Senior Advisor
Sexual and Reproductive Health Program
BACKGROUND:
The Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) is a research and advocacy organization that seeks to improve the lives and protect the rights of women, children and youth displaced by conflict and crises. We research their needs, identify solutions and advocate for programs and policies to strengthen their resilience and drive change in humanitarian practice. The Women’s Refugee Commission is a nonprofit 501 (c)3 organization.
ABOUT THE SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH PROGRAM:
The Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) Program aims to improve the resilience of systems and individuals – at community, national, and international levels – to meet the full range of SRH needs of diverse crisis-affected populations, from preparedness to response to recovery. It strengthens policies, funding and programming for SRH in humanitarian settings. It specifically:
- Defines and addresses global SRH gaps specifically in the areas of adolescent SRH, family planning, minimum standards for SRH response and inclusive programming.
- Leads and supports collaborative efforts to set and advance a global SRH agenda
- Builds local and national resilience for SRH
- Advocates for a holistic approach to well-being, that includes SRH across preparedness, response and recovery.
The WRC has been working with partners in the Inter-agency Working Group (IAWG) on Reproductive Health in Crises to address adolescent SRH for over a decade. A comprehensive mapping of adolescent SRH (ASRH) programming published in 2012 undertaken by WRC and Save the Children, showed a dearth of both funding and ASRH programming implemented since 2009. In 2013 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention supported the WRC to undertake background research on the SRH needs and risk of very young adolescents in humanitarian context. The WRC also initiated research around child marriage in 2011, and now oversees a multi-country effort to examine prevalence of child marriage, and promising approaches to address this practice in three humanitarian contexts with potential opportunity for two additional countries.
The WRC initiated its work with partners on disaster risk reduction (DRR) in 2010. The SRH DRR working group subsequently became an official SRH working group on the health platform of the International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (ISDR). The SRH working group led by the WRC published a Policy Brief and Fact Sheet on Integrating Sexual and Reproductive Health into Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management and further developed a national monitoring tool for the integration of SRH to national disaster risk management planning. The WRC has also taken a lead on community-based programming to address SRH.
SCOPE OF WORK
The Senior Advisor, SRH reports to the Director, SRH and will support implementation of the SRH programs 2015-2010 strategic plan with specific attention to:
Adolescents
The WRC aims to advance global gaps in attention to adolescents, particularly often overlooked sub-populations such as very young adolescents and married adolescents by undertaking evidenced-based advocacy on SRH needs and programming to address the diverse populations of adolescents; and by undertaking and disseminating research demonstrating the scope of child marriage in humanitarian contexts and identifying models that effectively prevent and respond to child marriage.
- Collaborate with colleagues and cultivate and secure donors to advance focused attention to adolescent SRH including subpopulations (very young adolescents and married adolescents) and a holistic approach to the safety, health and well-being of adolescents.
- Lead and participate in advocacy coalitions working on ASRH issues across both humanitarian and development spaces (Inter-agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crises Adolescent Sub-working group, Girls Not Brides, Very Young Adolescents, Arab States child marriage research network).
- Facilitate collaboration with existing and new partners to undertake, monitor, analyze, publish and disseminate findings from quantitative research demonstrating scope of child marriage in crisis-affected settings and qualitative evaluation of factors that mitigate child marriage in these settings.
- Document and share research findings through participant reports and facilitate appropriate local dissemination strategies.
- Ensure all research in each country context abides by donor requirements, ethics and implementation protocols.
- Identify and advocate evidenced-based models that effectively prevent and respond to the SRH needs of very young adolescents and child marriage practices in humanitarian settings.
Resilience Building and Inclusion for SRH
The SRH working group within the health platform for disaster risk management at the ISDR collaborated with WHO and others to effectively advocate SRH in the Sendai Framework for Action. WRC recommends that this working group is revitalized as a sub-working group in IAWG to advance collaborative initiates at the global, national and community levels. The WRC has also piloted its community-based preparedness curriculum on SRH and Gender in the Philippines, Iraq and Pakistan.
- Facilitate inter-agency coordination to address SRH in Emergency Disaster Risk Management (EDRM)/preparedness at global, national and community levels.
- Consolidate and document learning from three pilot projects utilizing the WRC curriculum,
Community Preparedness: Reproductive Health and Gender and modify curriculum to address learning and to integrate inclusion and resilience concepts into the curriculum.
- Collaborate with implementing agencies to advance existing initiative to build community resilience for gender and SRH.
- Collaborate with WRC and IAWG colleagues on strategic initiatives to address gender, inclusion and resilience.
Program Management
- Monitor related (adolescents, early marriage, DRM) SRH work plan
- Monitor related SRH program grants, sub grants and expenditures
- Prepare donor reports and proposals
Additional responsibilities
- Abide by the Women’s Refugee Commission’s accountability commitments and participates in its Accountability Working Group to continuously improve accountability to stakeholders.
- Participate in advancing WRC’s strategic priorities including gender, resilience and monitoring and evaluation.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Masters Degree in Public Health, International Affairs, Public Policy or related field
- Minimum of 5 years of program management experience;
- Demonstrated success analyzing and publishing research and/or program evaluation findings
- Demonstrated success translating research to practice (through publications, reports, and advocacy briefs)
- Understanding of health/SRH and humanitarian response systems
- Familiarity with the use of technology for data collection
- Excellent written and oral communication skills, including for reports, grant-writing, and research for advocacy presentations;
- Solid diplomatic and interpersonal skills: the ability to effectively liaise and coordinate with a variety of internal and external professional contacts, donors and partners;
- Successful fundraising;
- Excellent organizational and multi-tasking skills: the ability to work well under strong pressure in a fast-paced, high-functioning and detail-oriented team environment;
- Ability to travel up to 25% of the time;
- Exemplary computer skills: facility with SPSS/SAS/R, Nvivo or other qualitative software, Excel, Word, qualitative/quantitative data analysis software and email/internet software.
To apply please submit résume and salary requirements via email to: http://tbe.taleo.net/NA2/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=IRC&cws=1&rid=6870
This post was authored by Sarah Jessup on 04/30/2018.