The Position:
The post is located in the Corporate Performance and Foresight Unit (CPFU) under the Office of the Executive Director (OED) and reports to the Chief of the CPFU.
How you can make a difference:
UNFPA is the lead UN agency for delivering a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.
UNFPA’s strategic plan (2022-2025), reaffirms the relevance of the current strategic direction of UNFPA and focuses on three transformative results: to end preventable maternal deaths; end unmet need for family planning; and end gender-based violence and harmful practices.
These results capture our strategic commitments on accelerating progress towards realizing the ICPD and SDGs in the Decade of Action leading up to 2030. Our strategic plan calls upon UN Member States, organizations and individuals to “build forward better”, while addressing the negative impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on women’s and girls’ access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights, recover lost gains and realize our goals.
In a world where fundamental human rights are at risk, we need principled and ethical staff, who embody these international norms and standards, and who will defend them courageously and with full conviction.
UNFPA is seeking candidates that transform, inspire and deliver high impact and sustained results; we need staff who are transparent, exceptional in how they manage the resources entrusted to them and who commit to deliver excellence in programme results.
Job Purpose:
As the UNFPA Strategic Plan 2022–2025 stresses, transforming the world also requires reinvigorating and transforming UNFPA, in line with the United Nations reform.
The landscape UNFPA operates in is changing rapidly – with climate change, demographic shifts, growing inequalities, and technological advancements reshaping the world.
In this context and to ensure that UNFPA is future-fit and strategically positioned to deliver on its mandate, in alignment with the ICPD Programme of Action, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Secretary-General’s vision for a UN 2.0, UNFPA is continuing its journey of essential organizational transformation.
CPFU supports the UNFPA Executive Leadership in anticipating global trends, understanding their impact on the UNFPA organizational model and realigning it so that it is best equipped to deliver effectively and efficiently on the Strategic Plan, in line with the reform of the UN Development System.
CPFU acts as a governance mechanism, working under the DED-M towards facilitating institutional insight, ensuring the substantive and operational coherence of the various change initiatives and processes within UNFPA.
CPFU has overall responsibility in coordinating and providing oversight of change process in the organization.
Changing the mindsets and inherent culture of the organization is a key component that is both an enabler and an outcome of institutional transformation. CPFU, therefore, also leads the Culture Initiative, an organization-wide exercise championed by the Executive Director to promote culture change and ensure even stronger alignment with UN values.
Within this context, the Institutional Transformation Specialist will provide technical, managerial and coordination support to achieve corporate change objectives, by collaborating with different UNFPA business units, contribute to the work related to further institutionalization of the UNDS reform, and serve as the focal point for the work related to organizational culture.
You would be responsible for:
- Contribute to building a conducive environment for institutional transformation, including through the organization of a series of initiatives to foster a more positive, innovative and proactive approach to change;
- Build capacity, facilitate knowledge sharing, and develop and curate lessons learned and innovations to support improved corporate performance.
- Support the identification of major organizational changes to ensure that organizations are best future-fit, through scanning the environment for trends and ideas and assessing their potential impact and opportunities for UNFPA.
- Coordinate and help implement corporate-related change activities to support UNFPA capability and performance to deliver on its Strategic Plan(s) in collaboration.