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Women and girls' safe spaces have long been established as a key approach to provide survivors with information, links to services, skills-building, peer connection, and support. Yet, as access to physical safe spaces is often limited for adolescent girls and women, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNICEF has been developing Laaha, a virtual safe space (VSS) platform for them to access gender-based violence (GBV) information. Following successful piloting of VSS and feedback from adolescent girls in Iraq and Lebanon, a second version of a more interactive platform has been developed and piloted in Iraq and Ecuador. Heavy investment on human-centered design consultations with girls aims at identifying strategies to overcome the digital divide girls face to ensure greater access. As a component of the new iteration of Laaha, UNICEF is also creating a virtual forum which enables girls to seek support, ask questions, receive linkages to specialized services, and in time, replicate the sense of a safe social network (that women and girls note they value from physical safe spaces) on the platform with peers. A chatbot is also being designed to support women and girls to navigate Laaha rich content. In the coming months, Laaha is currently being deployed in a number of additional countries, including Afghanistan, Lebanon, Ukraine and Venezuela. New countries are expressing interest for the scaling phase. Laaha aims at reaching 1 million users and 15 languages by 2025. 

Under the supervision of the GBViE Specialist, the consultant will be responsible for the completion of the following deliverables: 

1.         Support maintenance of Laaha to ensure all content is working across all deployment countries;

2.         Share Laaha usage updates to each deployment country end of month;

3.         Support open source text to speech/translation model development with Office of Innovation;

4.         Support evaluation of Laaha in Ecuador and Lebanon;

5.         Participate in the management of the relationship with development vendors and support as needed;

6.         Support deployment and contextualization of Laaha in new languages/countries – including communication with instructional design on content development, and country engagement ;

7.         Prepare quarterly progress reports on Laaha’s deployment and performance, presenting key challenges and achievements;

8.         Contribute to the development of a governance structure for ongoing management of Laaha at both local and global levels.

•           University degree in Computer Science, Business Administration or related technical field.

•           Fluency in English is required. 

•           Fluency in Arabic, Spanish and French is considered an asset for this role.

•           At least 7 years of experience in supporting and coordinating tech project activities across a large organization and with other international partner organizations

•           Specific experience as a product manager for users in emerging markets.

•           Experience preferably including GBV programming in humanitarian contexts.

•           Progressively responsible professional work experience in communication, technology fields, youth participation and gender, some of which should be in an international setting.

•           Experience in managing projects with strong technology components.