BACKGROUND
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is one of the world's leading humanitarian relief and development organisations. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC responds to the world's worst humanitarian crises and helps people survive, recover and rebuild their lives. The IRC delivers emergency aid, protects children, provides health care, prevents and responds to violence against women and girls, safeguards human rights and helps to kick-start economic recovery. At work today in over 40 countries and in 22 US cities, the IRC restores hope and opportunity to millions of people. IRC leads the way from harm to home.
The IRC is committed to a culture of bold leadership, innovation in all aspects of our work, creative partnerships and, most crucially, accountability to those we serve. The IRC is a tireless advocate for the most vulnerable. The IRC's global headquarters are in New York.
PROGRAMME SCOPE
Under the IRC's new strategic plan, we have committed to becoming more responsive to our clients - people affected by conflict and disasters around the world. Through our Client Responsiveness Initiative, IRC seeks to improve our programming and business practices in order to bring greater choice to our clients and to bring client voices more systematically into our decision-making calculations.
In the first phase, this initiative will pilot and test light-touch approaches to capturing and sharing client feedback on humanitarian services. Based on consumer satisfaction approaches, the pilot programs will be able to receive real time input on how their performance is perceived by their clients. The experience of whether and how this data is used to course correct will be closely analyzed, by clients themselves, as well as by both IRC and partner organization staff. The intent is to distil learning from these pilots both for IRC programs more generally and for wider learning and uptake within the humanitarian sector.
IRC seeks to hire a Senior Coordinator to lead the implementation of the Client Responsiveness Initiative, including managing the client feedback pilots, collaborating with field teams and partner organizations, and developing and promoting tools, analyses and other information products flowing from the pilot projects. The post will also need to coordinate a cross-team working group to support the Client Responsiveness Initiative and take forward other aspects of the initiative as it evolves. This position will report to the Senior Director-Governance and Rights based in Geneva and the post holder will interact frequently with key members of the Governance and Rights Technical Unit as well as with the other IRC Technical Units and country programs. The position will be located in Brussels or Geneva. This is a fixed-term position that ends June 2016. The possibility of extension of this post is dependent on funding and performance.
MAIN DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Project Implementation:
- Lead the technical implementation and delivery of projects under the Client Responsiveness Initiative, including:
- Delivery of project goals, objectives and milestones;
- Design and roll out client responsiveness tools and products for the 6 pilots;
- Coordination with partner organizations and IRC country programs implementing pilot projects under this initiative;
- Responsible for all aspects of project cycle management and reporting;
- Accountable for project delivery;
- Representation of the initiative to peer and partner agencies, donors and internal and external networks and coalitions, in collaboration with other team members;
Coordination, Management and Monitoring:
- Provide coordination and effective management and direction to the initiative to achieve the greatest impact possible;
- Coordinate the Client Responsiveness Community of Practice across the agency, ensuring timely sharing of relevant information and fostering a learning culture across different teams;
- Manage the overall initiative by planning and tracking project activities in accordance with the overall initiative work plan and individual grant agreements;
- Establish work plans, set performance targets, and identify challenges and strategies to achieve initiative and sub-project aims in coordination with other initiative team members, the wider community of practice and other relevant teams across the IRC;
Grants Management:
- Track project deliverables and communicate progress across pilot projects to relevant stakeholders;
- Address challenges and resolve issues around performance with partner agencies in country, as appropriate;
- Lead in the coordination, preparation, and submission of narrative donor reports on the Client Responsiveness Initiative in collaboration with participating countries and local/national partners;
- Working alongside the G&R Unit's Senior Coordinator-Grants and Operations, review financial progress, identify realignments where needed, and ensure resources are being effectively and efficiently used;
- Ensure implementation is in compliance with donor and IRC policies and procedures in consultation with countries, Technical Units, local/national partners;
Technical Support and Knowledge Management
- Coordinate with Research, Evaluation and Learning and Governance and Rights Technical Advisors, researchers, and other relevant staff to ensure project objectives and outcomes are being met and that technical support is being streamlined and delivered;
- Identify synergies across pilot programs, countries and outputs as well as opportunities to produce global learning;
- Support knowledge management on client responsiveness in humanitarian service delivery; document and share widely lessons learned, good practice, briefing notes and cost analyses; develop and promote widely recommendations for strong client responsiveness in humanitarian service delivery;
- Lead the review of project documents for quality and consistency before external dissemination;
Person specification
Essential
- Masters degree in international development, protection, human rights or international humanitarian law, or other related field;
- Sound project management skills;
- At least 6 years of professional experience in managing and implementing programs, ideally with a background in accountability, client (or beneficiary) responsiveness, participation or engagement of affected populations in humanitarian contexts;
- At least 6 years of work experience in humanitarian or development contexts;
- Strong understanding of research and programming including how the two can work together for mutually beneficial outcomes;
- Proven ability to operate in a complex organisation, across funct ions and work on own initiative and collaboratively as part of diverse teams;
- Experience representing an organization and building strong relationships at the local, national, and international levels;
- Ability to manage a complex and varied work load, work under pressure, and travel regularly (up to 40% of the time) often to insecure environments;
- Excellent English communication skills, both oral and written;
- Good working knowledge of MS Word, Outlook and Excel.
Desirable
- Prior work with client responsiveness in humanitarian contexts, including substantial knowledge and understanding of where humanitarian organizations need to improve and grow technically to meet the needs of their clients;
- Experience with multi-country project start-up;
- Experience coordinating multi-country programs;
- Experience working with DFID, ECHO and/or other large international donors;
- Experience working with researchers and or managing M&E systems;
- French and/or Arabic language skills.
Please submit a cover letter and resume as ONE pdf or Microsoft Word file. Applications without a cover letter will NOT be considered. Your cover letter should indicate your desired salary range.
IRC leading the way from harm to home.
IRC is an Equal Opportunity Employer IRC considers all applicants on the basis of merit without regard to race, sex, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability.
HOW TO APPLY:
Please follow this link to apply: http://www.aplitrak.com/?adid=a2F0cmluYW1pbGxlci4xMjI2NC4zODMwQGlyYy5hcG...
