Summary
Date Posted: Monday, November 30, 2020 , Base Salary: Not Disclosed

JOB DETAILS:
Mercy Corps is a leading global organization powered by the belief that a better world is possible. In disaster, in hardship, in more than 40 countries around the world, we partner to put bold solutions into action — helping people triumph over adversity and build stronger communities from within. Now, and for the future.
Program / Department Summary
With funding from USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), Mercy Corps’ Nawiri Program is leading a consortium of Kenyan and international partners on a five year journey to sustainably reduce persistent acute malnutrition in Turkana and Samburu Counties of Kenya. Through a phased approach that emphasizes evidence gap analysis, as well as partnership, learning, and co-creation, the program takes a robust county-centered design with government leadership, active engagement from communities, the private sector, and civil society. Mercy Corps’ consortium brings together the global leadership, research capacity, technical expertise, and implementation experience necessary to partner with local institutions to test, adapt, and scale evidence-based solutions. Together we will sustainably reduce persistent acute malnutrition for vulnerable populations in Turkana and Samburu counties.
General Position Summary
The Technical Director is responsible for driving integration of diverse technical sectors and coordinating county-level leadership for the specific goal of sustainably reducing persistent acute malnutrition below emergency threshold levels. The Technical Director will lead coordination and collaboration of technical experts in water systems, social behavior change, climate smart agriculture, environment, alternative livelihoods & inclusive markets, as well as resilience for the benefit of over one million vulnerable people in Turkana and Samburu. In addition to providing technical direction for the project, s/he will bring both the technical and functional skills required to manage Nawiri’s technical advisors while providing nutrition specific technical support.
The role of the Technical Director is to guide and facilitate the work of Technical Advisors and sector specific teams while ensuring positive nutrition outcomes are both cross sectoral and integrated. The complex problems Nawiri seeks to address are, by definition, multi-sectoral in nature and require shared solutions across sectors and systems. By working with composite teams and providing strategic engagement on technical matters, the Technical Director will deliver coherence and clarity of approach across the entire consortium. Working across all program areas, and supporting the Deputy Chief of Party, s/he will ensure that the Nawiri team is analyzing emergent findings and routinely iterating to build a robust evidence base for informing strategic investments that drive nutrition outcomes. S/he will work directly with partner agencies both national and international and county governments to achieve the objectives of the program. .

Essential Job Responsibilities
STRATEGY AND PROGRAM MANAGEMENT
• Support the Deputy Chief of Party (DCoP) to guide overall technical strategy and approach to deliver clear actionable plans that will sustainably reduce persistent acute malnutrition.
• Support and collaborate Technical Advisors and County Managers to align research and sectoral approaches to the malnutrition in the drylands conceptual framework.
• Support an evidence based and data use culture - including assisting packaging/simplifying coherent evidence and encouraging its utilization by technical advisors and implementation teams for adaptive management.
• Set direction for Technical Advisors ensuring coherence across composite teams and wider consortium; strategically engages to advance implementation of those plans.
• Ensure that cross-cutting aspects of the program such as gender equality, social inclusion, youth, climate adaptation, and resilience are included and well integrated into the program strategy.
• Identify opportunities to ground truth technical approaches and lead on efforts to drive multi-sectoral approaches and tackle thematic issues (e.g., youth employment) in new ways to advance reductions in persistent acute malnutrition.
• Identify internal and external trends with potential to inform or affect implementation and assure team readiness to adapt to changing conditions and expectations.
• Build and maintain external partnerships and serve as key external communicator for Nawiri across a wide range of coordination platforms.
• Follow and promote across technical and field teams effective stakeholder management plans, ensuring sound and proactive communications between Mercy Corps Kenya, partner organizations, Mercy Corps headquarters, private sector, and government authorities.
• Support the socialization of the program with Government stakeholders, USAID, Technical Steering Committee ensuring necessary approvals and collaboration as required.
• Ensure all interventions adhere to Mercy Corps’ Gender Policy, Do No Harm principles, Environmental Safeguards, and beneficiary accountability standards.
TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP & TEAM MANAGEMENT
• Provide technical support for the implementation of high quality nutrition programming following Nawiri's theory of change, with a strong emphasis on social and behavior change
• Contribute to and support in carrying-out the situational analysis for the nutrition sector to ensure timely and current data is available for the designing, development and implementation of programming.
• Lead technical teams to establish an integration framework such that all sectoral interventions and thematic areas and approaches align at the household and community levels. This applies to all technical sectors such as natural resource management, livelihoods, nutrition, and cross-cutting considerations such as gender, youth, conflict-sensitivity, community-driven development, and resilience to shocks.
• Ensure that health and nutrition activities are implemented in line with global technical and quality standards.
• Collaborate with the DCoP in managing and developing sustainable and integrated multi-sector programming that is accountable to Government, participants and donors and will identify opportunities that strategically connect learning into a cohesive program implementation with the mindset to scale.
• Support the DCoP in the design and iteration of interventions for scale up of activities, including participant targeting and engagement, ensuring it is based on the evidence and learnings from research and assessments. This includes actively supporting ongoing documentation, learning, and knowledge exchange throughout the duration of the program. Working in close collaboration with the M&E team and field officers, monitor and adjust program implementation so it is responsive to communities and partners and consistent with Mercy Corps’ relevant program guidelines, principles, values, quality standards and strategic plan.
• In collaboration with the DCoP, Strategic Learning Lead, M&E Lead, and Research & Design Lead, design and implement a layering and sequencing strategy to ensure that each activity is timed and implemented in a way that builds towards overall desired food and nutrition security and resilience impacts. Manage activities to achieve this layering and sequencing plan. Ensure that external activities and investments in the intervention area are considered.
• Guide Technical Advisors to continually refine research and learning agenda to ensure its relevance to the overall program objective and maximize its utility to inform design decisions for testing and scale up of activities.
• Support DCoP in consortium management and ensure that all members of the program consortium are contributing technical inputs in a coordinated fashion that leverages the expertise of each organization.
• Work with Technical Advisors and STTA to continuously strengthen and revise Nawiri’s tools and approaches, focusing on quality and standards.
• Support development, integration and completion of program deliverables including work plans, programmatic reports, scopes of work, and other needs as they may arise.
• Ensure accountability for workplans and overall team performance. Conduct regular performance reviews, adhering to Agency personnel policies and practice.
• Create and sustain a work environment of mutual respect where team members strive to achieve excellence on their own team and embrace their role and responsibilities in advancing the shared goals of the larger Team, to forge its reputation as a cohesive, strategic and responsive Consortium.
• Conduct regular field visits and provide targeted technical feedback while ensuring nutrition is at the forefront of program thinking.
PROGRAM QUALITY, LEARNING AND COMMUNICATION
• Serve on Research, Learning and Adaptation Team (RLAT) and facilitate problem solving across technical teams or between research and Learning Working Groups (RLWG) and other departments as needed.
• Support DCoP to facilitate multi-team shared learning and evidence on what is working in order to standardize best practice, develop innovative approaches for new program development and advance Nawiri’s goal.
• Work with Strategic Learning Lead to organize program reflections to review learning and discuss new information and implications for programming in the various technical areas.
• Assist the DCoP in overall program quality assurance, and the Monitoring & Evaluation Lead in the measurement of the program impacts.
• Support the integration of M&E across the program and ensure M&E roles and responsibility are properly integrated within technical staff roles and responsibilities
REPRESENTATION
• Represent the DCoP and the broader technical team as requested at key internal stakeholder and leadership meetings.
• Engage and interact with Mercy Corps HQ (TSU, Policy and Research, Program and Quality) teams to ensure robust support.
• Strengthen Mercy Corps Nawiri’s profile and representation through expert interaction with internal stakeholders, partner agencies, and other networks and groups.
• Ensure a high level coordination with other partner staff, nutrition field teams and provide frequent feedback and updates.
• Spearhead technical partnership initiatives and empower Technical Advisors to do the same.
• Conduct himself/herself both professionally and personally in such a manner as to bring credit to Mercy Corps and to not jeopardize its mission.
SECURITY
• Proactively ensure that team members operate in a secure environment and are aware of policies.
• Ensure compliance with security procedures and policies as determined by country leadership.
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING
• As part of our commitment to organizational learning and in support of our understanding that learning organizations are more effective, efficient and relevant to the communities they serve, we expect all team members to commit 5% of their time to learning activities that benefit Mercy Corps as well as themselves.
ACCOUNTABILITY TO PARTICIPANTS
• Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically to our beneficiaries and to international standards guiding international relief and development work, while actively engaging beneficiary communities as equal partners in the design, monitoring and evaluation of our field projects.
Supervisory Responsibility:
Oversight of the technical advisors which includes Resilience Advisor, Alternative Livelihoods and Inclusive Markets Advisor, Water Systems Advisor, Climate Smart Advisor, and Social, Structural & Behavioral Change Advisor.
Accountability
• Reports Directly To: Deputy Chief of Party
• Works Directly With: Strategic Learning Lead, Research Design Lead, Institutional Strengthening Lead, M&E Lead, partner agencies (research & Design Lead, Health Systems and Nutrition Lead), local government, USAID and support departments (Finance, HR and Operations). Coordinates with HQ Policy and Research, Program and Quality, and Technical Support Unit (TSU).

Job Skills: Not Specified

Knowledge and Experience
• Master’s degree or equivalent experience in a relevant field such as social sciences, nutrition, public health, food security, etc.
• At least five (5) years of progressively responsible experience in the successful implementation of integrated health or nutrition activities working on programs of a similar scope and scale, with preference given to integrated nutrition programs. At least two (2) years must be in program management, including direct supervision of technical and support staff.
• Direct experience in planning, implementing and measuring the impact of health, nutrition, behavior change, hunger reduction or other related program.
• Demonstrated systems thinker and ability to think outside of the box in the implementation of a unique program with experience in adaptive management and using research as part of program implementation.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders, and to liaise with donors and remote HQ teams.
• Demonstrated experience managing multi-organization teams and managing partners is required.
• Demonstrated strong leadership and teambuilding skills; ability to work effectively in a team which includes remote members, often with limited supervision and under pressure.
• Ability to mentor others and model successful management techniques and approaches.
• Experience with participatory assessment methodologies a plus.
• Fluency in written and spoken English is required.
• Strong budget management experience is required.
• Prior experience in designing, implementing or managing implementation research strongly preferred.
• Prior experience of working on USAID-funded programs strongly preferred.
• Previous experience working in the ASALs of Kenya strongly preferred.
• Essential computer literacy and capacity to work with MS Office applications.
• Ability and willingness to travel frequently by road and flight to the northern arid lands including remote communities (estimated 40% of the time) sometimes at short notice.

Job Education Requirements: Not Specified

Success Factors
The Technical Director is an innovative thinker that will guide teams to test new approaches and build strategic partnerships. S/he is a strong influencer with the ability to communicate Nawiri’s technical strengths and overall vision. The Technical Director must be a superb team player who has the technical and functional skills to lead the Team in a coherent, strategic and field-responsive manner that results in vision and plans that both integrate well and are mutually reinforcing with other parts of the broader Research & Learning Agenda. The Technical Director must be able to guide a composite team ensuring coherence of vision and strategy across groups as well as be able to identify and pursue new paths forward. S/he will be a self-starter with exceptional ability in leading organizational initiatives with effective verbal and written communication. With demonstrated attention to detail, ability to follow procedures, meet deadlines, and work independently and cooperatively with team members, the Technical Director will have a sincere interest to see big picture trends through various systems lenses, and roll up his/her sleeves to put theory into practice. In addition, the leader must have strong interpersonal and communication skills to effectively reach across departments within the agency and across the consortium to build critical partnership to further thought leadership, program innovation and ensure Mercy Corps Nawiri impact.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.
Mercy Corps does not charge any fees at any stage of the recruitment process.

Work Hours: 8

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