Partnership Officer

Background/IRC Summary: The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC offers lifesaving care and life-changing assistance to refugees forced to flee from war and disaster. At work today in over 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities, we restore dignity and hope to millions who are uprooted and struggling to endure. The IRC leads the way from harm to home.

IRC has been working in Pakistan for approximately 40 years, managing and delivering large, complex programs to meet the needs in health, education, safeguarding, environmental health and livelihoods for displaced, poor and disaster affected communities. With the support of the federal and provincial governments, and generous donors like FCDO, ECHO, USAID, GAC and Australian Aid Agencies the IRC is currently implementing projects across the country.

The IRC launched 5-year USAID’s “Women’s Economic Empowerment Activity” (WEEA) to promote women’s economic empowerment through safe and dignified access to livelihood opportunities, information, resources, and services in the target districts of Pakistan. The WEEA target districts include a total of six districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Punjab.

Job Summary: The Partnership Officer reports to the Senior Partnership Manager, will support IRC Partnership sections to increase and strengthen their engagement with various partners (primarily national NGO partners). Partnership officer will be responsible to manage partners record, provide hands-on support to partners in design/development budgets, financial reporting and managing an effective coordination with all key staff members including those based in country office and field offices.

Responsibilities:

Partnership:

• Facilitation in partnership management processes to ensure well planned, timely, coordinated, and coherent partnership management, in line with PEERS and IRC’s partnership principles.
• Draft sub-award partnership agreement, taking into account the due diligence outcomes and specific project and donor requirements, liaise for review and approval.
• Ensure data recording of sub grants on OTIS as per standard procedures. 
• Support partnership team in partners’ due diligence process.
• Facilitate the collaborative development and delivery of the Partner Project Support Plan (PPCR), ensuring that it appropriately addresses issues identified in the due diligence process, and coordinate with relevant departments for the timely, quality implementation of the plan.
• Conduct Anti-Terrorism Compliance (ATC) of partners and partners’ vendors as per IRC policy.  
• Maintain partners’ data pool and identify potential partners as and when required.
• Ensure timely submission of partners financial and program reports as per agreed schedule. 
• Coordination with partners on program and compliance monitoring visits and support partnership team in program and compliance monitoring meetings.
• Facilitate in Partnership Project Opening, Review and Closing Meetings.
• Recording and dissemination of meeting minutes.
• Maintain/update partners’ tracker on monthly/quarterly bases.
• Managing/keeping partners’ record in both hard and soft form.

Finance:

• Work with finance section on partners budget development & reviews.
• Collaborate with finance section in developing/verifying partners’ financial reports.
• Support finance team in conducting grants opening and closing meetings.
• Orient/facilitate partners in developing financial reports and record keep as per IRC/Donors standards.
• Carry out partners’ record verification in field as per schedule.

Key Working Relationships:

• Position Reports to: Sr. Partnership Manager
• Position directly supervises: Non                               

Other Internal and/or external contacts:

• Internal: Finance team, Projects Managers/Team leads.
• External: Local Partners & Govt. departments

Position Requirements:

• Masters’ degree in social sciences, development studies or any relevant field from any recognized University.
• 05 years’ work experience in projects/programs development within a similar setup. At least 03 years of managing partnerships with local NGOs.

Skills and Competencies:

• Knowledge of donor rules and regulations for financial reporting desired (e.g. FCDO, ECHO, BPRM, USAID)
• Demonstrated successful experience working with partners.
• Sound knowledge of budgeting, partners’ financial verification, financial reporting & program designing.
• Demonstrated sound knowledge and expertise of managing and interpreting agreements regarding content and language
• Willing to travel partners’ offices and project sites across country.
• Excellent written and spoken Urdu & English language skills.
• Good knowledge of MS Office (MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint) 
•  Demonstrated interpersonal skills, sound judgment, planning, team building and facilitation skills.
• Excellent communication, negotiation and conflict resolution skills.
• Strongly resilient to unfavorable situations.

Language Skills: Good in English, Urdu

The IRC Core Values and Commitments.

• The IRC and IRC workers must adhere to the values and principles outlined in IRC Way - Standards for Professional Conduct.
• These are Integrity, Service, Equality and Accountability. In accordance with these values, the IRC operates and enforces policies on Adult Safeguarding, Child Safeguarding, Anti Workplace Harassment, Fiscal Integrity Anti-Retaliation and Combating Trafficking in Persons.
• IRC is committed to ensuring that IRC staff is suitable to work with children and have the knowledge s/he needs to uphold and abide by the IRC’s Child Safeguarding Policy as well as Adult Safeguarding Policy.
• Level of interaction with Adult (Above 18): Frequent direct contact with adult and less frequent direct contact with children.
• IRC ensures that its staff must actively practice the roles and responsibilities related to client responsiveness, accountability to people in affected communities and must have competencies to solicits and listens to feedback and other’s perspectives, responds to feedback with maturity and sensitivity and takes appropriate decisions and makes changes to behavior or actions in response to feedback.
• IRC recognizes that gender equality is fundamental to the achievement of our organizational mission.
• As such, IRC is committed to the promotion of gender equality in all aspects of our operations and programs. Our organizational policies, procedures and actions demonstrate this commitment.

Women candidates, transgenders and differently abled persons are highly encouraged to apply.