Consultancy: Reimagine Education Digital Connectivity Specialist , DCOE at UNICEF

UNICEF is the world’s largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.

Scope Of Work

UNICEF’s Reimagine Education initiative has five core pillars: World Class Digital Learning Solutions, Connectivity, Devices, Affordable Data and Content, and Young People’s Engagement. While a comprehensive approach cutting across all five pillars will be required to achieve meaningful results, through the Airtel partnership thirteen UNICEF Country Offices (COs) across the Eastern and Southern Africa Region (ESAR) and Western and Central Africa Region (WCAR) will be provided with additional support to develop and test scalable and sustainable models for addressing Connectivity and Affordable Data & Content to support provision of learning opportunities for children. This will require sustained engagement with Government and national parners, policy and regulatory reform, consortium building including with the private sector, development of new operating models, and testing of innovative approaches to lower significant cost drivers preventing scale. Most UNICEF CO’s have limited experience and / or capacity across many of the Reimagine Education Pillars and have in the past relied on RO’s for technical support. However, with the significant increase and acceleration of these programmes across ESAR and WCAR, there is not sufficient capacity to meet expected country needs. The purpose of this consultancy is to augment regional capacity to provide technology related technical support to CO’s around Reimagine Education, GIGA and the Airtel partnership. Activities are expected to include the following:

Coordinate development and monitoring of all digital / technology related inputs to the overall cross-regional workplans and budgets for Reimagine Education / GIGA, as well support and advise UNICEF CO’s on their respective workplans and budgets in related areas. This includes data consumption modeling across 13 countries over five years under this partnership.

• Support UNICEF CO’s to conduct digital readiness assessments and develop costed roadmaps.


• Identify barriers (eg. social norms) preventing children and adolescents from leveraging from connectivity solutions and ensure that relevant CO stakeholders are engaged to develop mitigation strategies.


• Provide thought leadership and technical guidance to Airtel Africa and UNICEF CO’s on connectivity and data solutions, prioritizing low bandwidth and offline data catching approaches to maximize efficiency and lower overall costs of zero-rated data provided by Airtel Africa. The incumbent will lead and be the focal point for T4D related continental initiatives work under the zero-rating and school connectivity pillars of the Airtel Africa partnership – this will be done with the support of the partnership manager, manager and relevant technical counterparts across the continent.


• Support UNICEF CO’s to pilot and generate evidence for new solutions and innovative approaches, including documentation and sharing with key stakeholders, prioritizing scalable and sustainable models.


• Regularly monitor and report to UNICEF leadership on usage and consumption of Airtel’s in-kind contribution across 13 countries.


• Support analysis of EdTech learning solutions proposed by UNICEF CO’s, including information security and data / bandwidth consumption, as well as opportunities to optimize.


• Support the Giga and CO teams to engage relevant government divisions and partners to collect, clean, classify the required data for Giga school mapping.


• Support the Giga and CO teams on the deployment of software tools for real-time monitoring of internet connectivity in schools.


• Support the Giga and CO teams to develop long term, financially sustainable models for continued provision of connectivity and data services.


• Support identification and engagement of additional technical partners and contribute to proposals / resource mobilization efforts as needed.

This position will sit under the newly established ICTD Digital Centre of Excellence (DCOE), based in Nairobi. The supervisor of the position will be the DCOE T4D Manager (Programme Effectiveness), supported by the Chief of DCOE. There will be a dotted, matrix management line to the ESARO and WCARO T4D Business Analysts and the Giga Accelerate Lead. In terms of the specific support to the Airtel Africa partnership, the incumbent will work in coordination with the Partnership Manager to ensure reporting expectations and deadlines agreed with the partner are met.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

• An advanced university degree in computer science, telecommunications, network engineering, software engineering, information technology management, or other relevant disciplines.


• A first university degree with 2 additional years of relevant professional experience may be considered.


• A minimum of five years of relevant professional experience in in the area of technology for development, including.


• At least 3 years’ experience providing field connectivity solutions, including mobile and fixed broadband, in low bandwidth settings.


• At least 3 years’ experience working with or managing relationships with MNOs and ISPs.


• Experience with EdTech, including infrastructure, hardware and software solutions, and capacity building is desired.


• Experience with national telecommunications policies and regulations is desired.


• Familiarity working with big data is desired: (telcos, satellite, etc).


• Development or government experience; familiarity with the UN system and UNICEF is desired.

Technical Knowledge : Knowledge of horizontal innovations relevant to school connectivity is desired

Competencies Skills

• Strong organizational skills, including multitasking, and time-management


• Demonstrated ability to work with people of various professional, academic and cultural backgrounds Ability to communicate data insights and to translate into programmatic impact.


• Good interpersonal skills

Language Skills : Fluency in English and French required

For every Child, you demonstrate…

• UNICEF’s values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, and Accountability (CRITA).


• To view our competency framework, please visit here.

Duration Of Contract: 11.5 months

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