The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, the IRC is one of the world’s largest international humanitarian non-governmental organizations (INGO), at work in more than 50 countries and more than 25 U.S. cities helping people to survive, reclaim control of their future and strengthen their communities. A force for humanity, IRC employees deliver lasting impact by restoring safety, dignity and hope to millions. If you’re a solutions-driven, passionate change-maker, come join us in positively impacting the lives of millions of people world-wide for a better future.
To achieve that vision, the IRC’s Technical Excellence (TE) provides technical assistance to IRC’s country program staff and share learnings to influence policy and practice. TE is comprised of five technical units: Economic Recovery and Development; Education; Governance; Health; and Violence Prevention and Response. There are also three supporting units: Measurement, Grant Operations and Analytics, and Program Quality Support.
The Women’s Protection and Empowerment (WPE) Technical Advisor will form part of the Violence Prevention and Response Technical Unit (VPRU), which houses expertise in the field of protection and rule of law, child protection, and women’s protection and empowerment. The VPRU provides dynamic, innovative support to IRC’s field offices and provides technical assistance, ensures innovation, promotes standard processes, and helps to improve data collection and analysis for protection programming within the organization. The Women’s Protection and Empowerment (WPE) team strives towards a vision whereby women and girls with their communities, work to create a world where they are valued and live free from violence, and can exercise their rights to promote their safety, equality and voice. The team supports programs to adhere to minimum standards and principles of good practice in the prevention of and response to gender-based violence and to meet the safety, health, psycho-social, and justice needs of women, girls, and survivors of gender-based violence. The Advisor is also responsible for supporting the WPE program strategy, business development, partnership strategy and relationship building, staff development and the organization’s strategy initiatives; and supporting integration across all of IRC’s VPRU programs.
POSITION OVERVIEW
This role is focused IRC’s Latin America region. This is IRC’s newest region with the ambition of substantially increasing its portfolio. IRC’s Latin America Region is comprised of three population-based responses to regional crisis: 1) the Venezuela Crisis including Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru; 2) Northern of Central America (NCA – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) and 3) Mexico & Cross Border (including coordination with IRC-US programming). Additionally, the Latin America region coordinates with the Emergency and Humanitarian Action Unit is responding to the current humanitarian crisis in Haiti through a partnership-based approach.
Portfolio Design & Business Development:
You will support country programs to design winning submissions and generally position IRC for continued success in our technical domains:
• Remain abreast of their region’s contextual developments and provide strategic advice on portfolio development, orientation
• Provide support and guidance to country programs in the development and implementation of violence prevention and response sectoral strategies
• Advise on program modalities and strategic partnership development based on evidence, scale considerations, and how we can best support, complement, and reinforce local systems
• Provide technical guidance on country and regional partnership strategies including strategic partnerships with governments, multilateral organizations, private sector, CBOs etc.
• Advise on and/or provide hands-on support on assessments, including application and contextualization of technical standards
• Support country teams in their strategic technical dialogue and engagement with critical stakeholders (donors, peer organisations, policy-makers, academia etc.)
• Participate in project design meetings for all relevant proposals (remotely or in person)
• Review and validate design meeting decisions around technical design quality, including alignment of narratives, log-frames, and budgets, to IRC standards and outcomes
• Identify opportunities to get regional technical needs addressed through global strategic projects in partnership with the relevant global practice lead
• Promote and support design collaboration with partners and clients
• Promote and support gender equality and diversity inclusion throughout project design
Proposal Design and Review:
• Substantially contribute to the development of proposal theories of change and log frames as relevant and needed
• Support the in-country technical lead in analyzing relevant information including available M&E and client responsiveness data, to prepare for design meetings/conversations
• Participate in project design meetings for all relevant proposals (remotely or in person), that includes as relevant participation into global strategic project design meetings
• Review and validate design meeting decisions around technical design quality, including alignment of narratives, log-frames, and budgets, to IRC standards and outcomes
• Promote and support design collaboration with partners and clients
Implementation Support: You will support country program staff and other key stakeholders in implementing technical interventions:
• Support country programs and other stakeholders with the recruitment and training of technical coordinators
• Assess program quality and inform improvements, providing follow up support to country programs as needed
• Collaborate with country program colleagues to monitor and analyze key indicators to inform periodic review, program adaptation, and course-correction as needed
• Provide technical capacity strengthening through ongoing mentoring, coaching, and trainings with country program focal points
Support advocacy and policy reform/ implementation processes through solid positioning of key issues and solutions
• Support country teams in their strategic technical dialogue and engagement with critical stakeholders (donors, peer organisations, policy-makers, academia etc.)
• Promote integrated outcomes for clients through collaboration across the VPR specialized areas and other sectors
• Support testing and roll out of strategic projects approaches as relevant
Knowledge & Learning: You will support continuous sectoral learning and IRC technical leadership:
• Document learnings from program activities and sharing takeaways and opportunities, in particular though leading and participating in relevant CoP
• Lead on context-relevant analysis leveraging and triangulating quantitative and qualitative data from diverse sources
• Share cross-contextual learnings with country program staff across the region and with other relevant counterparts
• Collaborate with the Quality in Emergencies team and Emergencies and Humanitarian Action Unit (EHAU) counterparts during emergency classifications to support country programs to assess, design and implement high quality programming in acute emergency situations
• Collaborate with other technical advisors within the region to promote integrated programming leadership
• Refresh the sectoral evidence-base in collaboration with global and regional staff to influence approaches
• Contribute to the delivery of VPRU strategic priorities
• Maintain currency with sectoral best practices through continual learning and development
Key Working Relationships: This position reports to the Latin America Regional Lead – Violence Prevention and Response, currently based in the United States. This position may potentially supervise occasional consultants and/or interns. Regular communication with other Women Protection and Empowerment (WPE), Child Protection (CP) and Governance Technical Advisors, Global Practice Leads, regional and country program teams, awards management and grants management staff, and other internal stakeholders.
PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
Success in this position requires an individual with expertise in designing and delivering technical assistance to Women’s Protection and Empowerment programs, and with a deep understanding of the cultural, societal, and political contexts in the Latin America Region.
Work Experience:
• A minimum of 6-8 years of relevant experience in implementing and/or managing women’s protection and empowerment programs, with on the ground programmatic experience in a service delivery organization, NGO or comparable international agency required. Extensive experience in gender based violence prevention and response work would be a significant asset.
• Experience in technical tools and materials development, monitoring and evaluation, and research in relation to women’s protection and empowerment
• Experience and familiarity with related donors, peer agencies and national contexts required, preferably in humanitarian, post-crisis, or climate impacted contexts.
• Demonstrated expertise in technical program design, monitoring and evaluation, with the ability to turn concepts and strategy into measurable action.
• Experience in integrated program strategy development and working across sectors or disciplines is highly desired.
Demonstrated Skills and Competencies:
• Excellent verbal and written communications skills
• Strong organizational and time-management skills; proven ability to prioritize and deliver projects on time and independently.
• Demonstrated ability to navigate a dynamic, cross-functional, global team structure in a large multi-national organization.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with internal and external stakeholders at all levels.
• Strong analytic problem-solving skills
• Demonstrate commitment and capacity to renew and maintain knowledge of standards and best practices in humanitarian women’s protection and empowerment.
• Highly proficient in Microsoft Office suite.
• Ability to manage and work through change in a proactive and positive manner.
Education: Bachelor’s Degree in international law, human rights law, international development, social work, psychology or a relevant field required, Master’s Degree preferred.
Language Skills: Fluency in spoken and written English and Spanish is essential. Working proficiency in Portuguese would be an asset.
**Working Environment:**Standard office working environment. This role will require international travel up to 40% of the time. This role is based in one of the approved locations in Latin America Region. Other IRC locations may be possible.
**Standard of Professional Conduct:**The IRC and the IRC workers must adhere to the values and principles outlined in the IRC Way – our Code of Conduct. These are Integrity, Service, Accountability, and Equality.
Commitment to Gender, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion: The IRC is committed to creating a diverse, inclusive, respectful, and safe work environment where all persons are treated fairly, with dignity and respect. The IRC expressly prohibits and will not tolerate discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or bullying of the IRC persons in any work setting. We aim to increase the representation of women, people that are from country and communities we serve, and people who identify as races and ethnicities that are under-represented in global power structures.