Consultancy 12 Months: Giga Pilot Project

**Job no**: 575704
**Contract type**: Consultant
**Duty Station**: Geneva
**Level**: Consultancy
**Location**: Switzerland
**Categories**: Innovation

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

**For every child, Connectivity**

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives.

The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the start-up thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

**About Giga**

Launched in 2019 as a joint initiative between UNICEF and ITU, Giga has set the ambitious goal to connect every school in the world to the internet. Half of the world’s population has no regular access to the Internet. Millions of children leave school without any digital skills, making it much more difficult for them to thrive and contribute to local and global economies. This has created a digital divide between those who are connected and those who are not, a divide that has become even wider during the Covid-19 pandemic. UNICEF and ITU have therefore joined forces to create Giga, an initiative to connect every school in the world to the Internet and address this new form of inequality.

Giga focuses on connecting schools so that children and young people have access to information, opportunity, and choice. It also uses schools as anchor points for their surrounding communities: if you connect the school, you can also connect local businesses and services. This creates opportunities for service providers to generate revenue from paying users, making connectivity more sustainable. A 2021 report by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that a 10% increase in school connectivity can increase effective years of schooling by 0.6% and increase GDP per capita by 1.1%.

Based in Switzerland with an open-source technology centre in Barcelona, Giga not only aims to provide children and young people with access to information but also envisions schools as anchor points to uplift entire communities.

The Connectivity Credits system includes many innovative elements which reinvent traditional financing and procurement in order to be ‘fit to size’ for small, local ISPs. These elements are being tested in a number of in-country pilot projects. The learnings from these pilots are integrated into the Connectivity Credits system.

**How can you make a difference?**

The Pilot Project Coordinator plays a crucial role in making the Connectivity Credits pilots successful in-country, and connecting the learnings of what works into iterations of the Connectivity Credits product. This role demands enthusiasm for implementing innovative projects on the ground and translating those learnings into implications for a global system.

This role will be an important bridge between the Connectivity Credits product team, government stakeholders (such as Ministries of Finance, Ministries of Education, Universal Service Funds and regulators), and internet service providers. It is expected that the Pilot Project Coordinator will be frequently travelling to countries piloting Connectivity Credits (primarily in Africa).

**Key responsibilities include**:
Project planning and implementation
- Establish a coherent project plan for each pilot in coordination with in-country stakeholders, setting clear milestones, and ensuring timely execution across different teams and stakeholders.
- Proactive and resourceful problem-solving to overcome challenges in pilots when they come up.
- Coordinate closely with the product team and other team members, aligning on rollout and adoption of the digital product.

Stakeholder Engagement and Communication
- Foster productive relationships with Universal Service Funds, governmental bodies, and other relevant stakeholders that are piloting Connectivity Credits
- Ensure close dialogue and foster a collaborative environment of co-creation, whereby local stakeholders continuously are shaping what the Connectivity Credits team are building.

User engagement and feedback collection
- Engage with users of the Connectivity Credits (on the one hand, government administrators, and on the other hand, small local ISPs) to understand their needs and pain points.
- Approach the experience of Connectivity Credits users with genuine curiosity and interest, and champion your observations inside the Connectivity Credits team to ensure we are building a system that fits users’ needs.

Results-Oriented Execution
- Drive a