Portfolio Advisor at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the United Nations' global development network. It advocates for change and connects countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life for themselves. It provides expert advice, training and grants support to developing countries, with increasing emphasis on assistance to the least developed countries. It promotes technical and investment cooperation among nations.

Headquartered in New York City, the status of UNDP is that of an executive board within the United Nations General Assembly. The UNDP is funded entirely by voluntary contributions from UN member states. The organization operates in 177 countries, where it works with local governments to meet development challenges and develop local capacity.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Portfolio Advisor

Location: Abuja (FCT)
Employment Type: Full-time

Job Description

• Under the supervision and guidance of the UNDP Nigeria Resident Representative, the Portfolio Advisor supports the Resident Representative in positioning UNDP Nigeria as a strategic partner for sustainable development, steer strategic planning, programme formulation and creative responses to new and emerging complex challenges.
• The Portfolio Advisor supports country office leadership to ensure that the UNDP programme and services are consistent with the national development priorities of the host country government, and supportive of the UN’s development efforts in the country in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF) and Country Programme Document (CPD).
• UNDP adopts a portfolio approach to accommodate changing business needs and leverage linkages across interventions to achieve its strategic goals. Therefore, UNDP personnel are expected to work across units, functions, teams, and projects in multidisciplinary teams in order to enhance and enable horizontal collaboration.

Duties and Responsibilities
As a member of the Country Office management team, ensure the formulation and implementation of UNDP programme strategies and policies within one or more thematic areas:

• 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 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 identify options to address challenges and capitalize 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. This will help foster adaptive management in the country office and strengthen the dynamism of the programming process to build a robust pipeline of integrated project and portfolios.
• Monitor the pipelines and resources mobilization 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 best available expertise and facilitate organizational learning.
• Ensure follow-up on thematic and program 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.

Within the UNSDCF Results matrix and the Country Programme Action Plan, provide high level advises to the UNDP senior management and programme teams on how to foster portfolio management in the CO programme management practice:

• Facilitate dynamic learning, sense-making, detecting signals of change and help distil insights, synthesize, 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 mobilization opportunities to inform the future value of work.
• Support to the 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 the system change.
• Working with the CO M&E and Strategy teams to ensure that the outcomes are mapped and measured in a way that the broader goals of the portfolio are fulfilled.

Establish and maintain strategic Country Office partnerships and support resource mobilization efforts to achieve portfolio outcome:

• 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.
• Analyze 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 mobilization.

Ensure knowledge building and management, as well as advising on diversifying partnerships to enable the portfolio:

• 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 & E teams, the Knowledge Hub and the Accelerator Lab.
• Apply lessons learned from audit and evaluation exercises to new management efforts and program 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 advice on the management of partnership risks and opportunities for the portfolios.

Requirements
Education:

• Advanced university degree (master’s degree or equivalent) in Policy / Public Policy / Politics / Economics / Development Studies / Business Administration or a related area is required. Or
• A first-level university degree (bachelor’s degree) in the areas mentioned above, in combination with an additional two years of qualifying experience will be given due consideration in lieu of the advanced university degree.

Experience:

• Minimum of 10 years (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 organization in a multi-cultural setting; working with national, regional and international entities is required.
• At least 3 or more years of senior-level management responsibilities of similar size and complexity is an asset.
• Experience in coordinating the knowledge-sharing and learning culture in an organization, across teams is an asset.
• Demonstrated experience and excellent knowledge of operations functional areas is required.
• Experience in the use of computers and office software packages (MS Word, Excel, etc), database packages,  and web-based management systems such as ERP is required.

Language:

• Fluency in oral and written English is required.
• Knowledge of another UN language would be an asset

Application Closing Date
18th May, 2024.

How to Apply
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online