Regional Crisis Adviser at British High Commission Nairobi

Main purpose of job:

• UK diplomatic posts overseas are at the frontline of a UK government response to an overseas crisis affecting British people and interests.  This role focuses on ensuring that our staff have the right plans and skills to be able to respond to a range of different crisis scenarios. Within your region you will be responsible for understanding the risks that different posts face and their overall preparedness and providing support, training and advice to help them improve their ability to respond.
• You will champion the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) clear crisis management methodology and training products, supported and directed by the FCDO Crisis Management Department in headquarters and working closely with regional crisis leads and consular staff.  As one of the two Regional Crisis Advisers for the Sub-Saharan Africa region, you will have opportunities to work together and will both be an important part of the Sub-Saharan Africa Consular and Crisis leadership team. You will feed into broader consular policy in the region and role model the Sub-Saharan Africa Consular Network leadership values.
• The role will be based at British High Commission Nairobi, Kenya. However, as a regional role, you will be expected to travel frequently to the Posts across East and West Africa that make up your ‘East and West Africa’ region (known as East & West Africa).
• At these posts you will need to be able to form close working relationships with your colleagues at all levels and experience, prioritising posts with the greatest need for support. You will benefit from excellent learning and development opportunities, which will allow you to deepen your crisis management skills as well as a supportive network of colleagues both in HQ and our global network. 

Roles and Responsibilities:

You will be one of two Regional Crisis Advisers covering the Sub-Saharan Africa region (the other is based in Cape Town). Role:

• Crisis Preparedness and risk: Develop a coherent approach to crisis management at British diplomatic posts across the Sub-Saharan Africa Region by supporting crisis preparedness and tracking risk, providing high quality guidance and training so that posts are well prepared to effectively respond to a crisis, in line with FCDO Crisis Management Department (CMD) policy and guidance.
• Crisis Response: To provide support and advice to posts experiencing or approaching a crisis to ensure the most effective response.
• Crisis Improvement: To maintain a good understanding of the crisis risks within your region, providing input to and quality assurance of post crisis management plans, highlighting key risks to CMD and the Consular Regional Director (CRD) and applying lessons from crises and exercises. Maintain good relationships with both internal and external crisis management stakeholders to enhance regional risk assessment and horizon scanning.

Responsibilities:

• Network and Post Support: To prioritise crisis preparedness work in your region based on an understanding of risk and horizon scanning. To act as expert adviser to the Embassy or High Commission Crisis Management Committee making recommendations to ensure policy and guidance is followed by Posts. To encourage and help embed a ‘whole of mission approach’ to planning and crisis preparedness.
• Quality Assurance: To advise our overseas Embassies and High Commissions on development of their crisis management plans (CMPs), and crisis preparedness, working to achieve a consistent quality across the region, merging local knowledge with central crisis management guidance. You will provide support and guidance on approval of all the CMPs in your region. Work with CMD’s Preparedness and Risk Team to identify risks, capability and capacity gaps and to help posts take steps to improve their preparedness.
• Training & Exercising: Deliver engaging crisis training in your region liaising closely with the CMD Training & Exercising Team and using the latest training approaches and materials. Identify any potential learning/skills gaps in crisis management techniques and work with CMD to address them. Help CMD to coordinate and prioritise regional exercises and assist in the delivery of overseas training events. Support crisis managers to encourage colleagues to complete the crisis content of the International Academy’s foundation level. Champion the various learning methods to help promote and develop crisis management learning in region.   
• Stakeholder Engagement: To ensure good understanding of host country and regional crisis structures and maintain up-to-date liaison contacts. Engagement with senior leadership will be critical, delivering constructive feedback to those seniors will be a core skill. 
• Lessons Learned: participate in and facilitate where appropriate (e.g. for locally managed crises), the crisis lessons learned process.  To identify, record and share best practice regionally. Working with CMD to ensure lessons learned are taken forward and incorporated back into CMPs across the region.
• Crisis Management Portal: act as a champion for our Crisis IT system ‘CM Portal’. Ensure relevant staff across the region keep their skills and access up to date to reflect latest developments of the Crisis IT system.
• Crisis Response: working with CMD and the CRD provide advice and support to Embassies or High Commissions in crisis.
• Corporate:  Up to 10% of your time will be spent on Kenya platform contributions (corporate and policy), including support for crisis preparedness in Kenya as well as support for tone or more of the various people-centred committees that enable the BHC Nairobi platform to thrive.

Resources managed (staff and expenditure): 

• Responsible for managing a regional travel budget

Essential qualifications, skills and experience  

• Excellent English language skills (written and oral)
• Understanding of and an ability to work in an international or governmental organization.
• Excellent inter-personal, communication and team working skills.
• Excellent presentational, organisational skills and a proactive approach.
• Resilience, with ability to work unsupervised and innovate
• Self-starter with strong time management skills - able to work to deadlines and targets and manage a sometimes-heavy workload while safeguarding your own personal resilience.
• Excellent IT skills (Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, MS Teams)

Desirable qualifications, skills and experience  

• Familiarity with FCDO’s crisis management policy and procedures would be helpful. The successful candidate will benefit from training and development through the FCDO’s International Academy’s Consular and Crisis faculty.
• Experience of providing training in a professional environment, ideally with an externally validated professional accreditation, such as CIPD.  
• Familiarity with crisis management issues and techniques and an ability to understand risks across a range issues. 
• Familiarity with UK consular procedures