Head of Solutions Mapping (Nationals Only)

• Developing and sustaining positive relationships with a range of local community and citizen groups
• Identifying and training local volunteers, recruiting Universities and think tanks for sustaining long term community outreach and engagement and identification of lead users, providing training and mentoring 
• Translaton of ethnographic and field research findings into learning and action for the Accelerator Lab activities 
• Design specific field research and participatory methods to focus on the most vulnerable populations and those not usually engaged in public policy debates on development methods 
• Explore, document and increase understanding on emerging methods of tapping into bottom up solutions, lead users and grassroots innovations related to sustainable development
• Convene a broad range of new partners with UNDP including artists, community organizers and emergent movements to explore areas for collaboration on sustainable development 
• Proactively manage risks with using ethnograpic tools and methods, including those related to ethics and privacy

• Design and implement methods for sensing and building on indigenous knowledge and local solutions, consolidating, screening and describing incoming 
• Design criteria for consolidating incoming local solutions 
• Conduct field research to determine best methods fo making solutions transferable, design methods to test and stretch ideas for their applicability and diffusion as part of a portfolio approach.
• Test the solutions and potential ideas in real life context to understand potential channels of spreading (including identifying private and public sector venues for uptake)
• Analyse system level issues that local solutions address (and those that they don’t address, therefore creating insights on the gaps) 
• Design ‘things and tools’ needed to successful scale indigenous knowledge, lead user solutions, turning its insights into systemic change.
• Advise on the accelerator lab’s experiment portfolio to ensure experiments are designed based on people’s knowledge, behaviors and peer to peer methods of managing and diffusing knowledge about sustainable development issues. 
• Design methods for integrating collective intellengence into UNDP programmes and engage with programme and project managers to translate ideas into concrete practice

• Lead communication efforts and proactively use blog and social media to share findings from field research
• Ensure UNDP’s communication efforts respect privacy and ethics considerations
• Jointly with the CO, support lab partners to develop an emerging pipeline of new initiatives, support other activities related to the design and operation of the Lab
• Liaise with the broader Accelerator Lab network and the support team to share learnings and insights from the country-specific experience 
• Proactively use blog posts and social media to share insights, attract partners and help position Accelerator Lab at the forefront of the exploration of new trends. 

• Help embed solutions mapping  and lead user methodology within the CO portfolio, design and provide trainings that include various methodologies and steps to identify and work with lead users
• Develop communication and other tools to transform field research into actionaable intelligence
• Work together with your Accelerator Lab colleagues and experts to codify and advance the Accelerator Lab practice and solutions mapping in particular. 
• Lead other activities related to the design and operations of the Accelerator Lab
• Design and deliver engaging and meaningful methods for reflection on learning from field research and grassroots innovation.
• Provide technical consultation and training for national partners and the CO  through various phases including asset mapping, developing a strategic portfolio logic, experiment design, prototype testing, and evaluation;

Achieve Results:

Think Innovatively:

Learn Continuously

Adapt with Agility 

Engage and Partner

Enable Diversity and Inclusion

Ability to empathise with people’s perceptions, motivations, feelings and mental models and craft narratives to build an emotive argument for change  accordingly. 

Ability to present data, insights or information in compelling ways to mobilise resources, talent or action. 

Ability to choose media and channels that is fit for purpose to reach specific target audiences.

Ability to engage and build rapport with vulnerable communities and get consent, facilitate participatory processes and navigate intricate power relations and cultural dynamics. 

Having the sensitivity and ability to identify grassroots solutions, capacities, assets, coping strategies that impacted communities have developed or used to address (emerging) development challenges. 

Being able to understand these solutions from a people’s perspective and learn about the conditions that enable or prevent communities from developing such grassroots solutions or coping mechanisms.

Understand how solutions and needs are paired, and how grassroots solutions can be used as an entry point to identify unaddressed or unmet development challenges and how to use these insights to inform policy design.  

Ability to reverse engineer solutions, understanding what aspects (artefactual, principles, conditions, configuration) can be scaled and how, being able to assess their potential to be transferred to other domains, regions or contexts and build a case for that.

Ability to appreciate and integrate various sources of knowledge (academic, experiential, observational, traditional, indigenous) in problem solving processes.

Set up structures and processes to collect ideas, solutions and facilitate matchmaking between supply and demand of solutions.”

Ability to design, lead or manage processes that help a collective to become smarter together by bringing together diverse groups of people, data, and technology. 

Ability to define and articulate why and how collective intelligence can add value to development programming (understanding problems; finding solutions; decision making and mobilising action; monitoring progress in real time, learning and adapting) 

Being able to integrate different types of data (realtime, ‘ground-truth’ and novel data) to unlock fresh insights. Understand guidelines and principles around data privacy, ethics and protection.

Increase diversity of inputs – and look beyond the ‘usual suspects’, ability to navigate and manage a variety of actors, appreciate the diversity in perspectives, opinions, expertise.

Ability to facilitate platforms or sessions where people can contribute by providing their views and ideas independently and freely.

Being people-centred: ensure people understand and can determine how their data is used. Feed back inputs and insights to empower people, don’t extract data.

Ability to build rapport and empathy with people and vulnerable communities to learn about their everyday lives, experiences and context. Being able to identify and understand patterns of relations, and their meaning, between different entities (i.e. of people, objects, animals, etc.) 

Being able to immerse deeply in the context of a community and look at it from an “”insiders perspective”” to understand how realities are socially constructed and understand and appreciated these realities; explore perceptions, motivations, preferences, needs, rituals to understand “”why people do things the way they do””. 

Being inclusive when using digital tools engaging with communities; have a thorough understanding of ethical guidelines when engaging with vulnerable communities. 

Ability to translate observations into compelling insights for community empowerment or to inform decision making, problem solving and policy design.