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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.

Giga is building a Connectivity Credits system. Connectivity Credits are envisioned as a fast and efficient mechanism to enable (small) internet service providers to connect schools in underserved areas. ISPs automatically earn Credits every time they connect a school and can redeem these Credits for a variety of incentives, including subsidies, tax reliefs, or infrastructure access - through respective Ministry of Finance or regulatory bodies, subject to individual country determinants.

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.

You can read more about Giga’s work at https://giga.global/ and by following us on twitter @Gigaglobal

How can you make a difference? 

Giga is seeking a blockchain developer who can work with a diverse, global, and interdisciplinary team to help us build and then scale tools and products that support the successful, on-the-ground implementation of the Giga project. Giga team is scattered across the world, but our blockchain team is mainly working from different locations in Europe.

Key responsibilities include:

• Work closely with the Product Manager and the Mapping & Tech Lead, to work on the development of Giga blockchain products (Connectivity credits platform, accounting platform, Giga Blocks)
• Engage with vendors and other software partners that are supporting us to build new products, APIs, and distributed infrastructures worldwide.
• Build new prototypes and tools that support the current Giga project, as well as scale features in existing ones.
• Support and maintain, including documentation, software and products related to Giga.
• Work closely with other parts of the team to explore collaboration and integration.

Please access the full Term of Reference (ToRs) and read a more detailed description of the assignment in this file in order to prepare your financial proposal and know more about the role:  Blockchain Developer FINALv.pdf

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have… 

• A master's degree in computer science or related field. *A first University Degree in a relevant field combined with 2 additional years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree.
• A minimum of five (5) years of relevant professional experience in software development, with at least two (2) years of experience in blockchain development.
• Experience working as part of a fully staffed scrum team.
• Experience in building software prototypes and extensible APIs.
• Strong knowledge of Ethereum-like blockchains and ability to design and implement smart contracts.
• Understanding of both fungible and non-fungible tokens.
• Having built public smart contracts or web3 apps is a great advantage.
• Good knowledge of a scripting language such as JavaScript will be highly useful.
• Experience with one or more language for backend development.
• Experience with relational databases.
• Experience with cloud services, like AWS, Azure.
• Knowledge of computer networks and understanding how ISP (Internet Service Providers) work is an asset.
• Experienced and comfortable with remote team dynamics, process, and tools (Slack, Zoom, etc.)
• Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergency conditions is considered an asset.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

Travel:

• The consultant is expected to travel to Geneva one time (1 trip), for a stay of 5 nights.
• The consultant is responsible for arranging his/her own travel, including visa and travel insurance.

Payment details and further considerations:

• Payment of professional fees will be based on the submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.
• The consultant is responsible for his/her own health and travel insurance.
• The consultant is responsible for arranging his/her own travel, including visa.

How to apply:

• Interested applicants are required to submit a financial proposal with an all-inclusive fee.  Please see the financial proposal template here:  Consultancy Financial Offer template.docx
• Financial proposal must include travel costs (economy class) and daily subsistence allowance, if travel is required as per TOR and any other estimated costs: visa, travel/health insurance.
• Applications without a financial proposal will not be considered.

For every Child, you demonstrate… 

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS). 

 To view our competency framework, please visit here. 

UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment. 

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check. 

Remarks:  

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process. 

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures, and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws. 

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.