Apply: UNDP Portfolio Advisor

By Gift Ejeh Ojima
May 10, 2024

Deadline: 18 May, 2024

Location: Abuja, Nigeria

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is seeking to fill the position of Portfolio Advisor.

UNDP’s mission is to lead the United Nations in its fight for a world without poverty, in which women are empowered, inequality is addressed and the planet is protected.

Responsibilities

Facilitate portfolio sensemaking through reviews of existing projects and programmes to extract learnings to guide the design of coherent initiatives, projects, and programmes to form the basis for strategic portfolios of programmes that are aligned with important national opportunities and development challenges as expressed in the overarching UNDP priorities and strategies at global, regional and country level, in line with the wider UN system cooperation framework for the country
Provide advice in the preparation of project initiation plans, project documents, and project proposals across the programmes, draft and review the documents as needed to ensure consistency with the broad CO strategy and priorities and compliance with UNDP practices and donor contractual obligations
Provide technical support to the teams on portfolio design and help establish structured approaches to analysis of development challenges and strategic opportunities from a system perspective to help the Nigeria Country Office (CO) identify options to address challenges and capitalise on important opportunities through a learning/adaptation logic
Provide advice to enable dynamic portfolio management where the CO evolves a practice of continuously extracting insights from a portfolio to generate new options that are relevant as the context changes
Monitor the pipelines and resource mobilisation of the portfolio and communicate strategically to management to aid continuous adaptive management
Continuously assess and advise the RR on the political and socio-economic situation and trends in the country to ensure that UNDP policy support, programmes and services are relevant and responsive to emerging priorities and needs
Promote knowledge management to ensure access to the best available expertise and facilitate organisational learning
Ensure follow-up on thematic and programme evaluations to ensure continuous improvement on development impact
Support the RR in maintaining oversight of high-risk projects and portfolios, and risks of high severity emanating from projects and the various risks assessment tools, to ensure necessary and timely follow up action
Facilitate dynamic learning, sense-making, detecting signals of change and help distil insights, synthesise, and capture trends to inform portfolio decision-making and growth
Collaboratively digest research data and insights to develop portfolio interventions and communicate fulfillment options to inform implementation
Contribute to portfolio awareness raising, promotion and advocacy as well as mapping and expanding the portfolio partnerships network
Driving new investments in portfolios for resource mobilisation opportunities to inform the future value of work
Support regular portfolio horizontal coordination within and among portfolio options/interventions
Advise on the team constitution for the portfolio implementation
Facilitate programme teams in the application of RBM tools, establishment of management targets and monitoring achievement of results
Lead portfolio monitoring and evaluation and contribute to the design of new portfolio options as well as monitoring against system change
Working with the Country Office M and E strategy teams to ensure that the outcomes are mapped and measured in a way that the broader goals of the portfolio are fulfilled
Generate strategic portfolio briefings to support the development of partnerships with the UN Agencies, IFI’s, government institutions, bi-lateral and multi-lateral donors, private sector, civil society in the assigned thematic area based on strategic goals of UNDP, country needs and donors’ priorities
Analyse and research information on donors, preparation of substantive briefs on possible areas of cooperation, identification of opportunities for initiation of new projects, active contribution to the overall office effort in resource mobilisation
Promote identification and synthesis of best practices and lessons learned from the country programme for organizational sharing and learning
Coordinate the knowledge sharing and learning culture in the CO by coordinating knowledge sharing across the M and E teams, the Knowledge Hub and the Accelerator Lab
Apply lessons learned from audit and evaluation exercises to new management efforts and programme development
Lead the development and implementation of key partner engagement strategies and action plans to drive the portfolio; setting priorities, goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each partnership portfolio
Guide interactions with partners within portfolio and advise internal clients on such guidance
Coordinate the partnerships and communications teams on partner visibility, outreach and advocacy activities in support of UNDP’s development mandate and support positioning of UNDP within the broader development landscape
Facilitate engagements with partners on co-creation of portfolios
Identify and advise on the management of partnership risks and opportunities for the portfolios

Requirements

Advanced university degree (master’s degree or equivalent) in Social Policy, Public Policy, Politics, Economics, Development Studies, Business Administration or a related area is required or
First-level university degree (bachelor’s degree) in the areas mentioned above, in combination with two years, minimum, of qualifying experience, will be given due consideration in lieu of the advanced university degree
Ten years, minimum, (with master’s degree) or 12 years (with bachelor’s degree) of substantive experience and results in development in a governmental, multilateral or civil society organisation in a multi-cultural setting; working with national, regional and international entities is required
Three years, minimum, of senior-level management responsibilities of similar size and complexity is an asset
Experience in coordinating the knowledge sharing and learning culture in an organisation, across teams is an asset
Demonstrated experience and excellent knowledge of operations functional areas
Experience in the use of computers and office software packages (MS Word, Excel, etc), database packages, and web-based management systems such as ERP

To apply and for more information, click here.