IRC’s Technical Excellence team is comprised of five sector teams or “Units” which have deep expertise in their respective fields: Education, Economic Wellbeing, Governance, Health, and Violence Prevention and Response, as well as teams which provide measurement and finance/grant management support. Technical teams are also matrixed with a team that focuses on the quality and content of cross-sectoral programming in emergency responses.
IRC’s Technical Excellence teams offer five core services to IRC country programs and the wider organization:
1. Program Design: We support country and regional teams to design state of the art programming, incorporating the best available evidence, cost data, and expertise of what has worked elsewhere, together with the knowledge that country teams, partner organizations and our clients bring to the table.
2. Quality Assurance: We partner with our measurement teams to design and drive the use of indicators to measure progress towards outcomes. We partner with regional and country teams to review program delivery progress and help address implementation challenges and adapt interventions to changed circumstances.
3. Business Development: We partner within and outside the IRC to design winning bids and identify winning consortia; we deploy technical expertise in public events and private meetings to position IRC as a partner of choice.
4. Research & Learning: We partner with our research lab to design cutting edge research to fill evidence gaps, and with country teams to learn from implementation such that we continuously improve our future design and delivery.
5. External Influence: We showcase the IRC’s programs, technical insights and learning in order to influence and improve the humanitarian sector’s policy and practice.
Technical Excellence is currently going through a change process called "Regional and Technical Alignment." We are doing this to ensure that the impact of our programs and the influence of our ideas create meaningful change for people affected by crisis. This next phase of IRC's commitment to program quality will more deliberately resource and link global thought leadership with practice on the ground. Updated Technical Unit structures will have new roles with clearer mandates. The Regional Lead is a new leadership role introduced by this change process.
The Violence Prevention and Response Unit at the IRC -
The Violence Prevention and Response Unit (VPRU) is one of IRC’s five Technical Units alongside Health, Education, Economy Recovery and Development and Governance. Technical Units provide support to our country programs in the design, delivery, quality assurance and continuous learning for programs advancing the outcomes areas the IRC supports and driving thought leadership around those areas of work.
Programming addressing violence, abuse and exclusion in crisis situations represents the organisation’s second largest programmatic portfolio.
The VPRU brings together the disciplines of Child Protection, Women’s Protection and Empowerment, and Protection- Rule of Law. We seek to reduce people’s vulnerability to violence and support them to recover from the consequences of violence through programs tailored to individual needs and contexts, as well as strategies addressing systemic gaps which contribute to the perpetuation and exacerbation of violence in crisis and conflict environments. Our prevention work focuses on programs that shift power dynamics, promote human rights, and empower people affected by violence and inequality to transform their future. Our response work focuses on ensuring lifesaving and survivor-centered services for people affected by violence and inequality in all their diversity. We work with the people most at risk and seek to address the needs of populations of all ages and backgrounds through a context-relevant, client-centered, intersectional approach.
We also know from evidence and experience that in most contexts women and children are disproportionally impacted by unequal power, and therefore those at greatest risk of violence. For this reason, we are committed to specialized approaches for these populations.
To advance IRC's delivery of Violence Prevention and Response programming across over 45 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, we rely on team of more than 70 professionals committed to provide best-of-class expertise, evidence-based insights based on continued attention to sectoral developments and learning from cross-regional programming insights in order to realize our ambitions for safer, more inclusive lives for our clients. They are supported in this by an intentional and strategic use of research and evidence, a commitment to the highest quality standards and continued engagement in industry-wide development including coordination mechanism, policy to promote innovation and high-impact, cost-efficient interventions. We partner with IRC country program teams and local actors to create and capture innovations in protection programming which can be used by humanitarian actors to improve the protection and empowerment of women and girls, children and adolescents, people with disabilities, with diverse Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics (SOGIESC) and other people at risk.
Latin America Regional Overview:
The IRC’s Latin America region is IRC’s newest and with the ambition of substantially increasing its portfolio. IRC’s Latin America Region is comprised of three population-based responses to regional crisis: 1) the Venezuela Crisis including Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru; 2) Northern of Central America (NCA - El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) and 3) Mexico & Cross Border (including coordination with IRC-US programming). Additionally, the Latin America region coordinates with the Emergency and Humanitarian Action Unit is responding to the current humanitarian crisis in Haiti through a partnership-based approach.
Job Overview
Violence Prevention and Response (VPR) Latin America Regional Lead provides coherence and direction to the provision of technical support for Women’s Protection and Empowerment, Child Protection, and Protection - Rule of Law in Latin America. As a member of both the regional team and the technical unit senior management team, the VPR Latin America Regional Lead has accountability for technical quality and responsibility for assuring the advice from Technical Advisors is taken into appropriate action by the country office.
The VPR Latin America Regional Lead will lead a highly effective, strategic violence prevention and response regional team to ensure the Latin America Region has high quality, sound technical support needed to deliver on global program goals and effectively serve our clients. The role will serve as a functional leader, advisor, and a thought partner to both TU leadership and Regional leadership, with a particular focus on leading the operationalization of the Safety strategy in Latin America, multi-sector and sub-sector program integration, mainstreaming of Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion across programming, evidence-based design, business development, and quality assurance for high-impact and scale strategic projects. The VPR Latin America Regional Lead will coordinate across individuals and projects, ensuring clear priorities are set and communicated, and navigating the challenges inherent in being an advisory function. They will be an excellent people manager, with great team building/animation skills, able to help technical staff succeed and grow in their careers. The VPR Latin America Regional Lead will invest deeply in understanding the context and dynamics of the country and regional teams and the challenges they face. They will ensure coherent ways of working within and across the regional technical team, as well as within the wider VPRU, to align high quality technical support with the operational realities of the country offices. The Regional Lead will champion technical external representation in regional for a for promoting learning, advocacy and showcasing IRC's programming as well as engage with regional colleagues on donor facing engagement. By doing so, the Regional Lead will ensure high quality programming across the Child Protection, Protection – Rule of Law, and Women’s Protection and Empowerment practice areas in Latin America, high quality coordination and partnership with regional teams, effective team performance, and efficiency and impact of technical excellence service offering to the Latin America region and country programs.
Major Responsibilities
Functional Leadership, Coordination and Implementation Support:
Staff management, learning, and development
Program Design and Business Development
Knowledge Management, Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning
External Influence and Representation
Key Working Relationships
o 1 Women’s Protection and Empowerment Technical Advisors
o 1 Child Protection Technical Advisor
o 1 Protection Rule of Law Technical Advisor
o Regional GEDI in Programming staff, if applicable
Key Internal Relationships:
Key External Relationships:
Desired Experience and Skills
Education: Masters’ degree in Social Sciences, International Law and/or related fields or an equivalent professional experience background is required. Sound training on the use of data and research evidence for programmatic decisions and rigorous analytic skills are an advantage.
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