Manager Client Responsiveness and Action

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 or disaster. At work today in over 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities, we restore safety, 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 over 30 years, and manages and delivers large, complex programs to meet the needs in health, education, protection, environmental health and livelihoods for displaced, poor and disaster affected communities. IRC works in partnership with local government and non-governmental organizations and currently works in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh provinces.

Job Overview/Summary:

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is seeking a dynamic and self-motivated individual for the position of Manager Client Responsiveness and Action (CRA) for a five-year USAID-funded Women’s Economic  Empowerment (WEE) Project being implemented in  selected districts of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa including Newley Merged Districts. The project focusses on implementing interventions to achieve the intended result of “Increased incomes for women-owned micro-businesses and women workers”. These interventions will stimulate women’s economic and social empowerment and prepare foundation for integrating intervention to prevent and respond to gender-based violence (GBV).  The CRA Manager is responsible for supporting the all aspects of designing planning and implementing of the CR strategy and mechanism throughout the WEE Project area – including Client Responsiveness global commitments on Accountability to Affected Population (APP) and Core humanitarian standards (CHS) for feedback and complaint response mechanism. This includes responding to feedbacks and complaints in timely manner, ensure information dashboards of client responsiveness is used by project management for improved implementation on regular basis.

In coordination with respective Implementing Partners,  CRA Manger will contribute to overall project quality and accountability through the conceptualization, coordination, and implementation of enhanced monitoring, accountability and learning strategies, including developing high-quality written products.

Major Responsibilities:

Management and supervision:

·         The CRA Manager will implement core processes and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the feedback reporting and complaints mechanism including designing and selection of feedback channels and Do No Harm in project areas in collaboration with Implementing Partners.

·         Train all Project staff and casual workers in accountability principles and practices.

·         Lead on coordination and liaison with programme and project support unit staff to ensure successful implementation and compliance with the client responsiveness and accountability strategy and mechanism

·         Ensure robust clients’ feedbacks mechanisms are in-place to encourage the communities to share their feedbacks and concerns.

·         Develop context specific clients’ feedback channels plans (proactive and reactive) for projects as well as providing technical support and guidance on implementation of the different clients’ feedback channels plans in all projects.

·         Regularly review and update clients’ feedback channels plans with changing context and situation.

·         Coordinate with Implementing Partners and project management and oversee allocate resources for clients’ responsiveness in projects budgets prepare budget forecasts as part of the overall MEAL budget.

Technical responsibilities

·         Managing the proactive, reactive feedback channel assessments, evaluations, and studies as required, including support scoping the study and methodology;

·         Review and test accountability measurement tools, ensuring alignment with best practices and the IRC and international standards, as well as compliance with the WEE requirements including Monitoring For Actions standards;

·         Work closely with the project team to support the implementation of Client responsiveness framework and guidelines.

·         Ensure Most Significant Change (MSC) stories are regularly collected in coordination with and support of Implementing Partners, analyzed, reported and used;

·         Develop plans with project team, partners and engage stakeholders including clients in the monitoring and ensure the feedback from stakeholders and especially women and their families is sought and utilized as appropriate;

·         Ensure Do No Harm and Child Safeguarding standards are mainstreamed in the MEL methodologies and regularly reviewed throughout implementation of MEL activities;

·         Support Implementing Partners  to comply with WEE CR framework, monitoring standards and commitments.

·         Ensure that programs adopt and comply with standards and tools at design, startup, implementation, and close out stages.

Reporting

·         Ensure Clients feedbacks data and its analysis is available for senior management team in country while considering the confidentiality and clients’ data protection.

·         Ensure that programs adopt and comply with CR standards and tools at design startup implementation and close out stages.

·         Ensure regular flow of Client Responsiveness data from field to country MEAL analyze and interpret the data to help program management in taking informed decisions.

·         Help the programs in assessing the performance at against CR commitments.

·         Assist to Produce and submit high quality reports on client responsiveness within the agreed timelines clearly demonstrating trends and key lessons learnt.

·         Lead documentation and sharing of knowledge and emerging practices on CR internally and externally with the wider stakeholder audience.

·         Participate in program coordination meeting and progress against activities and budget

Coordination with External Stakeholders

In close collaboration with the Chief of party and under the oversight of Senior MEAL Manager

·         Provide oversight of CR activities team building and the creation of external partnerships

·         Responsible for developing work plans as envisaged in the project proposal.

·         Facilitate and document regular meetings between partner’s MEAL staff and other stakeholders to oversee and discuss project progress client’s feedback.

·         Manage the MEAL staff at the provincial level as well as the IRC hotline

·         Ensure the IRC meets contractual project, legal and financial requirements for the CR.

·         Ensure timely, accurate and good quality MEAL reporting to the donor and others stakeholders

Key Working Relationships:

Position Reports to: Chief of Party/ Sr. MEAL Manager (Technical Reporting) Position directly supervises:  None

Job Requirements:

a)      Education:

·         Master’s degree in, Statistics, Social Sciences, Development Studies, Project Management or in any other relevant discipline

b)      Work Experience:

·         4-5 years of consistent proven and successful experience of monitoring, evaluation, accountability, participatory approaches, and learning.

c)      Skills & competencies:

·         Strong analytic skills and high-level understanding of statistical data (e.g., statistical analysis, social science, programme evaluation), ability to recognize, interpret and synthesize patterns in data;

·         Experience in working with communities using PRA tools and techniques. Experience on setting up of feedback channels will be added advantage.

·         Experience in working with communities, DNH, PRA tools and techniques. 

·         Excellent English writing business communication skills

·         Strong team management experience with sound capacities to work in a diversified team

·         Willingness to work under pressure and stressful situations without minimal supervision and without compromising on deadlines or quality

·         Willingness to travel outside city to field sites under demanding conditions

·         Strongly resilient to unfavorable situations,

·         Capability in statistical analysis programming languages/software such as R, SPSS/STATA highly desirable

d)      Demonstrated Skills and Competencies:

·         Good communication and presentation skills.

·         Familiarity with budgeting using MS Excel

·         Excellent computer skills and competency in Word, Excel, Power-Bi and PowerPoint;

Language Skills:  English, Urdu, Pashto 

Others: 

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, 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.

• Level of interaction with children (Under 18): Frequent direct contact with children especially adolescent girls (15-18 years old)

·         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 and differently abled persons are highly encouraged to apply.