E T Consultant
Paris, France
Paris, France
JOB DETAIL
Description
Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? Working at the World Bank Group provides a unique opportunity for you to help our clients solve their greatest development challenges. The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries; a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending extreme poverty, increasing shared prosperity and promoting sustainable development. With 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide, we work with public and private sector partners, investing in groundbreaking projects and using data, research, and technology to develop solutions to the most urgent global challenges. For more information, visit www.worldbank.org.
Global Practice for Urban, Resilience and Land
The World Bank’s Urban, Resilience, and Land Global Practice (GPURL) works with cities and governments throughout the world to help them tackle the challenges of disaster risks and climate change. We do this through comprehensive investments in infrastructure, social programs, and the support to policy and regulatory reforms to plan cities better and leverage their financing capacity. Ultimately, these efforts aim to contribute to the World Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity by improving the living standards of the poorer segments of the population, oftentimes the most affected by uncontrolled urbanization.
GPURL covers a wide array of issues including: (i) supporting the development of green, inclusive, resilient and productive cities, including harnessing urbanization to contribute to growth and poverty reduction, and strengthening local governments’ capacity to plan, finance and deliver services and infrastructure investments; (ii) promoting efficient, well-coordinated spatial and territorial development processes including strengthening rural-urban linkages and developing lagging regions; (iii) strengthening disaster risk management policies, institutions and regulations and mainstreaming resilience across development sectors including risk assessment and mapping, risk reduction (including urban flood management, stormwater drainage, coastal management, and retrofitting of infrastructure), disaster preparedness (including hydromet services, early warning systems, and civil defense), risk financing (including CAT-DDO), and resilient reconstruction and recovery (including post-disaster damage and needs assessment); (iv) post-conflict reconstruction and recovery; (v) strengthening land tenure, management and information systems; and (vi) supporting the development of national and sub-national spatial data infrastructure and supporting the development of geospatial information.
Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery
The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), established in 2006, is a multi-donor partnership and grant-making financing mechanism. The Facility contributes to the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction by supporting on-the-ground technical assistance to help developing countries integrate Disaster Risk Management and climate change adaptation into development strategies, policies and investment programs, including post-disaster recovery and reconstruction. The GFDRR Secretariat is hosted within GPURL at the World Bank in Washington D.C. with satellite offices in Brussels and Tokyo. The Secretariat is responsible for resource mobilization, awarding and managing grants, reporting on results, and carrying out outreach and partnership development. It also acts as the support hub for a decentralized network of Disaster Risk Management experts within the World Bank and supports a number of global platforms for knowledge-sharing and capacity building. More information on GFDRR is available at www.gfdrr.org.
City Resilience Program
The Program
Housed within GFDRR is the City Resilience Program (CRP) associated Multi-Donor Trust Fund supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance. The CRP is a global program that contributes to efforts to the scale up of the resilience of cities against the adverse impacts of disasters and climate change. The Program supports risk-informed and multisector planning efforts, identifies suitable interventions and investments that enhance city resilience, and supports their bankability and access to multiple sources of financing to ensure that those investments materialize. This approach helps create the conditions for equitable and sustainable economic growth in a context of rapid urbanization and increasing climate and disaster risks in urban settings.
CRP works in parallel with World Bank Group teams and in collaboration with other development partners to help cities build capacity and ability to deliver resilience investments. The Program supports efforts to mobilize capital from both the public and private sector, including the use of innovative financing and funding mechanisms. The Program achieves this through three complementary pillars.
• Planning for Resilience: the Planning for Resilience pillar helps cities understand and plan for the increasing risks they face through adverse impacts of disasters and climate change, which are inherently multidisciplinary, complex, and interdependent. Services provided include urban resilience analytics, in depth urban resilience advisory and support scaling access for cities to relevant professional services.
• Finance for Resilience: the Finance for Resilience pillar offers a comprehensive set of early to mid-stage project preparation services to support cities in closing the urban investment gap. It focuses on both resilience related land-based financing and municipal services investment opportunities from initial concept onwards.
• Partnerships for Resilience: the Partnerships for Resilience pillar helps cities engage with partners interested in urban development and disaster risk management. This work fosters city-focused collaboration within the wider World Bank Group, with other relevant private, public, and multilateral organizations, and between partner cities. The work includes co-financing support, targeted advocacy, knowledge sharing and outreach activities across the urban resilience space through workshops, events, knowledge products and the development of internal and external partnerships.
CRP supports projects globally, with a particular focus on Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) which are priority regions for SECO and Austria. In addition, particular attention is paid to the following SECO priority countries:
• Global: Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Peru, South Africa and Tunisia.
• ECA: Albania, Kyrgyz Republic, Serbia, Tajikistan and Ukraine.
The Finance for Resilience pillar
The Finance pillar’s support is tailored to the needs and stage of development of each project, while typically focusing on three types of support:
• Providing upstream, early-stage advice on the potential for expanded financing for urban resilience projects, including early-stage concept testing of resilience investments and consultations with potential private sector investors to leverage capital for urban resilience investments. This work includes reviewing the enabling framework, rapid project assessments, and providing technical assistance on deploying de-risking tools and possible business modelling support. It is carried out by a team of in-house specialists and consultants and may involve collaboration with city officials and other development stakeholders through local World Bank Task Teams.
• Analyzing prefeasibility-stage viability of specific project concepts, including dedicated financial advisory services to identify and test out business models for identified resilience investments. This work includes comparison of scope options and contracting modalities, costing, risk analysis, and affordability assessments. The work concludes with an assessment for the city of its financial needs and steps to improve the long-term financial sustainability of the project and move it to implementation.
• Supporting the specification and review of transaction advisory services to assist local government clients in their role as owners of the transaction to access the professional services needed to progress investments through feasibility, structuring and procurement. This work includes guidance on linking investments to transaction advisory by market providers or IFI providers such as IFC Advisory but, distinct to the two earlier stage areas of work, does not involve the direct contracting or provision of services to government.
More information on the CRP is available at www.gfdrr.org/en/crp.
Role and Responsibilities
The E T Consultant’s (the Consultant) primary objective is to support the Finance pillar within the CRP to specify and deliver technical assistance, support general development of the program’s technical offer and contribute to the general program management tasks required including monitoring and evaluation and knowledge production. In addition, the Consultant will be expected to support across the program including but not limited to workshop support and developing co-financing opportunities. The Consultant will be expected to work across any of the CRP’s beneficiary countries, with a particular focus on francophone countries in North, West and Central Africa. The Consultant will work closely with the Task Team Leader for CRP Finance, under managerial supervision of the Practice Manager, GFDRR.
Specific responsibilities and duties will include (but not be limited to) the following:
• Technical Assistance to Cities through WBG task teams
o Engage with task teams to understand their requirements related to supporting cities’ access to increased volumes and types of finance and expertise.
o Specify appropriate technical assistance based on these conversations, CRP best practice and experience.
o Identify and support the Finance TTL to secure adequate resources for delivery of specified technical assistance from CRP in house resources, CRP’s roster of specialist individual consultants and task based firm procurements.
o Provide specialist project management and quality assurance oversight of the delivery of the technical assistance including leading engagement with WBG task team counterparts, both virtually and in person.
• Business Development including Outreach & Product Development
o Build CRP Finance’s institutional knowledge on the sources of financing and funding and contractual models relevant to urban resilience investments in CRP beneficiary cities, including through the identification and documentation of relevant case studies.
o Provide content for CRP communication efforts to illustrate CRP achievements in the provision of technical assistance to beneficiary cities, with such efforts to likely include, for example, videos, LinkedIn posts, blogs and short papers.
o Contribute to the overall collaboration and coordination of the Finance pillar with CRP’s Planning and Partnerships pillars, the wider GFDRR department, GPURL, the World Bank and the WBG in general.
• General Program Support
o Contribute to CRP program management including results monitoring, reporting, budgeting, and branding amongst other tasks.
o Contribute to CRP’s partnership development with a particular focus on Paris based partners (e.g. AFD, Sciences PO Urban School etc)
• Workshops & Events
o Lead and/or contribute to CRP events (e.g. webinars) and workshops (e.g multi day virtual or in person) including scoping of workshop needs/required content, instructional design, development of technical tools and event/workshop organization.
o Deliver presentations, break out group activities and other content for workshops and a variety of events including client meetings, donor events, and external conferences.
• Co-Financing
o Lead day to day engagement across WB business units to ensure CRP understands the required processes to deliver co-financing from several bi-lateral lenders including, for example, AECID and AfD.
o Where requested, lead day to day support to task teams in navigating the co-financing process, including liaison with HQ business units, document preparation and coordination meetings with stakeholders as specified by the task team.
Selection Criteria
• Advanced university degree(s) (at least Master’s) in a field relevant to the financing of urban development, infrastructure, and service delivery, such as finance, urban planning, political science, public administration, law, engineering, or a related field.
• A minimum of five (5) years of full-time work experience including at least two (2) years in infrastructure related project finance or real estate investment including experience in WBG beneficiary countries.
• An excellent understanding of the urban resilience related investment needs of cities in WBG beneficiary countries along with an excellent understanding of the types of funding, financing and contracting models relevant to such cities.
• Strong technical proficiency in at least one area related to private investment in city services, municipal assets and/or urban redevelopment efforts. Such areas may include, for example: financial modelling, real estate market valuations, project finance documentation and procurement.
• Working knowledge of World Bank operations, especially urban resilience and climate change mitigation and adaptation projects including experience working with co-financing within the context of WBG transactions.
• Proven capacity to multi-task, deliver results, and respond quickly and effectively to requests; ability to work under pressure.
• Experience managing consulting firms, people and budgets for timely delivery of quality technical deliverables.
• Experience interfacing with and delivering high quality presentations and interactive workshops to government counterparts in developing countries and to donors.
• Strong oral, written, and visual presentation skills; strong creativity and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent written and spoken English and French essential; knowledge of Arabic, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish is desirable.
• Ability to deal sensitively in a multicultural environment and build effective work relations with clients and colleagues as part of strong interpersonal, organizational, and team management skills to achieve results.
Competencies
• Ability to deliver in a dynamic environment with multiple demands and quick turnaround of outputs. Ability to work under pressure while retaining perspective and professionalism.
• Results oriented, with an ability to work independently as well as devise and produce results in collaboration with departments across the WBG.
• High degree of motivation, initiative, flexibility, reliability, and responsiveness to changing demands; capacity for effective multi-tasking, with demonstrated ability of being an independent starter with minimal supervision, and a high capacity to persevere for results.
• highly developed communication and advocacy skills, including ability to write concisely and clearly in English and French and synthesize complex documentation and ideas into fluent, understandable communications.
• strong interpersonal, organizational and team management skills, with demonstrated ability to build strong networks and teams to achieve results. Strong team skills with successful history working effectively across organizational and units and/or sectoral boundaries.
• Knowledge of social media and other knowledge communications tools is an advantage.
Poverty has no borders, neither does excellence. We succeed because of our differences and we continuously search for qualified individuals with diverse backgrounds from around the globe.
World Bank Group Core Competencies
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