Humanitarian Capacity Strengthening Officer at Catholic Agency for Overseas Development

Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) has been working in Nigeria since the late 1970s, mainly supporting Primary Health Care programmes and Development Education, Justice and Peace as well as Women income generation projects through the Catholic Church in Northern parts of Nigeria.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Humanitarian Capacity Strengthening Officer

Location: Nigeria

Job Profile
This role contributes to CAFOD’s commitment to empower local partners and communities to be at the forefront of humanitarian response. The purpose of the Humanitarian Capacity Strengthening Officer’s role is to support selected national and local NGOs to strengthen their ability to prepare for, influence and implement quality humanitarian programmes and strengthen the recruitment and management of local volunteers. This includes strengthening local organisation’s knowledge, practice, policies and systems across the following humanitarian areas:

• Community participation and engagement
• Humanitarian leadership and governance
• Emergency preparedness and response
• External engagement (including fundraising, collaboration, advocacy and communications)
• Management of resources (including volunteer management).

Key Responsibilities
Provide Accompaniment and Capacity Development Support to Partners (65%):

• Encourage partners to take on the leadership of their humanitarian capacity strengthening work.
• Work with partners to identify and prioritise their humanitarian capacity strengthening needs through facilitating capacity self-assessments.
• Support partners to develop and implement their humanitarian capacity strengthening plans in collaboration with other key stakeholders.
• Build upon partners experiences to promote peer to peer learning and regular exchange between partners.
• Identify opportunities for secondments between partners and other NGOs.
• Design and facilitate participatory training of trainers and learning sessions on a wide variety of humanitarian topics. aspects.
• Provide guidance to partners to strengthen their organisational and humanitarian systems and procedures in line with CI Management Standards, Caritas Internationalis Toolkit for Emergencies, Core Humanitarian Standards.
• Support partners to review their volunteer management practices using the EU Volunteers policy and Caritas Internationalis management standards.
• Support selected partners to improve systems, procedures and practice in accordance with the following standards: Caritas Internationalis Management Standards (CIMS), Core Humanitarian Standards (CHS) and the EU Aid Volunteers certification mechanism.
• Support partners to strengthen their disaster risk reduction (DRR) procedures and programmes.
• Support partners to prepare for emergencies, including facilitating emergency preparedness and emergency simulation workshops.
• Support partners to apply new knowledge and skills in existing programmes
• Source and provide oversight and guidance to consultants and staff from other NGOs to provide training and technical support in humanitarian capacity to partners.
• In the event of partners responding to an emergency; provide field level operational support and accompaniment to partners. This may include accompaniment of partner staff to demonstrate good practice in rapid assessment, project design, targeting, funding proposals, accountability mechanisms, monitoring, evaluation and learning and coordination with Caritas and the Humanitarian community in Nigeria.

Develop, Manage and Share Learning for the Humanitarian Capacity Strengthening Programme in Nigeria (20%):

• Oversee the implementation of the project and support to individual partners in line with the timeframe, budget and EU Aid Volunteer requirements.
• Design, adapt and apply capacity strengthening tools and resources for use with partners.
• Develop and use partner and country level monitoring frameworks to review and act upon programme data.
• Provide in-country support to learning reviews and evaluations and participate as required.
• Complete regular programme and partner updates including collecting studies of change from partners.
• Commission and oversee the work of consultants and service providers working on humanitarian capacity development. (The post holder will not be expected to take on the line management of such personnel).
• Work with CAFOD’s programme staff to integrate key thematic initiatives into humanitarian programmes including Disaster Risk Reduction, protection mainstreaming, gender and inclusion.
• Explore and trial innovative approaches to capacity strengthening.
• Provide support to partners to ensure quality financial management and reporting in line with
• EU Aid Volunteer requirements.
• Contribute to the Nigeria country programme in line with CAFOD’s humanitarian, corporate and regional strategic frameworks.
• Lead on the development of funding proposals for humanitarian capacity development work as required.

Collaboration with Key Stakeholders (15%):

• Work closely with ERG and other programme staff to share expertise, coordinate support to partners and identify opportunities for partners to put learning into practice.
• Engage with the Senior Church leadership to strengthen commitment to humanitarian work.
• Organise and participate in the PEOPLE National Steering Committee in Nigeria.
• Strengthen relationships with Caritas, other INGOs/ networks and agencies of strategic importance to identify potential opportunities for joint programming, funding and sharing learning and expertise.
• Actively participate in PEOPLE, HCS team, Emergency Response Group (ERG), Nigeria and regional meetings.
• Represent CAFOD in relevant working groups and interagency fora for the purposes of coordination and learning.

Other:

• In the event of an emergency the post-holder may be required to provide technical support and guidance to CAFOD programme staff on the planning, management and delivery of high quality humanitarian programmes in coordination with the relevant CAFOD Head of Humanitarian Programmes and/or his/her delegate.
• Support the country programme to develop an emergency preparedness and response plan.
• Strengthen the capacity of CAFOD Nigeria staff in humanitarian response.
• Support the HCD Manager with any other work as required.
• This job involves frequent travel within Nigeria and to undertake the above tasks in locations worldwide, sometimes in insecure environments and at short notice.
• This may include blocks of up to 4 weeks travel (and in exceptional circumstances and in agreement occasionally for longer periods).
• This list of duties and responsibilities is by no means exhaustive and the post holder may be required to undertake other relevant and appropriate duties as required.
• This job description is subject to regular review and appropriate modification.

Child Protection

• CAFOD recognises the personal dignity and rights of children, towards whom it has a special responsibility and a duty of care and respect.
• CAFOD, and all its staff and volunteers, undertake to do all in our power to create a safe environment for children and young people and to prevent their physical, sexual or emotional abuse.
• CAFOD is committed to acting at all times in the best interests of children, seeing these interests as paramount.
• This post involves responsibility for people who will have contact with children or young people and applicants will be subject to specific checks related to child protection issues.

Essential CAFOD Core Requirements
Understanding our context:

• Actively supports CAFOD’s vision, mission and values and what we aim to achieve.
• Commitment to and demonstrated experience of working with humanitarian principles, standards and best practice.

Working together:

• Actively supports CAFOD’s partnership principles and standards.
• Ability to work comfortably with Church and secular partners.
• Ability to work in a cross-cultural environment.

Making change happen:

• Ability to take the initiative, work autonomously, creatively, innovatively and effectively to make decisions with limited direct supervision.
• Ability to quickly establish and maintain trusting, effective relationships to achieve results in short-timeframes.
• Ability to share complex information, influence and liaise with key stakeholders effectively in line with CAFOD’s principles.
• Highly organised with the ability to manage multiple tasks.
  

Essential Job Specific Requirements
Technical skills and experience:

• Proven successes in working with local organisations in capacity building particularly in emergency preparedness and response.
• Proven experience in designing and facilitating participatory learning processes.
• Proven experience of successfully implementing emergency programmes.
• Sound understanding of emergency good practice and ability to skill up rapidly in new areas.
• Understanding of emergency preparedness planning and procedures.
• Proven experience in financial management.
• Proven experience of managing institutional donor funded projects in accordance with donor requirements.
• Understanding of and ability to influence others to incorporate accountability, DRR, gender, protection mainstreaming and diversity in their humanitarian work.
• Strong communication and negotiation skills.

Attitudes:

• Consistently approaches work with energy and a positive, constructive attitude.
• Demonstrates self-awareness and willingness to change own practice and behaviour.
• Tackles conflicts in a balanced way.

Desirable Job Specific Requirements:

• Experience of organisational capacity assessments and capacity development plans.
• Understanding of best practice in volunteer management.
• Experience of implementing and reporting for EU and or ECHO funded projects.
• Proven experience of managing institutional donor funded projects in accordance with donor requirements.
• Experience of working and liaising with international bodies and consortia.
• Experience of working and liaising with international bodies and consortia.

Other:

• Fluent in written and spoken English.
• Understanding of the local context and ability to speak local languages.
• Able and willing to travel for up to 6 months annually within Nigeria and overseas. This may involve occasional travel at short notice and to potentially insecure and difficult environments.

Remuneration
Salary: NGN 7,696,377 - 9,428,058 per annum.

Application Closing Date
4th March, 2018.

How to Apply
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online