-level university degree (Bachelor’s degree) in the areas mentioned above, in combination with an additional two years of qualifying experience will be given due consideration in lieu of the advanced university degree.
