Division: Giga
Duration: 6 months
Duty Station: Barcelona, Spain
Modality: Part-time
Expected Start Date: February, 2025

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...Innovate

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%. 

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? 

We seek a master’s student that is willing to carry out their master thesis on a project that relates to Giga’s mission of connecting all the schools to the internet. More specifically, we are looking for someone interested in computer vision and satellite imagery, to develop extensions to our current ML school mapping work. 

Your main responsibilities include:

• Literature research
• Adapt current ML pipeline to use open source satellite imagery.
• Extend/Migrate the current school mapping pipeline to predict health centers.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have: Please access the full Term of Reference (ToRs) and read a more detailed description of the internship in this file  Internship 6 months- Connectivity Research (Giga), Office of Innovation, Part-Time.pdf

What you need to apply… 

• A bachelor’s university degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence or related field.
• Currently enrolled in a master’s program in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence or related field.
• Experience with Deep Learning and satellite imagery is an asset
• Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergency is considered an asset. 

Language:

• Fluency in written and spoken English is required.
• Proficiency in Spanish or any other UN languages (French, Russian, Arabic, Chinese) is considered an asset.

Conditions:

• Age: Interns must be at least 18 years.
• Have good academic performance as demonstrated by recent university or institution records.
• Have no immediate relatives (e.g., father, mother, brother, sister) working in any UNICEF office.
• Have no other relatives in the line of authority which the intern will report to.
• Individuals must have proof of medical insurance covering the time and location of their internship.
• This internship expects a Part-time commitment. 
• Individuals are expected to provide their own laptop. 

Payment:

The eligible intern will receive a monthly stipend as a contribution towards their living expenses. The selected candidate is expected to work remotely if located outside Barcelona.

Employment:

There is no expectancy of employment at the end of the internship.

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 competencies required for this post are … 
(1) Builds and maintains partnerships (2) Demonstrates self-awareness and ethical 3) Drive to achieve results for 4) Innovates and embraces change (5) Manages ambiguity and 6) Thinks and acts 7) Works collaboratively with others.

 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 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 an internship agreement 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. Their conditions of service will be governed by their agreement. Interns 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 intern 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 agreement. Selected intern is 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 interns 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 internship agreement.