Risk and resilience adviser (climate change and disasters)

Introduction

This post sits within the Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation team (DRR AND CAA), in the Programme Policy and Quality (PPQ) department.

The team works to reduce risks and enhance the resilience of children and their communities in the face of disasters and climate change, across both emergency and development contexts. We aim to expand the scale and improve the quality of SC’s programmes covering disaster prevention, preparedness, recovery, and mitigation activities. The team supports both stand-alone and mainstreamed programming within and between both development and humanitarian contexts.

The DRR and CCA Team is responsible for:

• Enhancing SCUK’s capacity to effectively contribute to improving children’s rights and ability to realise their potential objectives, through the provision of robust technical advice for programme design and implementation of DRR and CCA programmes
• Developing programme policy for SCUK, other SC members and SCI on disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation aiming to build resilience against shocks and stresses
• Mainstreaming disaster resilience and climate change adaptation across SCUK’s development and humanitarian programmes;
• Ensuring projects that aim to reduce risk and build resilience are underpinned by robust evidence and informed by good practice, thus enhancing their potential to have a demonstrably positive impact on the lives and rights of children

Job purpose:

To support Save the Children UK to deliver high quality, innovative and impactful programmes that build the resilience of children, households, communities and institutions, particularly governments. This job will focus in particular on our strengthening and expanding SC’s work in Africa, especially the slow-onset disaster drought prone regions of the Horn and the Sahel that are characterised by weak governance and conflict risk. The successful candidate will provide expertise to help develop the capacity of Save the Children staff to design, manage and deliver programmes, building on good practice.

The successful candidate will collaborate with thematic specialists in health, education and livelihoods across development and humanitarian spheres advisors in close liaison with M&E specialists. The successful candidate will also contribute to our understanding of the role of markets in strengthening resilience and improving outcomes. The successful candidate will also contribute to writing proposals for externally funded evaluations and participate in producing successful bids, and then providing technical assistance to support country and regional offices implement high quality programmes.

Key responsibilities: 

Technical support in strategy, programme and project design, evaluation and learning

1. Provide sound technical advice to country offices, regional offices and other thematic teams. This will include:

• Supporting country programmes to integrate disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and resilience building thinking and practice into country strategies and project proposal development.
• Providing timely, high quality feedback to project and programme development.
• Providing expertise about risk analysis and building resilience to the other thematic teams in Save the Children as required.
• Developing resource materials (position papers, guidance notes and toolkits) and training on risk management and resilience building as necessary.
• Collating and analysing data to improve programme design and increase impact.
• Guiding operational research on risk management and resilience building.
• Ensuring programmes are underpinned by evidence and have robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks to assess impact.
• Contribute to thinking across the organisation about how risk management and resilience building informs the strategic direction of Save the Children.

Networking and Influencing

2. Strengthen Save the Children UK’s networks with key partners in Save the Children International, donor agencies, government, private sector, other NGOs and academia. This will involve:

• Producing and overseeing cutting-edge programme publications (reports, briefings, articles) to form the basis for effective technical support and advocacy on risk and resilience policy issues relevant to the needs, interests and well-being of children.
• Enhancing Save the Children’s reputation as a key agency with an emphasis on managing and mitigating risks that shocks and stresses degrade programme achievement and also build long-term resilience.
• Technical advocacy with key donors and governments on DRR, CCA and resilience and providing key donors with regular Save the Children programme updates.
• Developing a network of experts/consultants who can be called upon to support programme or strategy development.
• Establishing and maintaining links with key stakeholders in academia to enhance learning through the extraction and dissemination of data and evidence.
• Working with key stakeholders to identify and develop innovative programming solutions to enhance communities resilience to shocks and stresses.
• Strengthening SCUK’s technical advocacy and research collaboration with other agencies, bilaterally and multilaterally Strengthening Save the Children UK’s cooperation with Save the Children International and other Members on risk and resilience.

Other

3. Comply with the requirements of SC UK’s child safeguarding policies and other staff policies.
4. Perform other tasks and responsibilities as may be required from time to time in order to ensure the smooth running of the team, cross departmental teams, the PPQ department and SC UK.

Person specification

Essential Criteria

Technical skills

• A professional qualification at a post graduate level in development or a relevant social science. Experience can substitute for qualifications.
• Demonstrable expertise in managing and implementing Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation programmes in international development. This should include experience in integrating risk reduction and resilience building and application of this experience within a framework similar to the Save the Children Theory of Change and preferably in relation to any of Save the Children’s core thematic or crosscutting areas - Health, Nutrition, Livelihoods, Child Protection, Education, Child Rights Programming, Gender, Child Participation and Accountability.
• Experience of relevant programme design and management in East and Southern Africa, and/or the Sahel.
• A track record of building, maintaining and developing relationships and networks of partnerships to maximise organisational reach and influence.
• Expertise in the operationalizing the relationship between resilience building and climate change adaptation (on the one hand) and economics, markets and sustainable development (on the other).
• Fluent written and spoken English and computer literate.

Core Competencies and Behaviours

• Strong interpersonal skills with an ability to communicate effectively verbally and to adjust style to a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds and at all levels - e.g. young people, peers, senior colleagues, the media etc.
• Excellent writing skills with an ability to write and edit at a level suitable for publication.
• Strong analytical skills with an ability to distil key messages from a large amount of information.
• Strong skills with an ability to build and maintain strong cross-organisational relationships and mobilise support and build ownership.
• Commitment to team working and ability to build and motivate teams, effective team management (including experience of building shared objectives, empowering staff, coaching and mentoring, motivation, performance management, development and training).

Other

• Ability to travel overseas for up to two weeks per visit as required (up to 30% of time)
• Commitment to Save the Children UK’s mission, values and approach.

Desirable criteria:

• Experience of developing, allocating, and monitoring budgets and supporting efforts to generate funds from institutional donors (DFID and EC primarily).
• Experience of programming for livelihood support, food security and nutrition .
• Experience of using evidence based innovation within an institution. Successful experience in an international development organisation, especially on child rights programming will be an asset.
• Experience of developing strategic frameworks and effective use of evidence to influence organisational decisions.
• Demonstrated monitoring and evaluation skills.
• Ability to work both in an advisory and hands-on implementation capacity.
• Proven capacity to supervise, train and coach national staff.
• Language skills in French, Spanish or Portuguese.