Cluster Development Agent

The Directorate of Technical Cooperation and Sustainable Industrial Development (TCS), headed by a Managing Director, oversees the Organization's development of capacities for industrial development as well as industrial policy advice, statistics and research activities and the Organization's normative contribution to Member States and global development community in achieving the SDGs. The Directorate also ensures the application of strategies and interventions for sustainable industrial development related to Environment, Energy, SMEs, Competitiveness and Job creation, as well as Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence. Through coordination in-house and with Member States and industry stakeholders, it ensures that the services provided in these areas contribute toward effective and appropriate technical, business and policy solutions and are focused on results and on realizing any potential for scaling up and positioning UNIDO as a leading platform for industrial development in developing countries and global fora.

The Directorate houses the technical Divisions of Capacity Development and Industrial Policy Advice (TCS/CAP); Circular Economy and Environmental Protection (TCS/CEP); Decarbonization and Sustainable Energy (TCS/DSE); SMEs, Competitiveness and Job Creation (TCS/SME); and Digital Transformation and AI Strategies (TCS/DAS). The Directorate also ensures close coordination and collaboration among the Divisions as well as with relevant entities in the Directorate of Global Partnerships and External Relations (GLO) and the Directorate of SDG Innovation and Economic Transformation (IET).

This position is located under the Competitiveness, Quality and Compliance Unit (TCS/SME/CQC) which builds national and regional production and quality infrastructure systems, with an emphasis on providing internationally recognized services, facilitating SME participation in regional and global value chains; strengthening institutional quality infrastructure capacities (i.e. standardization, metrology, and accreditation); building conformity assessment capacities (testing, inspection, certification, calibration, etc.); and supporting trade facilitation and quality awareness with the public sector, economic operators and consumers, placing a special emphasis on capacitating SMEs.

PROJECT CONTEXT

Poverty Alleviation and Inclusive Development Across Rural Sindh (PAIDAR) is a five-year programme funded by the European Union to support the Government of Sindh (GoS), Pakistan in the implementation of its Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS). The long-term objective of PAIDAR is to contribute to sustainable poverty reduction and improvement of livelihoods of poor women, men, and young people across the Sindh province.  The PRS has three pillars: 1) Community Driven Local Development 2) Addressing Urban Poverty, including Urban Economic Clusters, and 3) Rural Growth Centres.

The purpose of the PAIDAR programme is to support the GoS to implement its poverty reduction strategy as a whole and sub-strategies that aim at:

• Fostering economic development, enterprise development and job creation with the objective of increasing income of the poor women, men and young people
• Optimizing public service delivery to enhance access to livelihood improving services such as water, electricity, health services and education with the ultimate objectives of both improving living conditions and quality of life and reducing poor household’ expenditure that arises as a cost resulting from lack of access to such services and poor living conditions.

To this end, the programme will:

• Provide necessary technical assistance, capacity building and financial support to a significant number of micro and small enterprises in target RGCs with the objective to overcome COVID-19 impacts on enterprises, support enterprise development and business development.
• Contribute technically and financially to building and upgrading public infrastructure for improvement in delivery of basic service with direct impact on poor people’s livelihood as well as services to support business development.
• Strengthen capacity of the GoS at provincial and local level for implementation of the PRS and assist the GoS to strengthen internal coordination and monitoring capacity, and to optimize provincial public resources allocation towards meeting PRS objectives.

PAIDAR will deliver on the above objectives through utilization of three key mechanisms:

• Co-financing public investment projects of the GoS aiming to build and/or upgrade public infrastructure for delivery of basic services with high impact on livelihood improvement and poverty reduction, as well as for delivery of services with high potential to contribute to economic development of the target RGCs and foster enterprise development.
• Provision of grants to support MSMEs investment projects which demonstrate strong potential for enterprise development, income generation, job retention and creation.
• Technical assistance to the GoS and the MSMEs to ensure investment projects (both co-financed public infrastructure development projects and financially supported MSME investment projects) are designed, planned and implemented to deliver results in line with the objectives of the PRS; and to strengthen GoS capacity to plan, implement and monitor results PRS.

FUNCTIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES

The Cluster Development Agent (CDA) is the local PAIDAR staff in target districts who would be instrumental in achievement of programme objectives in their assigned districts. The CDA is the face of PAIDAR in the eyes of the final beneficiaries of the programme. Therefore, they must promote values of UNIDO and the PAIDAR programme through a consistent, professional, transparent, trusted and value-adding performance. The CDAs role under the supervision of Senior Cluster Expert is to support and contribute to the following:

1. Stakeholder management: the CDA will work with a range of actors from the public sector, private sector and the civil society. He or she must build a comprehensive knowledge of the who-is-who in their target districts. The CDA will understand the relations between each actor group and the level of influence they exert over each other. The CDA will gauge each actor’s level of interest and power to influence the local economic development process. Based on the above, the CDA will engage with relevant stakeholders throughout the delivery of the programme activities. Above all, the CDA must build a trusted, transparent and unbiased relationship with all stakeholders. The CDA must ensure he or she is seen as a neutral broker and facilitator of local economic development, without any particular interest or preference towards any particular stakeholder.  The CDAs are agents of PAIDAR and must ensure portraying a positive image of PAIDAR among local stakeholders.

2. Assessment and investigation: for the CDA as the local agent of change, it is critical to have an in-depth understanding of livelihood challenges and opportunities on one hand, and income generation and enterprise development challenges and opportunities on the other. This knowledge and understanding are built overtime. Nevertheless, the CDA must use various resources such as poverty related data, census data, own interviews and data collection, secondary resources, etc. to build such knowledge. The CDAs must apply available diagnostic and assessment tools as much as possible to investigate the major livelihood and business development opportunities and challenges. In this effort, the CDAs will be assisted, where needed, by specialized technical experts who can support the CDAs to investigate specific sectors/fields in more depth. 

3. Building common vision: the CDA’s knowledge of the livelihood and business development challenges and opportunities can lead into local economic development results only if such knowledge is shared between stakeholders and lead to creation of a common vision for local economic development in the area. Therefore, it is an important role of the CDA to actively share information and knowledge with stakeholders through formal and informal channels, to raise their awareness on the livelihood and business development opportunities, and to foster creation of common vision through facilitating dialogue among stakeholders them. 

4. Turing vision into action: the CDA, will support technical experts (both in livelihood and business sectors) and in consultation with the local stakeholders (government, communities and businesses) will assist in development initiatives to address identified livelihood and business development challenges and opportunities. Such development initiatives may be led by individuals, MSMEs, local government, community organizations, NGOs or networks consisting of two or more actors. Such initiative may be a purely public sector investment, a private sector investment or a public-private-partnership. PAIDAR programme has two main mechanisms to support implementation of the identified development opportunities, namely technical assistance and co-financing support.

5. Mobilizing technical assistance: under the supervision of technical experts, the CDAs will support in planning, mobilizing and coordinating delivery of technical assistance to support sound planning and execution of development initiatives. Such technical assistance can be acquired from PAIDAR roster of experts, or contracting local support institutions and/or business development service providers, or relevant government institutions. It is responsibility of the CDA to plan provision of timely, efficient and effective technical assistance and with the overall support of the PAIDAR team. The technical assistance proposed by the CDAs do not necessarily have to be linked with grants. For example, the CDA may propose provision of a training programme to local youth on a specific topic with the view to increase their employability.

6. Mobilizing financial support: In addition to technical assistance, PAIDAR can co-finance identified development initiatives through various windows of PAIDAR grant scheme. The CDA can support individual or group of stakeholders to turn development initiatives and ideas into grant proposals for submission to PAIDAR for co-financing. The CDA must have a thorough understanding of the PAIDAR grant scheme, the procedure and requirements to advise potential grantees. The CDA will support PAIDAR team to actively raise awareness about the grant scheme and incentivize the local communities, enterprises and public sector to take advantage of the co-financing support available through PAIDAR.

7. Monitoring and evaluation: The CDA, under the guidance of the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) expert of PAIDAR will support continuous monitoring, report and evaluation activities in relation to their own operations as well as technical assistance and co-financing initiatives of PAIDAR. The CDAs will have access to the MEL experts, guidelines and tools that would allow them to undertake their M&E tasks correctly. The CDAs have an important function in learning from and mainstreaming of good practices in the five target districts and beyond. He or she will support in identification of good development initiatives, actively share them within PAIDAR team (community of CDAs) and also identify good practices in other districts that can be replicated in their districts.

8. Communication: with the communication, visibility and outreach framework of PAIDAR, CDAs have a strong role to play. On one hand, with the overall guidance of communication expert of PAIDAR, CDA will perform various communication and outreach activities to ensure the relevant news, message and information reach out to the relevant audience. In addition, CDAs are the focal point for local stakeholders to communicate with PAIDAR. Therefore, CDAs will perform a critical role to ensure PAIDAR stakeholders can communicate their message with PAIDAR.

In order to perform their tasks, the CDAs are not alone. The overall PAIDAR team, and in particular, international and national cluster development experts work closely with the CDAs on the ground to ensure, provide guidance and support CDAs to continuously improve their performance and to gradually be able to perform independently. Various technical experts from livelihood and business sectors are available to support the CDAs in their work. In addition, UNIDO gender, communication, MEL experts etc. will provide guidance and necessary tools to CDAs in support of their work.

Under the overall guidance of the PAIDAR Programme Manager in Vienna and National Technical Advisor and Cluster Development Expert in Karachi, the Cluster Development Agent is expected to deliver the following duties:

MAIN DUTIES

• Support in identifying potential clusters/cooperatives/businesses/investors in the target districts (input business information to PAIDAR data base)
• Support in auditing and interrogating business ideas and opportunities prior to submission to line management.
• Gather available statistics necessary for preparation of support for the business idea/opportunity and conduct initial feasibility studies including basic value chain and SWOT analyses.
• Support in conducting research in the district/s to generate opportunities for PAIDAR business development interventions.

Support in follow-up/monitor/report progress of MSMEs / clusters to ensure businesses are making the connections and getting the assistance they need toward becoming sustainable clusters.

Identifying business technical assistance needs and relevant local experts.  

Identifying technical assistance needs related to public sector infrastructure/livelihood opportunities.

Present motivation for financial support for opportunities based on sound analysis and in collaboration with technical experts, guide business entities through grant/loan application processes.

Establish and maintain relationships with appropriate economic development organisations, financial institutions, business support organisations and community leaders.

Develop networks and networking opportunities that complement the work of PAIDAR.

Encourage cocreation of interventions that complement the PAIDAR objectives and avoid duplication of resources.

In collaboration with technical experts, perform outreach and deliver presentations to community and business support organisations to inform PAIDAR project status and future planning.

Facilitate organizations of consultative meetings and have frequent information exchange with business groups/agglomerations, cooperatives and cluster members to collect information and reach consensus on collective activities.

Under the guidance of technical experts contribute to the development of Cluster / business marketing plans, promotional materials, logos and creation of a cluster website.

Develop a repository of ideas and basic business idea proposals for both public sector infrastructure and private businesses.

Identify successful erstwhile projects/interventions by other development sector agencies/Government and Private sector to extract best practices to incorporate in the PAIDAR interventions.

Support with preparation and organization of training events:

• conducting and analysing needs
• preparing the list of participants
• setting up virtual platforms or actual venues for the events
• inviting business/cluster members and following up on individual inquiries
• disseminating relevant background materials
• translating presentations
• attending the trainings
• prepare training report
• save training material and recording for future use by the cluster members.

Complete weekly, monthly progress reports in accordance with reporting disciplines and agreed format.

Utilise and update the PAIDAR’s database management system.

Maintain and safeguard PAIDAR’s property including laptop, mobile phone, transport and ensure that these are operated in accordance with agreed policy.

Attend PAIDAR’s Project team as well as inter-agency and donor meetings, and provide inputs, where relevant/necessary.

MINIMUM ORGANIZATIONAL REQUIREMENTS

Education: Advanced university degree in business administration, management, engineering, economics, or equivalent, is required.

Experience, technical and functional expertise

• At least of 1 year of working experience, is required.
• Experience relevant to technical cooperation in developing countries, is desirable.  
• Knowledge of technical cooperation projects in the country or similar country in the region, is desirable.
• Computer proficiency for preparation of reports/presentations and for the correspondence is required.
• Ability to work effectively in a multi-cultural environment, is required.

Languages: Fluency in written and spoken English and Urdu, is required.

Fluency in Sindhi, is desirable.

REQUIRED COMPETENCIES

Core Values

WE LIVE AND ACT WITH INTEGRITY: work honestly, openly and impartially.

WE SHOW PROFESSIONALISM: work hard and competently in a committed and responsible manner.

WE RESPECT DIVERSITY: work together effectively, respectfully and inclusively, regardless of our differences in culture and perspective.

Key Competencies

WE FOCUS ON PEOPLE: cooperate to fully reach our potential –and this is true for our colleagues as well as our clients. Emotional intelligence and receptiveness are vital parts of our UNIDO identity.

WE FOCUS ON RESULTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES: focus on planning, organizing and managing our work effectively and efficiently. We are responsible and accountable for achieving our results and meeting our performance standards. This accountability does not end with our colleagues and supervisors, but we also owe it to those we serve and who have trusted us to contribute to a better, safer and healthier world.

WE COMMUNICATE AND EARN TRUST: communicate effectively with one another and build an environment of trust where we can all excel in our work.

WE THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX AND INNOVATE: To stay relevant, we continuously improve, support innovation, share our knowledge and skills, and learn from one another.