Geneva – Under the ongoing UN 80 reform process, the “Hub of Expertise” established by the Global Accelerator’s Technical Support Facility (TSF) has been identified as a pilot intervention, under Work Package 8 on “expertise on demand”.
The reform aims to test new ways of delivering rapid, coordinated technical support across the UN system. By mobilizing specialized expertise across agencies—when and where it is needed—the initiative seeks to strengthen how the UN responds to country demand on complex development challenges.
Within this framework, the TSF’s Hub of Expertise, includes a practical mechanism for delivering expertise on demand. It connects country needs with global expertise and provides structured technical assistance across employment, social protection and financing. The operational model of the on-demand specialized technical assistance, spanning need identification, request, review, mobilization and delivery, aligns closely with the objectives of Work Package 8, in particular regarding the ability of Member States to tap into existing specialized knowledge of technical agencies and remove barriers to collaboration.
The Hub of Expertise is a technical assistance offer to the Global Accelerator’s pathfinder countries and M-GA supported countries. It has two primary objectives: firstly, to respond to technical assistance needs on specific topics related to the design and implementation of integrated social protection and employment policies and their financing; and secondly, to facilitate knowledge generation and sharing among stakeholders involved in pathfinder countries.
The expertise is delivered across five core areas (multistakeholder engagement; integrated policy approaches and delivery mechanisms; integrated financing strategies and instruments; inclusive programming; and partnership development) through four different entry points:
- Toolkit: A database of approaches designed to respond to frequent requests for support.
- On-demand specialized technical assistance: Subject-matter experts are deployed to provide advisory support, training, analytical inputs or implementation guidance in specialized areas.
- Community of Practice: Being designed as a global platform for peer learning, technical exchange, and co-creation of solutions.
- Digital knowledge repository: A multi-agency library of resources (including case studies, learning briefs, analytical tools, and country experiences) that supports evidence-based decision-making and cross-country learning.
The Hub of Expertise has already demonstrated a successful use case as countries have been able to access global and regional level expertise and adapt it to their national contexts, to implement the Global Accelerator.
As UN80 moves into implementation, the inclusion of the Hub of Expertise positions the Global Accelerator as a concrete mechanism to operationalize expertise on demand—and thus as an initiative that can carry forward UN reform, linking global expertise with national priorities and supporting countries to accelerate progress on decent jobs and universal social protection.