Job Overview/Summary:
The Economic Recovery and Development Technical Unit (ERD TU) is responsible for providing dynamic, innovative support to IRC’s field offices for their economic and livelihoods programming. This unit provides technical assistance, ensures innovation, promotes best practices, and helps to improve data collection and analysis for economic and livelihoods programming within the organization.
Cash and voucher programming approaches are an increasingly important mechanism for delivering effective and efficient assistance to affected households, and the IRC has committed to scaling-up its provision of cash relief to 25% of the organization’s assistance by 2020. To support this scale-up in use of cash and voucher programming approaches, the IRC is recruiting a regional cash implementation specialist to support and strengthen the use of cash and vouchers across the West Africa region. The West Africa Regional Cash Implementation Specialist will work closely with regional ERD Technical Advisors to comprehensively support IRC country teams in the assessment, design, and implementation of high quality cash and voucher programs throughout the region.
The position will be based in a country within the West Africa region where the IRC has a presence (Cameroon, CAR, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone), with responsibility to provide remote and regular in-person support to each country office team. The position will involve working closely with finance and supply chain teams, ERD program teams to support the use of cash in basic needs, food security, or livelihood programming, as well as to provide technical support to Health, Environmental Health, Protection and Governance teams to effectively use cash-based programming approaches to help achieve other sectoral outcomes. The position will also play a critical role in strengthening IRC and partner staff capacity to deliver cash transfer programs, promoting preparedness to deliver cash rapidly when crises happen, and enhancing cash and voucher program operations by strengthening practice and procedure between program, finance and supply chain teams.
Major Responsibilities:
- Assist ERD or other sector teams in IRC country offices in the assessment, design, implementation and monitoring of cash and voucher programs. The position is expected to be heavily involved in supporting program delivery, assisting country teams in trouble-shooting implementation challenges, and using monitoring data to improve program designs
- Develop tools, resources and program guidance materials as needed in order to support assessments, program implementation or monitoring efforts, including cross-sectoral implementation of cash programs, in close conjunction with program staff and regional M&E and ICT Coordinators.
- Develop and implement a capacity building plan for the region to ensure all program, finance and supply chain staff involved in cash and voucher programming have appropriate knowledge and skills related to cash and market-based programming.
- Support the development, adaptation and standardization (if appropriate) of operating procedures for cash and voucher implementation across the region, and support linkages with regional finance and supply chain teams to deliver high quality programming.
- Support country teams in developing cash preparedness plans and pre-positioning cash transfer programs in order to be prepared to rapidly and effectively deliver cash relief when emergencies happen.
- Support country offices to adopt digital payment systems for the administration and processing of cash and voucher programs, including enabling program teams to define digital payment needs and program requirements, identifying potential vendors and supporting the contracting process as well as developing systems and operating procedures to effectively manage digital payments.
- Support the design, development, piloting and roll-out of monitoring systems for cash and voucher programming in close collaboration with monitoring and evaluation and ICT staff at TU, regional and country levels, to ensure harmonized M&E approaches and efficient data collection and management systems are in place.
- In partnership with the ERD Technical Advisors that support the West Africa Region, coordinate and encourage sharing and learning across the region, including sharing knowledge, skills, tools and best practices by engaging country office staff in active cross-country and cross-sector communication.
- Provide technical advice related to cash and markets into research or policy and advocacy initiatives lead by country and/or regional teams.
Key Working Relationships:
Position Reports to: ERD Technical Advisor for West Africa Region, with dotted line to ERD Sr. Technical Advisor for Cash Initiatives
Position directly supervises: N/A
Indirect Reporting: Regional Deputy Regional Director
Other Internal and/or external contacts:
Internal: ERD Senior Technical Advisor for Cash Initiatives, Cash Preparedness TA, ERD Markets Specialist, Regional M&E and ICT4P Advisors, Country-level SMTs, ERD Coordinators and other sector Coordinators as needed
External: Regional Cash Coordination Forum(s)
Job Requirements:
Education: Undergraduate degree in social science, international relations, humanitarian affairs, nutrition, food security, logistics, Business Administration, Financial Management, or related field and technical accreditation or equivalent
Work Experience: 3-6 years of work experience in the humanitarian or development sector with progressive management and decision-making responsibility, including 2-3 years of international experience implementing cash and/or voucher activities. Experience working in diverse emergency, recovery, post-conflict or development contexts preferred.
Demonstrated Skills and Competencies:
- Strong demonstrated experience implementing cash and/or voucher programs in a variety of programming contexts, and in-depth knowledge of various types of CTP approaches (conditional and unconditional grants, vouchers, Cash for work, etc.).
- Demonstrated assessment, data collection and analysis skills, including needs assessments, market assessments and incorporation of gender analyses in to assessment approaches.
- Demonstrated ability to work across function and sector to build strong working relationships and to ensure high-quality market-based program delivery. Demonstrated ability to communicate technical expertise and standards and implement best practice approaches to implementing rapid, consistent, high quality projects
- Superior internal and external communication and coordination capabilities and capability to operate independently and as a team member.
- Experience writing proposals for donor funded programs and grants.
- Proven capacity building, facilitation and coordination skills required
Language Skills: English and French required; knowledge of local languages spoken in the region strongly preferred
Certificates or Licenses: N/A
Working Environment: The position will be based in one of the countries in the region where the IRC has an established office (Cameroon, CAR, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone) with 50-70% travel to countries in the West Africa region.
Returning National Candidates : We strongly encourage national or returning national candidates to apply for this position. IRC strives to attract, motivate and retain qualified national staff in our programs.
