South Sudan: Resilience Policy Officer, Humanitarian and Resilience Policy Programme, DFID South Sudan

Summary of the role

DFID South Sudan are looking for a dynamic and enthusiastic South Sudanese Policy Officer to join the Humanitarian and Livelihoods Team. The post holder should have experience and knowledge in the fields of food security, livelihoods, resilience and/or economic security programming. But equally importantly should be intellectual curiosity, flexibility and a keenness to learn.

This job offers an exciting opportunity to make a significant contribution to delivering better impact and results from the humanitarian and resilience effort in South Sudan. The successful candidate will play a key role in informing key policy objectives and in designing and implementing DFID South Sudan’s multi-year humanitarian and resilience programming. The UK is one of the largest bilateral donors South Sudan and works closely with other key donors including the US, EU and Germany.

The context:

The humanitarian outlook in South Sudan is incredibly challenging. 5.3 million people are severely food insecure, and 1 million people are on the edge of famine. Four years of conflict has lead to significant displacement with 4 million people forced from their homes due to violence (1.9 million internally). The conflict has been divesting for people’s livelihoods and has severely eroded people’s normal copying capacity to deal with shocks and stresses. Ultimately only peace will resolve the humanitarian crisis in South Sudan, but until that happens it will be important to support the resilience of people and communities as far as possible.

Under the Humanitarian and Resilience in South Sudan (HARISS) programme, the UK through a range of partners has been supporting a range of essential life-saving services (food assistance, health, nutrition and WASH) as well as livelihood opportunities. These include diversified food production systems, stimulating market recovery through cash interventions, enabling vulnerable people to access markets, as well as working with communities through cash for work schemes to strengthen infrastructure that supports livelihoods and climate change adaptation.

DFID South Sudan’s 2016 to 2020 business plan sets out plans to build peace and stability, to reduce extreme poverty and to increase resilience. Our programmes help meet immediate life-saving needs and build South Sudanese people’s resilience to crises through strengthening their livelihoods. We also help support their basic health and education needs, and have cross-cutting work on conflict-sensitivity and governance analysis. The business plan explains how our country programme will adapt to a range of possible scenarios, including the current crisis and ongoing uncertainty.

This role sits within a friendly and high performing DFID South Sudan Humanitarian and Livelihoods Team (HLT), which is composed of three (two humanitarian and one livelihoods) advisors, as well as programme management team of nine, plus a Team Leader and a Deputy.

Key Duties and Responsibilities

The roles’ overarching responsibility is to provide high quality, timely and relevant technical advice to DFID South Sudan. The priorities will be:

1. Supporting the team with contextual (political, social and economic) analysis to inform humanitarian and resilience programming, policy development and advocacy strategies. Review existing research and analysis (including IPC) and advise on the design of appropriate research and analysis. Ensuring everything DFID South Sudan does, and especially new programming, is rooted in context.

2. Supporting partner management and technical direction. Work with advisers and programme management teams within HLT to ensure effective programme delivery of resilience focus programming.

3. Strengthening relationships with national and local stakeholders. Building relationships with key national and local stakeholders who play a role in shaping humanitarian and resilience programming and policy. This includes faith-based organisations, CSOs, NNGOs, Red Cross, academic institutions, Government and other non-government actors.

Specific duties will include (but will not be limited to):

• Contributing strategic, timely and high quality technical inputs and analysis for policy and strategy work within DFID South Sudan, ensuring everything we do is informed by the context in South Sudan;

• Supporting technical oversight of the programmes, including implementation, ensuring VFM and monitoring and evaluation of the programme;

• Contributing to the management of key relationships with key local actors such as NNGOs, faith-based organisations, government, academics and think tanks;

• Supporting the office in the production of business cases, programme reviews, briefing, information notes, submissions, and other products as needed;

• Conducting field visits to monitoring partner projects and strengthen sub-national contextual understanding and analysis.

Successful candidates will have:

Essential criteria

• A Masters level degree in a relevant discipline or substantive, equivalent technical experience.

• At least 5 years technical experience in relation to humanitarian, livelihoods, resilience, economic security and/or protracted humanitarian emergencies.

• Solid experience of working in South Sudan or similar contexts.

• Strong understanding of the causes and dimensions of conflict and insecurity in South Sudan, and applying this knowledge to policies and programmes.

• Strong knowledge of the political context in South Sudan and how this relates to relates to humanitarian and resilience policies and programmes

• Ability to work under pressure and at pace, meeting competing priorities.

• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to work effectively with others.

Desirable criteria

• Experience of working with or in international organisations such as donors, UN, INGO, or the Red Cross.

• Knowledge of a number of South Sudanese indigenous languages

Core UK civil service competences

Candidates should be able to clearly demonstrate in their application examples of the following competencies:

Seeing the Big Picture, Leading and Communicating, Delivering at Pace, Collaborating and Partnering

Details of the above UK Civil service competencies are available at http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Civil-Service-Competency-Framework-July-2012.pdf

In addition, you will be expected to show a commitment to DFID’s values which are:

Risk and resilience

• South Sudan is a protracted crisis, which is getting steadily worse, with many people who have been displaced for years. It also has a strong regional dimension. The post holder will need to help DFID adapt and develop our response to meet these challenges, ensuring we are using approaches to strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability where ever possible.

Humanitarian and disaster risk planning and management of relief programmes

• DFID South Sudan is delivering a multi-year humanitarian and resilience programme in a high risk environment with a great deal of public scrutiny. Delivering results for vulnerable South Sudanese is central to this role. A general understand of the humanitarian system in South Sudan, and how this relates to more development coordination forums is important.

• If you have not received a response in 2 weeks after closing date please consider your application as unsuccessful.

• The candidate must complete the application form onWWW.GOV.UKand send it to theAfricaHRHubRecruit@DFID.GOV.UKwith a copy of their most recent CV and Covering letter**. Please quote the following reference number when applying “SS0118”. Failure to do so may result in your application not being viewed.**

• Closing date of applications is midnight on 28 May 2018 Applications shown as being received after this time will not be accepted.