Job Title: Safeguarding Senior Advisor
Sector: Violence Prevention and Response
Employment Category: Fixed Term
Employment Type: Full-Time
Open to Expatriates: Yes
Job Description
Background/IRC Summary:
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC offers lifesaving care and life-changing assistance to refugees forced to flee from war or disaster. At work today in over 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities, we restore safety, dignity and hope to millions who are uprooted and struggling to endure. The IRC leads the way from harm to home.
Safeguarding is at the
core of IRC’s mission – to do no harm and ensure that the IRC’s clients and
staff are protected from sexual violence, exploitation, and abuse. Safeguarding
covers both staff and client-facing protection from exploitation and abuse. It
sets out deliberate action taken to ensure the safety, dignity and protection
of clients receiving aid and workers delivering it. Safeguarding covers sexual
harrassment and other forms of sexual violence that may be experienced by
staff, regardless of who perpetrates it, and the exploitation and abuse,
including physical, verbal, emotional, mental, economic and sexual, of adult
and child clients by persons working for or associated with the IRC.
The IRC’s Violence
Prevention and Response Unit (VPRU) has specific protection expertise and
experience that is relevant to the organizational work around client and
workplace safeguarding – prevention of and response to sexual harassment,
exploitation and abuse, and child abuse, exploitation and neglect. While
Safeguarding is a separate function of protection and is an organizational and
HR function, we recognize that the response to safeguarding concerns for
clients and staff will benefit from support from VPRU and our protection teams,
who are often the ones offering response services on the ground.
Therefore, for an initial period of one year, the Safeguarding Technical
Adviser will be situated in the VPRU to align the organizational work on
Safeguarding with the protection programming expertise.
The VPRU works to reduce
people’s vulnerability to and support their recovery from violence and promote
transformative work for a future free from violence. The unit houses expertise
in the fields of Child Protection (CP), Protection and Rule of Law (PROL), and
Women’s Protection and Empowerment (WPE) to support women, children and other
vulnerable groups through violence prevention programs that help stop violence
before it happens and violence response programs that ensures lifesaving
services for people affected by violence. VPRU has programs across 39 countries
across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
Specific
Responsibilities:
The Safeguarding Senior
Advisor will be responsible for supporting global, regional and country level
safeguarding efforts on prevention and response in line with protection
programming and building on protection networks. The Safeguarding Senior
Advisor will work in close collaboration with colleagues across SGU, HR, Duty
of Care, GEDI and VPRU. The Safeguarding Senior Advisors’ specific
responsibilities are as follows:
Risk Mitigation: Technical guidance and support for safeguarding
best practice in program design/implementation across sectors
·
Lead the development of best practices for mitigating safeguarding risks
related to different types of programming. (In close collaboration with
VPRU STAs for Child Protection and Women’s Protection and Empowerment, focal
points from other sectors and SGU)
- Ensure
basic understanding of general Safeguarding risk mitigation, reporting,
and response principles and actions across Technical Units so that these principles
can be used in program design and implementation across sectors
- Ensure
basic understanding of general Safeguarding risk mitigation, reporting and
response principles and actions across business process owners so that
these principles can be incorporated into business processes related to
programs, e.g. PCM, DDP 1:1s with TCs, or SAP design/revision
- With
SGU, develop and make available audit tools to be used by CPs to assess
alignment between policy/program design and practices at site level, to include
both assessment of risk and risk mitigation as well as response, including
service mapping and referral pathways.
Safeguarding Response: Technical guidance and support for
safeguarding response to client and staff survivors
- In
partnership with SGU, DOC, S&S, maintain and update on the IRC’s
global minimum standards and SOPs for survivor-centered safeguarding
response to clients and staff survivors.
- Provide
training and coaching support for relevant stakeholders to understand and
utilize the standards when leading a response to a safeguarding violation
and when putting in place the SoPs.
- Support
RVPs, Country Directors, and other relevant country office staff in
establishing and maintaining site level response capacity
- Provide
leadership in creating and supporting regional communities of practice for
all locally identified staff safeguarding responders to build community
and provide support. This includes supporting country programs and regions
to identify country leads and support them to facilitate regional CoPs,
maintaining a database of appointed site level responders and onboarding
newly appointed responders.
- In
collaboration with SGU and DOC, hold quarterly check in meetings for all
those identified to lead a regional staff safeguarding response COP to
facilitate training, coordination, discussion, support requests and data
collection/analysis.
- Collaborate
with SGU, ECU, and HR to define clear division of responsibility and
accountability between actors and coordination
- Provide
technical advisory support on client and staff safeguarding case response
as terminal point of escalation for highly complex cases
Key Working Relationships:
Position Reports to: Director of Country Support, VPRU
Position directly supervises: N/A
Other Internal and/or external contacts:
Internal: Regular communication and
collaboration with Regional Safeguarding Advisors and Director of Safeguarding
in SGU, HR, Duty of Care and Regional Directors in GEDI. Close collaboration
with VPRU STAs for WPE and CP. Close relationships with regional and country
program safeguarding focal points.
External: Participate in external interagency
Safeguarding coordination and learning networks, as appropriate, in
coordination with SGU advisors.
Job Requirements:
Education: Master’s/post-graduate
degree in public health , social work, humanities or other relevant field or
equivalent combination of education and experience is required.
Work Experience: A minimum of 8-10 years of
experience in safeguarding (or another relevant sector) and response services
for survivors, ideally within a humanitarian or international development
organization. Experience in technical tools and materials development,
monitoring and evaluation is highly desired. Experience in strategy
development and working across sectors or disciplines is highly desired.
Demonstrated Skills and
Competencies: Demonstrated ability to turn concepts and strategy into
measurable action, and experience leading on program design, monitoring and
evaluation. Must have proven experience of working directly with survivors of
violence. Must have strong and effective communications skills, and the ability
to present a broad array of information to inform and influence diverse
audiences in multi-cultural environments. Demonstrate commitment and capacity
to renew and maintain standards with best practices in the field.
Language Skills: Fluency
in English required; proficiency in another language (Spanish, French, Arabic
or Swahili) is highly desired.
Working Environment: Up to 40% travel may be
required. This position will be based depending on candidate preference and IRC
eligible location.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY
All staff are required to
adhere to THE IRC Way Standards for Professional Conduct and the IRC country
employment policies.
