EMPOWER West Africa Emergency Operations and Supply Chain Technical Advisor I at Catholic Relief Services (CRS)

Job Summary:  

• The EMPOWER West Africa Emergency Operations and Supply Chain Technical Advisor I (Emergency Ops TA) will provide technical advice and accompaniment to local organizations participating in the EMPOWER West Africa program on a range of program design and implementation issues in the area of emergency response operational capacity and management including Human Resources (HR), Supply Chain, Logistics, Procurement, Administration, Fleet, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Audit.  You will support participating organizations to strengthen their institutional capacity for humanitarian response programming, through good stewardship of resources, principled compliance, and proactive identification and mitigation of risks informed by CRS program quality principles and standards, donor guidelines, and industry best practices to advance the delivery of high-quality programming to the poor and vulnerable. As a part of the EMPOWER team, you will support local national organizations to achieve their institutional objectives for humanitarian response management.

RESPONSIBILITIES
Roles and Key Responsibilities: 

• Provide technical assistance and lead capacity strengthening activities for EMPOWER West Africa partners on emergency operations and supply chain management. Capacity strengthening may be achieved through remote or on-site trainings, workshops, learning events, peer-to-peer exchanges, simulations, coaching, and on-the-job training.
• Provide capacity strengthening in operations functions (systems, processes and staffing) to ensure humanitarian services are delivered with high-quality in an efficient manner. Identify and help address challenges that affect the proper stewardship and optimal utilization of program assets and resources (financial, human, and material).
• Provide capacity strengthening on identifying, managing, and mitigating security and other risks that may impact staff safety, humanitarian access, and operational success. Support partners to proactively identify, manage, and mitigate risks.
• Provide capacity strengthening on internal processes for approving expenses, monitoring spending, and making budget adjustments in line with operational and programmatic needs and with donor requirements.
• Provide capacity strengthening on effective staffing and adherence to HR systems, policies and practices that support a high-performance culture, staff development and retention. Help assure quality personnel administration and a work environment that upholds staff wellbeing and duty of care.
• Provide capacity strengthening on development of and compliance with policies, procedures, donor requirements and local laws and regulations, and support establishment of procedures for periodic systems checks, review and assessment of operations policies and procedures. Coordinate response to issues that emerge from internal and external audits and provide guidance to implement improvements.
• Assume a direct support, management or leadership role during emergency responses via remote or on-site secondment to local partners, as needed/requested. 

QUALIFICATIONS
Basic Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Economics, Finance, Accounting, international development or Humanitarian Program Management, or other relevant field. Master’s degree a plus.
• Minimum of three years relevant work experience with progressive responsibilities, ideally with an international NGO, with minimum of two years relevant finance, human resources, logistics, or administration field-based experience in complex emergencies in partnership with local humanitarian actors.
• Knowledge of technical principles and concepts in emergency operations and supply chain management. General knowledge of other related disciplines such as partner capacity strengthening, cash and voucher assistance, market-based approaches and safeguarding to ensure proper cross-sectoral approach.

Required Languages

• English and French oral and written language proficiency required, with excellent English writing skills and capable of conducting trainings, writing reports and proposals, holding meetings, conducting interviews and communicating with partners in both English and French.
• Knowledge of West African languages or Portuguese a plus. 

Travel

• Willingness and ability to travel internationally up to 50% of time (6 months out of the year).
• Willingness and ability to deploy quickly to support responses to rapid onset emergencies, when necessary, primarily within West Africa but may include opportunities to deploy to other regions as agency needs dictate.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities  

• Excellent relationship management skills with ability to influence and get buy-in from people not under direct supervision and to work with individuals in diverse geographical and cultural settings
• Excellent strategic, analytical, problem-solving and systems thinking skills with capacity to ability to quickly adapt technical guidance to any given operating environment
• Knowledge of capacity strengthening best practices and partnership principles.
• Extremely flexible and able to cope with stressful situations in emergency environments
• Proactive, resourceful, results and service-oriented
• Presentation, facilitation, training, mentoring, and coaching skills including remote and online settings

Preferred Qualifications 

• Candidates from/presently based in the West Africa region are highly preferred.
• Experience and knowledge of technical principles, concepts and international standards in safeguarding, protection from sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA) and protection mainstreaming in humanitarian response highly preferred.
• Experienced trainer/teacher of adults and multi-cultural groups, in both in-person and virtual settings.
• Experience managing warehouse, transport, and food or other humanitarian distribution operations a plus
• Proficient in MS Office packages (Excel, Word, PowerPoint), Web Conferencing Applications, information and budget management systems, knowledge-sharing networks.