Technical Advisor, Early Childhood Development at International Rescue Committee

Position Overview

• The IRC seeks a Technical Advisor (TA) focused on the first education outcome: early childhood development, which is closely aligned with the Nurturing Care Framework with key interlinkages across multiple sectors.
• This role will have a global scope and provide direct technical support to countries identified as strategic priorities for ECD innovation, growth, and research, in close collaboration and coordination with the country-facing Education TAs, and other sector-specific TAs relevant to ECD (Child Protection, Nutrition, Primary Health, Mental Health, Economic Development, Women’s Protection, Governance, etc.).
• To ensure quality programming towards impacting the lives of young children and families affected by conflict and crisis through IRC’s work, the ECD Technical Advisor will: support country program staff to design programs and projects that are aligned to the IRC’s outcomes and evidence framework / theories of change / core indicators; review technical quality of proposals; input into proposal go/no go decisions; analyze data to inform course correction; conduct technical trainings and ongoing technical coaching, share cross-context learning with country program staff; design, review and share program-specific tools; support senior technical country program recruitment and capacity--building. The ECD TA will also provide guidance to country-facing TAs on strategies to build technical capacity within country teams to design, implement, measure, and continuously improve ECD programs.
• As the ECD Technical Advisor, you are responsible for ensuring high quality technical assistance to specific ECD projects in Bangladesh, East Africa and MENA – including collaboration with counterparts from other sectors to ensure holistic support to clients. You will promote and collaborate with relevant stakeholders to achieve high quality, high impact interventions that are informed by evidence and best practice, contextually appropriate, driven by client and partner voices, and widely inclusive.

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

• Support designated country programs’ proposal technical lead through participation in and/or facilitation of program design meetings
• Promote and support design collaboration with partners and clients
• Advise on program modalities, and strategic partnership development based on how we can best support, complement, and reinforce local systems
• Advising and/or providing hands-on support on assessments, including application and contextualization of technical standards
• Reviewing technical design quality, including alignment of narratives, log-frames, and budgets to IRC standards and outcomes

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
• Assess program quality and inform improvements, providing follow up support to country programs as needed
• Collaborate with country program colleagues to monitor and analyze key indicators to inform periodic review, program adaptation, and course-correction as needed
• Provide technical capacity strengthening through ongoing mentoring, coaching, and trainings with country program focal points

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

• Document learnings from program activities and sharing takeaways and opportunities
• Share cross-contextual learnings with country program staff across the region
• Refresh the sectoral evidence-base in collaboration with global and regional staff to influence approaches
• Collaborate with other technical advisors within the region to promote integrated programming leadership
• Contribute to the delivery of education strategic priorities
• Maintain currency with sectoral best practices through continual learning and development

Professional profile

• Success in this position requires an individual with expertise in designing and delivering ECD technical assistance and with a keen ability to work across a range of cultural, societal, and political contexts.

Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Education or a relevant field required, Master’s Degree preferred.
Work Experience

• A minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in implementing and/or managing ECD education programs, with on the ground programmatic experience in a service delivery organization, NGO or comparable international agency required.
• Experience and familiarity with related donors, peer agencies and national contexts required, preferably in humanitarian and transitional, post-crisis contexts.
• Demonstrated expertise in technical program design, monitoring and evaluation, research methods and data analysis 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, data analysis and data visualization skills.
• Highly proficient in Microsoft Office suite.
• Ability to manage and work through change in a proactive and positive manner.
• Ability to travel internationally

Language Skills: Excellent spoken and written English is essential. Proficiency in an additional IRC language (Arabic, French, Spanish etc.) strongly preferred.