Closing Date: 24 August 2025
Work Remotely as a WASH Innovation Consultant at UNICEF: Apply Now
Overview
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 is committed, passionate, and proud of what they do for as long as needed.
UNICEF is a place where careers are built. UNICEF offers its 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. UNICEF welcomes everyone who wants to belong and grow in a diverse and passionate culture, coupled with an attractive compensation and benefits package.
For every child, the right to innovate
UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. UNICEF believes 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. UNICEF sits 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.
The Sustainable WASH Innovation Hub, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, aims to source, pilot and scale transformational and frontier climate resilient innovations that respond to key programmatic challenges that, if solved, will unlock faster progress for a water secure future for children and young people. One of the key global challenges that the Hub will address through exploration and scale of innovative solutions will be tackling foreseen climate change impacts on WASH services and delivery access. The Hub will also support research and innovation on the links between climate change and water, sanitation and hygiene.
The Hub will bring together a passionate community of strategic partners including children and young people, academia, private entrepreneurs, public policy makers, social development and humanitarian actors, and its global UNICEF WASH / CEED and innovation colleagues in 150+ countries. Collectively UNICEF will co-create, advocate, enable, convene, and motivate for innovative sustainable solutions to long-standing barriers and emerging opportunities for a WASH secure and climate resilient future for every child.
How can you make a difference?
The role of the WASH Hub is to develop pathways to scale for solutions. For the work on Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) UNICEF is looking for a WASH Innovation Consultant to outline the scaling pathway. This should be a structured approach that outlines the steps, strategies, and choices for expanding a proven innovation so it can reach a larger population and achieve sustainable impact over time.
The pathway is not a single, fixed route but rather a sequence of stages and decisions that adapt to changing contexts and challenges as the innovation grows. The strategy will demonstrate success, building evidence, address local challenges, foster partnerships, enable policy, ensure economics, replicate models, and iterate based on feedback to enable MAR to be scaled as a robust, sustainable water management innovation.
Specifically, for the MAR solution the strategy needs to:
- Identify UNICEF countries using a MAR approach and review of work in key countries (Including Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Timor L’Este and Afghanistan others to be defined in discussion with the WASH hub team) to identify effectiveness in results and efficiency for delivery while also exploring other relevant MAR schemes;
- Identify and assess how to engage key actors in adoption of innovation; and
- Identify what is needed in deployment kits and other resources to facilitate uptake and adoption into new contexts and countries.
While this remote consultancy is intended for an individual to carry out it will be informed by the WASH hub technical team including a hydrogeologist and innovation specialists. Technical support will also be available through an existing partnership with IHE-Delft and another with Dresden University who are undertaking assessments on elements of existing MAR schemes and supporting design and activities the WASH hub is supporting. These resources can be used to support the WASH Innovation consultant if outlined in the inception report and agreed by the contract manager.
Required Qualifications
Minimum requirements:
- Education: An advanced university degree (Master’s or higher) in Innovation management or Water Engineering, other relevant field.*A first University Degree in a relevant field combined with 2 additional years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree.
- Work Experience: At least 8 years of relevant professional experience in technical project management in water
- Demonstrable experience of strategy development, knowledge management and strategic planning to scale projects
- Experience of project and contract management and working with government actors in this process
- Experience of driving projects in development settings with strong stakeholder engagement processes
- Skills:
- Demonstrable strong research, analysis and concise report writing skills.
- Knowledge of models for scaling innovation within development contexts and relevant experience in other contexts that add value to development approaches
- Language Requirements: Fluency in English is required.
Desirables:
- Relevant experience at country level, particularly in development, fragile settings and humanitarian contexts.
- Demonstrated experience on scaling innovation in low resource settings considered an asset
- Experience with private sector innovation actors considered an asset
- Experience in developing contexts and/or familiarity with emergency and fragile contexts is considered an asset
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