Technical Advisor II – Emergency Response and Recovery, East and Southern Africa (ESARO)

Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is an international non-governmental organization supporting relief and development work in over 99 countries around the world. CRS programs assist persons on the basis of need, regardless of creed, ethnicity or nationality and works through local church and non-church partners to implement its programs.

Role Overview

The Technical Advisor II – Emergency Response and Recovery for East and Southern Africa (ESARO) provides rapid deployment surge support to country programs during humanitarian responses, delivering practical program quality and management accompaniment. The role involves leading high-quality project design, contributing to regional strategies and knowledge sharing, and strengthening partner and staff capacities in emergency response contexts.

Roles and Key Responsibilities

• Provide rapid deployment surge support to ESARO country programs during humanitarian responses, delivering practical program quality and management accompaniment.
• Work with the country programs to provide acting emergency program management/leadership roles and support set-up/management of emergency field offices, teams, and relief operations as requested during deployments.
• Provide technical solutions to country teams (remote and onsite) for emergency program planning, start-up, implementation, and close-out, ensuring alignment with CRS program quality principles/standards, donor guidelines, and good practices.
• Lead high-quality project design incorporating project management standards and MEAL methods, appropriate to scope, context and technical requirements of projects.
• Contribute to the development and implementation of regional/CP strategies, standards, tools, and best practices in Emergency Response and Recovery that effectively engage partners, donors and governments. Help ensure a cross-sectoral approach integrating gender, safe and dignified programming, and disaster risk reduction.
• Contribute to regional knowledge sharing by documenting lessons learned, promising practices, and response innovations from deployments and sharing with the RFP and relevant HRD and regional stakeholders.
• Support country programs to apply program design and implementation standards, partnership principles, and MEAL approaches to ensure high-quality implementation.
• Contribute to capacity strengthening initiatives in Emergency Response and Recovery programming for staff and partners through helping develop learning and training strategies and agendas/curricula, conducting trainings and workshops, and mentoring and coaching to CP staff.
• Contribute to knowledge management and learning through collecting and analyzing program data, evaluating strategic projects, assisting with measuring program impact, capturing and sharing lessons learned and best practices, and research and internal reports.
• Represent CRS and partners at cluster, donor and coordination meetings in the field as requested.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in international development, Disaster Response or a related field required.
• Minimum of eight years relevant international working experience in an advisory or management role with progressive responsibilities, ideally with an international NGO, with minimum of three years working for programming interventions in Emergency Response and Recovery program management.
• Previous experience providing technical assistance and developing successful proposals for external donor funding is required.
• Experience with program monitoring and evaluation, including applying data collection tools and methodologies, data analysis, and data presentation.
• Experience in business development, project design and proposal development in emergency response, including technical writing.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in international development, disaster response, or a related field is an advantage.
• Experience in complex/conflict-affected contexts in East and Southern Africa.
• Knowledge of Humanitarian principles, standards and system, with specific knowledge of CRS and Caritas Internationalis emergency programming and standards a plus.
• Experience with and enthusiasm for coaching, mentoring and on the job training.
• Practical knowledge/skills in Information and Community Technology (ICT) and Information Management.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Demonstrated application of technical principles and concepts in Emergency Response and Recovery.
• Highly proficient in security protocols and management of emergency programs in insecure environments.
• Ability to work with local partner organizations.
• Knowledge of design requirements and regulations of major emergency donors, including US Government, EU/ECHO, and UN agencies.
• Proficient in MS Office packages, Web Conferencing Applications, information and budget management systems.
• Required Languages: English required. French and Portuguese preferred.
• Travel: Must be willing and able to travel up to 50% (up to 6 months per year) with deployments generally from 2 to 8 weeks.

How to Apply

Interested and qualified candidates can apply online through the portal: Catholic Relief Services Application Portal.