Background

While UNDP has helped countries achieve significant progress in making gender equality and women’s empowerment integral to human development, much work remains to be done. Against a backdrop of growing distrust in governments, a sense of unfairness and a deterioration in the quality of democracies, there is now notable pushback against gender equality. This backlash has also been seen in the form of a rise in fundamentalist ideologies, authoritarianism, and extremism. Women and other affected groups continue to face a host of discriminatory laws and social norms, and women human rights defenders often lose their lives.

UNDP’s Gender Equality Strategy 2022-2025 (https://genderequalitystrategy.undp.org/) focused on helping countries shift systems and power structures that generate gender inequalities and women’s disempowerment. UNDP targets public institutions to deliver public policies towards gender equality. UNDP commits to equip them with capacities to identify and address backsliding, protect and expand gender equality gains in policies and laws, and address negative social norms in society. Our vision is to work for a world with strong public institutions and policies that work and are accountable for gender equality and expand spaces for civil society engagement.

The Gender Team has the leading role in this work and in the implementation of the Gender Equality Strategy 2022-2025. A key pillar of this work is the UNDP Gender Equality Seal for Public Institutions, https://www.gendersealpublicinstitutions.org/ one of UNDP’s pioneering flagships, helping create a new generation of public policies, institutions, and policymakers to diminish discriminatory norms, enhancing public institutions skills and capacities for delivering gender responsive public policies. It is a global voluntary awarding program, specifically designed for public institutions, that aims to support, recognize and champion public institutions that commit to and improve on advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment.

The Gender Equality Seal team is currently developing a dedicated Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help UNDP Gender Seal team and external assessors to implement rapid evidence-based assessments of public institutions performance against Gender Equality Seal for Public Institutions standard, analysing evidence in any language and providing the results of the assessment also in any language. For improving this functionality, UNDP seeks to hire an intern that will be responsible to do comparative analysis of the results produced by the assessors and the results produced by the AI tool, LOLA, and provides inputs and recommendations to improve the work of the AI. The intern will also support the Gender Seal team in implementing its knowledge management strategy, that includes the analysis and production of different knowledge products regarding the Seal results.

Duties and Responsibilities

Under the overall supervision of the Global Manager of the Gender Equality Seal for Public Institutions, the intern will assist in the following duties and responsibilities:

A. Support the continuous improvement of AI LOLA

1. Develop comparative analysis of the results of LOLA and the real results produced by UNDP Seal team and external assessors, both for baseline and final assessments.
2. Propose adjustment of the instructions that are given to LOLA AI, so it can improve its outputs.
3. Propose adjustments to the user experience in LOLA.

B.Support the implementation of the knowledge management strategy of the Seal for Public Institutions team:

1. Produce briefings regarding the results of the public institutions that have undergone the final external assessment of the Seal.
2. Systematize and analyse aggregated information from different sources related to Seal implementation (lessons learned, Seal surveys results etc.)
3. Support the implementation of the global Seal awarding ceremony 2025.
4. Support the content development of the Seal Sharepoint and Sparkblue Page.
5. Support the development of pitches, presentation, key messages, social media card or any other products.
6. Support updating the monitoring of Seal KPIs
7. Graphic design of simple documents

Competencies

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills;
• Knowledge of gender equality and women’s rights in the context of development and interest to contribute to the question;
• Strong qualitative and quantitative analytical skills.
• Previous experience with AI training will be highly valued.
• Outgoing and initiative-taking person with a goal oriented mind-set;
• Strong organizational skills;
• Excellent interpersonal skills;
• Responds positively to feedback and differing points of view; consistently approaches work with energy and a positive, constructive attitude.
• Communicates effectively when working in teams and independently;
• Interest and motivation in working in an international organization;
• Displays cultural, gender, religion, race, nationality and age sensitivity and adaptability;

Required Skills and Experience

Education:

Candidates must meet one of the following educational requirements:

• Currently in the final year of a Bachelor’s degree; or
• Currently enrolled in a Master’s degree; or
• Have graduated no longer than 1 year ago from a bachelor’s or master’s degree or equivalent studies.
• Field of study: communications, journalism, international development, gender studies, public administration, or related field
• Experience:
• Experience in communications and media work, including in digital communications and social media outreach and engagement.
• Analytical, editing and writing skills in English.
• Computer skills (MS Windows, MS Office applications, Infographics).
• Experience in the area of gender equality.
• Capacity for strategic and creative thinking in global communication for gender equality.
• Familiarity with Excel including presentation of data in graphs and visualisations.
• Photo and video-editing experience
• Experience working collaboratively in a team structure in a multicultural environment is desirable;
• Previous experience with AI training will be highly valued
• Language:
• Fluency in English;
• Working knowledge of Spanish or French is a strong advantage.

INTERNSHIP CONDITIONS

• UNDP will not pay interns for internship but will provide a stipend in accordance with the provisions of the UNDP internship policy.