Integrated Protection Coordinator

Legal

Job Description

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises, assisting people to survive and rebuild their lives. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC works with people forced to flee from war, conflict and disaster and the host communities which support them, as well as those who remain within their homes and communities. At work today in over 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities, we improve outcomes in the areas of health, safety, economic wellbeing, education and power. Given the disparity faced by women and girls, IRC seeks to narrow gender inequalities and also ensure social inclusion of all vulnerable groups in broader policies, processes and actions affecting their lives.

IRC has been working in Uganda since 1998 supporting refugees, vulnerable host communities and various institutions in the country notably the government, community-based organizations, the civil society and the private sector. Currently, the IRC in Uganda has presence across six sub-regions and six refugee settlements, implementing programming in the sectors of health, protection and rule of law (PRoL), women’s protection and empowerment (WPE), economic recovery and development (ERD), and education. IRC Uganda also implements cross-cutting programming focused on systems strengthening and accountability to affected persons. As part of IRC Uganda’s strategic ambitions, the IRC works closely with local actors, including civil society organizations, local non-governmental organizations, local and national governments, among others, to strengthen their capacity and with intentions of transferring more resources for locally-led implementation and support to our clients.

IRC’s PRoL program works to safeguard the human rights and wellbeing of refugees in settlement and urban settings. Components include information services, protection case management, promotion of social cohesion, psychosocial support and legal services – all incorporating a community-based protection approach. IRC’s innovative WPE programs are focused on preventing and responding to Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG). WPE seeks to help restore the dignity of gender-based violence (GBV) survivors, engage communities in VAWG prevention efforts, create socio-economic opportunities for women and girls, study the impact of our programs and advocate for change. Currently, IRC Uganda does not implement standalone child protection (CP) activities but supports another NGO in the implementation of CP activities in West Nile.

Job Overview

IRC Uganda is currently looking for a strategic leader for its ongoing protection and rule of law and women’s protection and empowerment activities and to potentially build its child protection activities with a geographic focus in the West Nile, Acholi, Karamoja and Southwestern sub-regions and in Kampala. The ideal candidate has strong technical capacity in two or three of the protection sectors: protection and rule of law, women’s protection and empowerment and child protection programming. The candidate has practical experience working in an emergency and protracted crisis contexts, coordination and networking skills, the capacity to innovate and solve problems efficiently and provide strategic direction to IRC Uganda protection programming.

The Integrated Protection Coordinator leads the IRC’s efforts to meet refugee and host community safety and protection needs, reducing risk and responding to cases of violence, coercion and deprivation. They will work closely with IRC staff and partners ensuring the interventions are context appropriate, coherent along the humanitarian and development nexus, leverage cross-program synergies and align to national systems and international standards. Focus is on data-driven program quality, with progress being monitored and evaluated against quantifiable benchmarks. They are expected to forge strategic partnerships with the government, UN agencies, international and local NGOs, CSOs, the private sector, donors and civil society to successfully implement integrated protection programs.

The Integrated Protection Coordinator reports to the Deputy Director of Programs (DDP) and is based in Kampala, with significant field travel to the program sites. This position directly supervises the deputy WPE and PRoL coordinators and potentially a deputy child protection coordinator.

Major Responsibilities

Program Development and Design, including Business Development

• Provide strategic direction, leadership and overall technical and management support to protection and rule of law, women’s protection and empowerment, and child protection programming in Uganda, ensuring it is context appropriate, responsive, coherent, collaborative, and operationally feasible and in line with the Uganda’s Strategic Action Plan (SAP) outcomes for Safety and Power.

• Ensure an integrated protection strategy, is developed and updated as required with input from frontline staff and in close collaboration with the country leadership and WPE, PRoL and CP Technical Advisors.

• Develop and promote an integrated protection partnership strategy aligned with the Uganda SAP and IRC’s global partnership ambitions.

• Promote joint work across the three teams (CP, WPE and PRoL) to enhance the quality of programming and a holistic approach to addressing the needs of families.

• Ensure high quality program design processes, based on thorough analysis of trends, gaps and needs, application of identified lessons learned, and ensuring adherence to evidence-based approaches linked to theories of change.

• Contribute to growing the integrated protection portfolio, including potentially introducing the child protection sub-sector, in line with the Uganda SAP through proactive engagement with key stakeholders and donors, in addition to leading in the technical development of concept notes and proposals for existing and new donors.

• Support partners as equals to design and implement protection interventions, and ensuring appropriate budget resourcing for partner project delivery, including project support and capacity sharing activities.

• Ensure all designed projects use the IRC theories of change and that outcomes are evidence-driven and evidence-generated.

• Based on thorough review of needs and gaps in service provision and coverage of humanitarian and development actors, and government agencies, ensure programmatic priorities are regularly reviewed for relevance and adaptations proposed.

• Develop and/or input into protection assessments and protection analysis for the purpose of program development.

• Identify opportunities for partnership and strategic collaboration, including those that are led by women and serve women and girls.

• Participate in cross-departmental collaboration and coordination with livelihoods, health and education colleagues to ensure that linkages between programs are made and programs gain from protection best practice.

Program Quality and M&E

• Ensure projects and activities are of high technical quality, meet humanitarian standards, mainstream protection, align with IRC’s Outcomes and Evidence Framework, and respond to community and monitoring feedback.

• Ensure that all interventions are in compliance with Uganda’s Refugee Act and Constitution as well as relevant international laws including International Refugee Law and Human Rights Law; and Humanitarian law.

• Ensure protection mainstreaming and adherence to global good practice including GBV MS and CPMS during design and implementation of all project activities.

• In collaboration with program, finance, HR and Supply Chain departments, ensure smooth management, implementation, integration and compliance of project work plans and budgets (budget forecasting, spending plans, procurement plans and expenditure) for direct service delivery, with best use of resources across activities and delivering on time, to scope and within budget.

• Undertake regular field monitoring visits to assess progress and identify technical quality issues and/or other implementation issues and provide solutions and implement modifications as required.

• Support the program managers and field teams in the implementation and monitoring of the work plans ensuring that activities reflect the commitments IRC made to the donor and the community.

• Ensure quality GBV response programming and ethical and sound data collection and information management systems are in place for GBV analysis, planning, and evaluation, and to allow for data-driven programmatic decision-making and reporting.

• Ensure that monitoring and evaluation systems are effectively designed, measure protection outcomes, and integrated into all stages of the project.

• Contribute to the technical interpretation of M&E data and apply output and outcome indicator findings to improve program quality.

• Liaise with PRoL, WPE and CP Technical Advisors regularly and proactively, and pursue technical guidance as needed.

• Stay abreast of developments in the IRC Violence Prevention and Response Unit (VPRU) and global working groups related to new tools and guidelines.

• Promote and apply IRC’s Partnership Excellence for Equality and Results system (PEERs), ensuring that IRC’s partnership principles, skills and approaches are applied by staff across projects with partners.

Partnership Management

• Ensure collaborative program design processes that fully leverage the perspectives, experience and expertise of local actors, where possible based on collaborative needs assessment processes.

• Support Partner Identity and Background Review (Vetting) checks and Partner's Project Capacity Review (PPCR) of potential partners, as relevant.

• Promote and actively practice full partner participation in project decision making, including any project adaption based on data.

• Lead timely and effective partnership project review and reflection (monitoring), identifying appropriate follow up actions.

• Review partnership project reports and provide feedback as appropriate.

• Ensure that supported partner projects are consistent with humanitarian and sector principles and standards.

• Support partners whenever possible in coordination with other entities such as government, UN, other humanitarian actors and coordination mechanisms.

• Engage with partners to identify and jointly pursue shared advocacy priorities.

• Explore with partners potential capacity strengthening support, including system strengthening for government partners, and organizational development for civil society partners, and identify needed resources, in collaboration with the Partnership Coordinator.

• Integrate technical capacity sharing approaches, including how IRC can learn from local partners.

Representation, coordination and advocacy

• Coordinate with CD, DDP and other technical coordinators to forge connections and strategic partnerships with key government counterparts at the Office of the Prime Minister and Local Government; UNHCR and other UN, I/NGOs, human rights actors and other sub-national government actors.

• Represent the IRC in high level and strategic meetings involving protection actors such as protection working group meetings, inter-agency coordination meetings, and bilateral meetings.

• Ensure representation and active participation by program managers in district and settlement sector working group meetings.

• Regularly coordinate with internal program and operational stakeholders, the PRoL, WPE and CP Technical Advisors, and other IRC colleagues.

• Identify advocacy opportunities together with the DDP and Communications and Advocacy Coordinator and based on information received from the field.

Human Resources Management

• Coach, train, and mentor protection staff with the aim of strengthening their technical capacity, exchanging knowledge within the team, and providing professional development guidance.

• Support the development of sound performance objectives among staff and provide regular feedback on staff progress toward realizing those objectives.

• Ensure ongoing training and targeted capacity building of staff.

• Support recruitment of PRoL, WPE and CP staff, as relevant.

• Support Field Coordinators to ensure that program managers and deputy coordinators put capacity development plans in place for the PRoL and WPE (and potentially CP) teams based on documented capacity needs assessments exercise.

• Maintain open and professional relations with team members, promoting a strong team spirit and providing oversight and guidance to enable staff to successfully perform in their positions.

• Ensure timely completion and submission of interim and annual employee performance reviews.

• If/as required, identify staff performance issues and works with Human Resources to document and address these in accordance with the National Staff Employment Policies.

• Responsible for adhering to IRC’s Global HR Operating Policies and Procedures.

Key working relationships

Position reports to: Deputy Director of Programs

Direct reporting: Deputy Protection and WPE coordinators

Other internal contacts: Technical Coordinators in Health, Education and Economic Recovery and Development; MEAL Coordinator; Grants Coordinator; Partnerships Coordinator; Communications and Advocacy Coordinator; Program Coordinator for Quality and Learning; Senior Management Team (Country Director; Deputy Director, Finance; Deputy Director, Operations; Deputy Director, HR and Administration); Field Coordinators; VPRU (including PRoL, WPE and CP Technical Advisors)

Requirements

The Integrated Protection Coordinator will need to meet the requirements below:

• Degree or equivalent in social work, psychology, social science, human rights, law, humanities or other related degree or demonstrate strong comparable work experience in relevant sector.

• At least 5 years’ experience implementing protection, rule of law, child protection and/or GBV programming in an emergency or complex emergency context and demonstrable understanding of the relevance of international humanitarian law and human rights law to humanitarian action.

• Demonstrated ability to conduct needs assessments and propose context-appropriate solutions based on analysis of needs and gaps.

• Demonstrated experience in capacity building and mentoring.

• Demonstrated leadership and facilitation skills, with strong coordination, diplomacy, and networking skills.

• Experience in working with and coordinating with the UN, bilateral donors, international and local NGOs and other stakeholders.

• Strong interpersonal, intercultural, communication and problem-solving skills.

• Strong team and people leadership, management, organizational and development skills.

• Strong program and budget management skills including planning and reporting across multiple grants.

• Strong written and oral communication skills, effective in representation and liaison with external parties;

• Excellent analytical, writing skills and fluency in English.

• Familiarity with key donor regulations such as UNHCR, BPRM and ECHO.

• Strong commitment to humanitarian work and values.

• Works well in and promotes teamwork, comfortable in a multi-cultural environment, flexible and able to handle pressure effectively and productively.

Standards of Professional Conduct: The IRC and IRC workers must adhere to the values and principles outlined in the IRC Way – Code of Conduct. These are Integrity, Service, Equality and Accountability. In accordance with these values, the IRC operates and enforces policies on Beneficiary Protection from Exploitation and Abuse, Child Safeguarding, Harassment-Free Workplace, Fiscal Integrity, Anti-Retaliation, Combating Trafficking in Persons and several others.

Gender Equality: IRC is committed to narrowing the gender gap in leadership positions. We offer benefits that provide an enabling environment for women to participate in our workforce including parental leave, gender-sensitive security protocols and other supportive benefits and allowances.

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Qualifications

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Added 8 months ago - Updated 6 months ago - Source: rescue.org