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.

Responsibilities

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