Health Technical Advisor – West Africa

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, the IRC is one of the world’s largest international humanitarian non-governmental organizations (INGO), at work in more than 40 countries and more than 25 U.S. cities helping people to survive, reclaim control of their future and strengthen their communities. A force for humanity, IRC employees delivers lasting impact by restoring safety, dignity and hope to millions. If you’re a solutions-driven, passionate change-maker, come join us in positively impacting the lives of millions of people world-wide for a better future.

To achieve that vision, the IRC’s Technical Excellence (TE) provides technical assistance to IRC’s country program staff and share learnings to influence policy and practice. TE is comprised of five technical units: Economic Recovery and Development; Education; Governance; Health; and Violence Prevention and Response. There are also three supporting units: Measurement, Grant Operations and Analytics, and Program Quality Support.

The Health Technical Unit (HTU) is organized in three sectors; Health (integrating general primary healthcare including sexual and reproductive health, child health, communicable and non-communicable diseases, mental health & Psycho-Social Support), Environmental Health and Nutrition. The structure emphasizes a clear division of roles between technical assistance core and important functions versus other specialized support functions to best meet the needs of country programs and regions. In 2022 the HTU supported programming in 6 regions and 35 countries.

Technical areas of focus will include: Comprehensive Primary Healthcare both at community and health facility levels, including communicable and non-communicable diseases, sexual and reproductive health, maternal, newborn and child health, iCCM, nutrition (maternal, adolescent, IYCF practices, prevention of malnutrition), mental health and psychosocial support, outbreak response and Infection Prevention and Control in Health Facilities.

POSITION OVERVIEW

As the health Technical Advisor for West Africa, you are responsible for ensuring high quality technical assistance to the following country programs: Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mali and Niger. You will collaborate with relevant stakeholders to achieve high quality, high impact interventions that are informed by evidence, data, and best practice, contextually appropriate, driven by client and partner voices, and are safe, inclusive, and promote equal outcomes for clients.

Program Design & Business Development: You will support country programs to design winning submissions and generally position IRC for continued success in our technical domains:

• Substantially contribute to the development of proposal theories of change and log frames, and ensure country programs have access and the trainings to the relevant resources, such as the health outcomes, evidence frameworks, global and regional capacity statements, as well as the IMPACT standards

• Support the in-country technical lead in analyzing relevant information including available M&E and client responsiveness data, to prepare for design meetings/conversations.

• Review and advise on use of core indicators, including alignment of donor indicators, and guidance on indicator targets and disaggregation.

• Advise on program modalities and strategic partnership development based on evidence, scale considerations, and how we can best support, complement, and reinforce local systems.

• Advise on and/or provide hands-on support on health assessments, including application and contextualization of technical standards and tools.

• Participate in project design meetings for all relevant health proposals (remotely or in person)

• Review and validate design meeting decisions around technical design quality, including alignment of narratives, log-frames, and budgets, to IRC standards and health outcomes.

• Promote and support design collaboration with health partners and clients.

• Review and advice on program and project level indicator selection and target setting and support data driven decision making.

• Promote and support gender equality and diversity inclusion throughout project design, field visits, and through the process of health need assessments.

Implementation Support: You will support country program staff and other key stakeholders in implementing technical interventions:

• Support country programs and other stakeholders with the recruitment and training of technical coordinators, specialists, as well as health project leads.

• Assess program quality and inform improvements, quality of care, including infection prevention and control, providing follow-up support to country programs as needed.

• Collaborate with country program colleagues to monitor and analyze key indicators to inform periodic data review, program adaptation, and course-correction as needed.

• Provide mentorship to Technical Coordinators on the interpretation of data, including monitoring data, annual statistics data, quality data, client feedback and evaluations. Participate in data review meetings, particularly technical data review meetings.

• Provide technical capacity strengthening through ongoing mentoring, coaching, and trainings with country program focal points, while ensure the country programs have regularly assess the needs of capacity building and develop the adapted capacity building plans.

• As requested and guided by the region and the country programs, attend internal meetings with the IRC health local partners, other sectors, in addition to other external representations and meetings as requested by the supervisor, such as donors, health clusters academic fora, donor meetings, inter-agency working groups, technical working groups and various global/regional fora as assigned by the supervisor.

• Participate in coordination efforts within the health unit and with other technical units and departments in IRC as required.

• Contribute and support the health technical unit globally to achieve and implement different work streams as informed by the IRC health strategy such as immunization, nutrition, contraception, Infectious disease prevention and control, and last mile delivery, etc.

• Collaborate with Quality in Emergencies STAs and Emergencies and Humanitarian Action Unit (EHAU) counterparts during emergency classifications to support country programs to assess, design and implement high quality programming in acute emergency situations, in line with QiE TA Model

Knowledge & Learning: You will support continuous sectoral learning and IRC technical leadership:

• Document learnings from health program activities and share takeaways and opportunities.

• Share cross-contextual learnings with country program staff across the region, and health unit.

• Collaborate with other technical advisors within the region to promote integrated programming leadership at different stages of program design, implementation, and evaluation.

• Refresh the sectoral evidence-base in collaboration with global and regional staff to influence approaches.

• Contribute to the delivery of health unit strategic priorities, and support the process do developing different case studies, identify areas for future research and end of health project evaluation,

• Maintain currency with sectoral best practices through continual learning and development.

• Provide mentorship to technical coordinators to identify projects/ interventions that should be evaluated, and review and approve evaluation methodologies, analysis plan and final reports.

• Support high quality program and project evaluations

• With Technical Coordinators, co-draft the development of learning agenda and learning questions for projects or sector portfolios.

PROFESSIONAL PROFILE

Success in this position requires an individual with expertise in designing and delivering technical assistance to primary health care programs, and with a deep understanding of the cultural, societal, and political contexts in at least one of the regions where IRC operates.

Work Experience:

• A minimum of 6-8 years of relevant experience in implementing and/or managing big health programs, with on the ground programmatic experience in a service delivery organization, INGO or comparable international agency required.

• Experience in the matter related the public health programs, humanitarian health response, and system development and strengthening.

• Experience in specified technical areas including comprehensive primary healthcare, technical tools and materials development and monitoring and evaluation is highly desired. Experience in strategy development and working across sectors or disciplines is highly desired.

• Experience and familiarity with related donors, peer agencies and national contexts required, preferably in humanitarian, post-crisis, or climate impacted contexts.

• Demonstrated expertise in technical program design, monitoring and evaluation, with the ability to turn concepts and strategy into measurable action.

Demonstrated Skills and Competencies:

• Excellent verbal and written communications skills

• Strong organizational and time-management skills; proven ability to prioritize and deliver projects on time and independently.

• Demonstrated ability to navigate a dynamic, cross-functional, global team structure in a large multi-national organization.

• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with internal and external stakeholders at all levels.

• Strong analytic problem-solving skills.

• Highly proficient in Microsoft Office suite.

• Ability to manage and work through change in a proactive and positive manner.

Education: MD/RN, RN with public health or equivalent with a Master’s/post-graduate degree in Public Health, Public Health Nutrition or equivalent.

Language Skills: Excellent spoken and written English and French is essential.

Key Working Relationships: This position reports to the Senior Technical Advisor – health – Country support. This position may potentially supervise occasional consultants and/or interns. Regular communication with other health unit staff, regional and country program teams, awards management and grants management staff, and other internal stakeholders.

Working Environment: Standard office working environment. This role may have some international travel up to 40% of the time.

**Standard of Professional Conduct:**The IRC and the IRC workers must adhere to the values and principles outlined in the IRC Way – our Code of Conduct. These are Integrity, Service, Accountability, and Equality.

Commitment to Gender, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion: The IRC is committed to creating a diverse, inclusive, respectful, and safe work environment where all persons are treated fairly, with dignity and respect. The IRC expressly prohibits and will not tolerate discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or bullying of the IRC persons in any work setting. We aim to increase the representation of women, people that are from country and communities we serve, and people who identify as races and ethnicities that are under-represented in global power structures.