Health & Nutrition Technical Lead At Save the Children

TITLE: Health & Nutrition Technical Lead

TEAM/PROGRAMME: Health & Nutrition Programme team

Number of Position: 1

GRADE: Tier – 4

LOCATION: Myanmar Country Office, Yangon. May be remote for a period based on in-country situation

CONTRACT LENGTH: Fixed Term

CHILD SAFEGUARDING:

Level 3: the post holder will have contact with children and/or young people either frequently (e.g., once a week or more) or intensively (e.g., four days in one month or more or overnight) because they work country programs; or are visiting country programs; or because they are responsible for implementing vetting process staff.

ROLE PURPOSE: The Health & Nutrition (HN) Technical Lead provides strategic technical leadership to Myanmar Country Health, Nutrition and WASH Programmes. The Technical Lead plays a lead role in setting strategic direction for the sector, designing new programs and projects, and identifying and pursing strategic partnerships. S/he is responsible for ensuring program quality for a range of projects, directly supervises the health and nutrition technical advisors, and works in close collaboration with the Health and Nutrition Head of Programme and Deputy Director for Program Operations (DDPO). S/he plays a senior representational and advocacy role with key national and international stakeholders as appropriate in the current country context and works on a regular basis with SC members and internal stakeholders to maximize programme impact, quality, and development. The Technical Lead ensures that program learning, research and evaluation findings are channelled towards advocacy, continuous improvements, innovation and new program design.

SCOPE OF ROLE:

Reports to: Programme Development and Quality Director.

Staff directly reporting to this post: Health Technical Advisor, Senior Nutrition Advisor, Nutrition Advisor

Staff indirectly reporting to this post: None

KEY AREAS OF ACCOUNTABILITY:

Strategic Direction, Program Design and Development

• Take lead role in formulating CO’s vision for long-term programming in Health & Nutrition in Myanmar aligning with country strategic plans for 2022-2024/20225-2027.
• Introduce innovative ideas and approaches to support children HN issues in Myanmar; Identify needs and opportunities for potential programmes, in particular in response to the current humanitarian needs, through situation analyses/feasibility studies, networking, participation in cluster coordination as relevant, and leveraging research and evaluation findings from both internal and external sources.
• Encourage and facilitate implementation of a Strategic Learning Agenda for HN in Myanmar for systematic and a coordinated approach to evidence generation and learning.
• Work with other teams (BD, Ops, Awards, PIU) to develop funding strategies and proposals to expand and adapt the HN portfolio in line with strategic priorities, technical best practice, and research/learnings from current/past programming. This will involve continuously developing concepts and innovations and packaging them for a range of donors, both for proactive and reactive fundraising efforts.
• Continuously assess technical staffing patterns and competencies to ensure that the right technical expertise is in place to support HN portfolio needs and development.
• Identify and pursue opportunities for synergistic, inter-sectoral programs to address the holistic needs of children, especially the most deprived.
• Facilitate a community of practice on HN involving staff from different teams across the country programme to foster a culture of learning and sharing

Programme Quality:

• Overall responsibility to ensure programme quality of SC’s HN programming in Myanmar
• Identify internal and external capacity building opportunities and resources to provide high quality technical assistance to HN projects, supporting technical staff, partner agencies and others to build knowledge and technical competence.
• Integrate programme learning across the sectors, ensuring coherence of technical approaches across programmes, identifying best practice, and ensuring inter-sectoral complementarity.
• Develop strategies to ensure gender equity, social and disability inclusion, child participation and beneficiary accountability in all programmes.
• Complete the Silver Common Approaches Learning Program course and hold advance knowledge and skills of the Health and Nutrition Common Approaches and be able to provide training, mentoring and support to others.
• Ensure that thematic and internal technical best practices, including SC’s Common Approaches, is applied in collaboration with the programme implementation teams.
• Proactively support the continued country uptake of Common Approaches, ensuring that they are adapted to the Myanmar
• Share results, evidence and learning on Common Approaches in Myanmar and elsewhere.
• Ensure that all programs have an effective Monitoring Evaluation Accountability and Learning (MEAL) practices throughout the program cycle.
• Ensure that interventions are evaluated using appropriate methods, including process and impact evaluations, and that evidence is rigorously maintained, documented and disseminated internally and externally, to contribute to improvements in programme quality and advocacy efforts.
• Ensure that monitoring and accountability systems (i.e., IPTT and FRM) provide information in the appropriate form and at the right time (in different levels) to allow for effective decision making and risk mitigation
• Working closely with MEAL, ensure that all programs have and follow the recommended MEAL practices throughout the program cycle
• Ensure that quality benchmarks are developed for key interventions, as well as all new projects; ensure that ongoing analysis of QBs is used for adaptive management and programme quality improvement
• Support teams to identify, design and carry out operational research related to HN.
• Ensure that Save the Children’s regional and global experience is reflected in HN programmes
• Share CO’s experience and organizational learning with COs as well as with relevant organizations over the globe.

Policy and Advocacy:

• Coordinate closely with the Advocacy, Research, and Evidence sector on policy and advocacy work relating to HN
• Lead on policy and advocacy for the sector, ensuring that HN technical interventions are designed to inform relevant policy concerns. Develop policy briefs and position papers, ensuring the inclusion of technical input from the relevant project managers.
• Lead in networking and articulating Save the Children’s position, policy and strategy in national forums and meetings as appropriate. Engage in key debates related to national HN sector policies and programs, in coordination with technical colleagues and other relevant staff, as context allows and as per the CO’s engagement principles.
• Identify appropriate strategic partnerships for joint advocacy initiatives on related issues

Human Resource Management and Development

• Identify and support professional development and career growth opportunities for HN staff from a technical point of view and provide mentoring support where appropriate.
• Establish, build, and nurture effective teamwork within the HN technical team and ensure a cohesive workplace environment for optimum staff retention.
• Provide leadership to ensure effective ways of working with other teams, in particular with the HN programme implementation teams.
• Create opportunity for staff development in coordination with HR.
• Responsibility to create and maintain a managerial environment where the Child Safeguarding Policy is effectively implemented.

Representation, Coordination and Networking:

• Maintain working relationships with relevant stakeholders.
• Identify partnerships/collaborations and build strong networks with other NGOs, CSOs, donors, UN agencies and academic institutions and the private sector working on HN to collaborate on programs, joint learning, analysis, and advocacy initiatives
• Support the identification, selection, technical capacity strengthening and monitoring of new partners in HN.
• Ensure that the country office has effective representation on national, regional, and international networks and forum related to HN, and that we participate in conferences/meetings that will enhance our reputation and programming
• Actively participate in technical coordination meetings to ensure synergies with other agencies in our development and humanitarian work, including sectors/clusters at national level.
• Maintain excellent relationships with donors, both in terms of strategic positioning and program delivery
• Represent CO on the Regional and Global meetings on HN, both internal and external.

Child Safeguarding Responsibilities

• Support the Country Director in providing overall leadership, oversight and monitoring to the implementation of the Child Safeguarding Policy, with an emphasis on maintaining current successes as well as addressing key gaps identified in the annual child safeguarding self-audit

QUALIFICATIONS

• Academic: Master’s degree in relevant field.

EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

Essential

• At least 7 years of working experience in relevant field.
• Strong leadership abilities
• Excellent understanding and experience on key issues and strategies in Health and Nutrition
• Excellent skills on process facilitation and coordination with high standard.
• Excellent skills in Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning in HN
• Demonstrated experience in humanitarian response
• Excellent inter-personal communication skills
• Strong analytical capacity and proficient understanding of both qualitative and quantitative research methods
• Good presentation skills including policy briefing
• Good supportive supervision skills,
• Fluency in written and spoken English.

Desirable

• Experience working in Myanmar
• Fluency in Myanmar language

Child Safeguarding:

We need to keep children safe so our selection process, which includes rigorous background checks, reflects our commitment to the protection of children from abuse.

All staff has an obligation and a responsibility to:

• Ensure they fully understand the provisions of the Child Safeguarding Policy, the Code of Conduct and Local/Country Procedures.
• Conduct themselves in accordance with the rules of the Child Safeguarding Policy, in their personal and professional lives – which includes reporting suspicions of child abuse.
• Ensure the way they are carrying out their work is not putting children at risk (or further risk) – this means constantly scrutinizing their work through a child safeguarding lens and talking to children about possible design/implementation “flaws”.
• Promote the message of child safeguarding to colleagues in other organizations and government ministries, children in their own and beneficiary families, and community members in general.
• Be vigilant about observing possible child abuse/harm in their personal and professional lives.

All managers have the above responsibilities as well as ensuring

• Their staff are doing the above.
• That child safeguarding is integrated and given a “voice” in all management processes including recruitment, induction, performance management, team meetings, annual planning processes, field level monitoring, etc.