Finance Specialist, P-3, Fixed Term Position, Div of Financial and Adm Mgmt, Brussels, Belgium #00121857

Finance Specialist, P-3, Fixed Term Position, Div of Financial and Adm Mgmt, Brussels, Belgium #00121857

The Grants Management Unit (GMU), anchored within DFAM, plays a central role in safeguarding UNICEF’s financial integrity, compliance, and operational effectiveness in the management of donor resources. GMU oversees the full financial lifecycle of grants from negotiation and revenue recognition to donor reporting and closure ensuring adherence to UNICEF’s Financial Regulations and Rules (FRRs), policies, and donor conditions. GMU provides guidance to offices and the Global Shared Services Centre (GSSC) on revenue recognition and fund utilization, ensuring accurate and timely financial reporting to donors and internal stakeholders. The unit issues certified and interim financial statements, prepares key corporate reports for the Executive Director, Comptroller, UNICEF Executive Board, and major donors, and supports the organization’s credibility through transparency and accountability. By driving process improvements, strengthening compliance, and fostering collaboration across divisions and field offices, GMU enables UNICEF to maintain donor confidence, optimize resource mobilization, and deliver programmatic results effectively.

How can you make a difference?

As Finance Specialist, your responsibilities will contribute towards the Division Of Finance and Administration's goal of providing robust and appropriate financial reporting to external and internal stakeholders. Specifically, accurate, timely and useful donor statements of account will increase UNICEF’s credibility with donors and will contribute towards UNICEF being seen as a partner of choice. For certain donors with complex framework agreements, accurate donor statements will lead to a reduced risk of disallowed expenditures which will need to be funded from other sources. Technical support provided to Country Offices will help ensure better grant management at Country Office level. This will also increase the quality and consistency of uncertified financial reporting at Country Offices, again this will increase UNICEF’s credibility with donors.

Under the general supervision of the Finance Manager, you will be responsible for the preparation of complex statement of accounts, for example, the statements for grants funded by the various key donors, who are strategic partners to UNICEF.
All statements must be prepared in compliance with the donor agreements including strict adherence to the deadlines.

You will also provide extensive support and guidance to country offices with regards to the preparation or the statements and, more generally, with regards to the management of complex grants.

In addition to ensuring compliance with donor agreements, you will carry out functions in accordance with UNICEF’s accounting policies and procedures, and UNICEF Financial Regulations and Rules. You are also expected to backstop the P4 post when he/she is away.

Summary of key functions/accountabilities:

• Guides regional and country office staff on the resolution of issues with donor reports, especially the non-standard complex reports to key donors. All reports must be in compliance with the contribution agreements and UNICEF accounting policies and financial regulations and rules.
• Works on projects for improvements and efficiency to support donor statement issuance;including dashboards, applications and systems.
• Coordinates periodic donor reporting closure processes and other closure tasks collaborating with other team members and units, as required.
• Responds to queries from donors on donor report submissions and, in the process, give donors confidence that reports are correctly prepared in compliance with the contribution agreements.
• For Joint Programme arrangements, including where UNICEF is acting as an Administrative Agentor as a Participating Organisation, ensures that the donor reports meet the unique accounting and reporting requirements.
• Provides guidance to regional and country offices on maximizing funding from donors in the context of exchange rate complexities.
• Oversees the completeness, accuracy, and timeliness of financial transactions in VISION and Insight to ensure that donor statements and other reports are correctly stated. Take corrective action where required, which could include deriving additional information from VISION or requesting the necessary information directly from the country offices.
• Provide guidance to regional and country offices on grant management, especially on accounting matters that have implications for financial reporting.
• Seek to improve the grant management and donor reporting functionality of VISION and liaises with staff in DFAM, Public Partnership and Resource Mobilisation, and Digital Impact Division as appropriate to bring about the improvements.