About CRS: Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. CRS works to save, protect, and transform lives in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality. CRS’ relief and development work is accomplished through programs of emergency response, health, agriculture, education, microfinance and peacebuilding. For nearly 60 years, CRS has taken the lead in responding to natural and man-made disasters affecting Ethiopia's most vulnerable communities. Moving beyond emergency response, CRS' disaster mitigation and recovery projects in drought and flood-prone areas have rebuilt individual and community assets through non-food aid in the form of agriculture, livestock, health, nutrition, and water and sanitation assistance. CRS's humanitarian work in Ethiopia also provides livelihoods support to farmers and entrepreneurs, promotes equality and inclusion, and mitigates the impact of COVID-19.

Background: The Joint Emergency Operation (JEOP) is an emergency food assistance program targeting transitory food insecure households through a project participant targeting process led by the Government of Ethiopia’s (GoE) Ethiopian Disaster Risk Management Commission (EDRMC). JEOP provides emergency assistance to protect their lives and livelihood where recurrent drought affected in significant harvest loss, livestock death and price increase of essentials. The consortium is led by CRS and includes consortium partners, CARE, Food for the Hungry, Relief Society of Tigray (REST), World Vision and Organization for Relief and Development in Amhara (ORDA). CRS also works thorough local implementing partners Hararghe and Meki Catholic Secretariat (HCS and MCS).

Job Summary:

As a Technical Advisor on JEOP, you will provide technical advice and support to a range of program design and implementation issues in nutrition in line with CRS program quality principles and standards, donor guidelines, and industry best practices to Country Program (CP) teams to advance the delivery of high-quality programming to the poor and vulnerable. Your advice, knowledge, and support will contribute to determining how effective, adaptive and innovative CRS’ JEOP programming is across the globe.

Job Responsibilities:

• Act as the technical lead for JEOP field of nutrition and its intersections with other sectors including but not restricted to food commodities and cash, early warning, monitoring evaluation accountability and learning (MEAL), gender, safeguarding, disability inclusion and protection mainstreaming.
• Linking with country program, consortium partner and CRS regional colleagues, provide leadership on JEOPs engagement in development and roll out of a Nutrition Strategy. Prepare JEOP nutrition action plan and make recommendations to Senior Management on nutrition issues concerning JEOP.
• Facilitate JEOP access to emerging learning and adjustments to Global Guidance due global shocks and participate in the CRS regional community of practice for nutrition.
• Taking a quality assurance and improvement lens, support JEOP to strengthen nutrition specific and sensitive program approaches through a structured review of current programming and guidance in development of quality assurance and improvement tools where needed with particular focus on inclusion of vulnerable groups.
• Strengthen capacity of JEOP staff (CRS and partners) to represent JEOP in national nutrition forums including technical working groups and cluster forums.
• As an active member of CRS’ Global Nutrition Technical team strengthen JEOP staff access to best and promising practices as well as evolving thinking, as it relates to core nutrition objectives.
• In coordination with JEOP Program Quality colleagues, strengthen integration of nutrition activities within JEOP programming, ensuring that activities are in line with all humanitarian and SPHERE standards.
• Determine which approaches are necessary to strengthen nutrition activities and the impact of intended to improve nutrition with particular focus on women, girls and people living with disabilities.
• Support the development and contribute to the implementation of agency-wide, regional, and JEOP-specific strategies, standards, tools, and best practices in nutrition that effectively engage partners, donors, and governments. Help ensure a cross-sectoral approach including integrating gender, protection mainstreaming, early warning, and disaster risk reduction.
• Provide technical solutions remotely and on-site, for strategic planning and how to best apply program design and implementation standards, best practices, partnership principles, tools, and M&E, ensuring high-quality implementation.
• Advocate, inform, and communicate amongst partners to ensure that project participants nutrition and food security issues are addressed and that the nutritional needs and status of project participants and other persons of concern are appropriately documented and disseminated.
• Contribute to efforts to pre-position CRS for growth opportunities in nutrition. Lead or contribute to development of the technical design for large and/or complex proposals, including defining appropriate monitoring systems and indicators. Advise design teams on integrating donor strategies, priorities and technical requirements into CRS’ approach.
• Contribute to capacity strengthening initiatives in nutrition programming for staff and partner through recruitment support, helping develop learning strategies and agendas/curriculums, facilitating access to external consultants, conducting trainings and workshops, and mentoring and coaching.
• Strengthen technical quality of reports and communications material for external audiences, through review, mentoring, training and coaching of staff.
• Contribute to knowledge management and learning through supporting innovation and the adaptation and application of innovations from other organizations, collecting and analyzing sex and age disaggregated program data, evaluating strategic projects, assisting with measuring program impact, capturing and sharing lessons learned and best practices, and research and internal reports.
• Establish and maintain relationships with key peer organizations, research and other institutions (i.e. UNICEF, WFP, private sector stakeholders). Participate in forums to collect and share best practices and promote CRS’ work.
• Work closely with the Regional Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Bureau, Regional Emergency Coordination Unit (RENCU), Regional Health Bureau (RHB), UN agencies and NGOs.
• Ensure collaboration, leveraging, layering, integration and learning accompanies project activities throughout the project cycle between JEOP and other CRS sectors including other USAID projects and other NGOs with related activities.
• Analyze implementation challenges and report any inconsistencies and/or gaps to inform adjustments to plans and implementation schedules.
• Work with other programmatic sectors to develop comprehensive or complementary programming to address nutrition components in JEOP.
• Ensure project documentation for assigned activities is complete with all required documents and is filed per agency and donor requirements. Assist with preparation of trends analysis reports and documentation of case studies and promising practices.
• Facilitate the formulation of relevant strategies and interventions, promote initiatives, and support the adaptation, and implementation for improving the delivery of primary health care services.
• Champion learning - analyze and evaluate project performance data, proactively identify issues and concerns, using participatory processes which values diverse ideas to overcome implementation obstacles. Collaborate with JEOP university partners.
• Work with CRS Communications Manager on social behavior change material development related to nutrition.
• Ensure that any new and existing programming approaches new proposals consider protection mainstreaming, gender and safeguarding assessments and principles, and that women, men, boys, and girls are consulted in design.
• Ensure practical application of a Do No Harm lens, incorporating adaptive accountability to affected populations.

Job Requirements

Typical Background, Experience & Requirements:

Required Education and Experience

• MA/BA Degree in Public Health, Nutrition or other related field with 4 years' relevant experience for MA degree or 5 years' relevant experience for BA degree for an international NGO. Additional experience may substitute for some education.
• Previous experience providing technical assistance
• Demonstrated application of technical principles and concepts in nutrition in both humanitarian and development program contexts and including nutrition sensitive as well as nutrition specific interventions.
• Experience in mentoring, coaching, facilitation, and training applying adult learning principles and practices.
• Experience and skills in networking and relations with donors, peer organizations and civil society partners.
• Proficient in MS Office packages (Excel, Word, PowerPoint), Web Conferencing Applications, information and budget management systems, knowledge-sharing networks.

Desired Education and Experience

• General knowledge of other related disciplines to ensure solid cross-sectoral approach.
• Experience in business development, project design and proposal development in health and social services, including technical writing.
• Understanding of partnership principles and experience working with faith-based partners.
• Experience with program monitoring and evaluation, including applying data collection tools and methodologies, data analysis, data presentation and data use for decision making.

Personal Skills

• 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.
• Inclusive approach, able to elevate the voices of underrepresented groups.
• Flexibility, persistence, and ability to work well with people and cross-cultural skills.
• Strong strategic, analytical, problem-solving and systems thinking skills with capacity to see the big picture and ability to make sound judgment
• Strong written and oral communication skills
• Strong presentation, facilitation, training, mentoring, and coaching skills
• Proactive, resourceful, and results-oriented

Female applicants and persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply. CRS is committed to maintaining a diverse talented workforce.

Required/Desired Foreign Language: English and Amharic, additional Ethiopian national languages a plus.

Travel Required: 15-30% by road and air across Amhara, Oromia, SNNPR, Sidama, Dire Dawa City Administration and Tigray (subject to need and flexible to family commitments)

Key Working Relationships:

·        Supervisory: none

·        Internal: JEOP program quality unit, CRS Ethiopia technical units, CRS regional counterparts.

·        External: JEOP implementing partners, nutrition cluster, line ministries

Agency-wide Competencies (for all CRS Staff):

These are rooted in the mission, values, and guiding principles of CRS and used by each staff member to fulfill his or her responsibilities and achieve the desired results.

• Trusting Relationships
• Professional Growth
• Partnership
• Accountability

How to Apply

You should fill the application form through this link: https://form.jotform.com/220791572253557 and attach your up-to-date Note: Website for reporting misconduct: www.InternationalMedicalCorps.ethicspoint.com. Female candidates are highly encouraged to apply. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.