Gender Justice Lead

Oxfam is a global movement of people working together to end the injustice of poverty.

Oxfam has been working in Iraq since the 1990’s responding to both humanitarian crises as well as to development needs. In 2023, Oxfam implements work through eight offices in Anbar, Baghdad, Diyala, Kirkuk, Ninewa, and Salahaddin governorates in Federal Iraq and Erbil and Kalar in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).

Our humanitarian and development priorities in the country are water, sanitation, and hygiene; food security and livelihoods; gender justice; and protection. Across these themes, our programmatic approach:

• Continually looks to improve quality and lead through innovation
• Mainstreams gender and ensures women’s rights are at the heart of everything Oxfam does
• Establishes and maintains transformative partnerships to facilitate local leadership
• Promotes complementary advocacy, where possible, to influence systemic change

As an advocate for Local Humanitarian Leadership and a strengthened civic space, Oxfam has active partnership engagements with 47 local and national NGOs.

The Role:

The Gender Justice Lead is responsible for the strategic development and technical supervision of Oxfam in Iraq’s Gender Justice programming through technical guidance, support, oversight, strategy development, resources, fundraising, capacity development, and representation. The role will ensure the successful transition of Oxfam programming from humanitarian aid to recovery and development initiatives. The job holder will collaborate with other technical leads, such as those in the Protection, and Economic Development sectors, as well as with Area Managers in the field in order to design and execute integrated programming and guarantee the quality of the interventions.

The Gender Justice Lead will be responsible for ensuring that Oxfam’s Gender Justice projects are successful in meeting their objectives and making a lasting impact on those affected by conflict, displacement, and poverty in Iraq

What we are looking for:

We’re looking for a candidate who cares about Oxfam’s mission to end poverty and is personally aligned to our feminist principles and values of empowerment, accountability and inclusion in all you do.

An ideal candidate for the role will also have..

Essential

Programme development and funding

• Highly developed strategic planning skills with the ability to contribute to the programme’s overall strategies.
• Extensive experience in a capacity development role at the senior level and ability to facilitate learning and knowledge management. Excellent understanding of gender issues in development and humanitarian programming, including key challenges and approaches to mainstreaming gender into programme design and management.
• Ability to support contextual analysis (including power, gender and conflict analysis).
• Excellent understanding of different aspects of quality programming (for example partnership, participation, accountability, innovation, gender and monitoring, evaluation and learning) and how these can be incorporated into field interventions.
• Ability to design project and programme documents – including strong knowledge of theories of change (logic models, logical frameworks), contextual analyses (e.g. power, gender, and conflict), budgets, MEAL plans.
• Ability and experience in leading programme development sessions/workshops.
• Understanding of programme/project cycle management practices in development programming.
• Strong technical competence in research, learning and monitoring and evaluation methods.
• Critical thinking and reflection of lessons learnt in humanitarian and development practice.
• Results-oriented, experience in managing high-value grants and a track record of leading programme development processes that have resulted in gender-transformative projects/programmes regarded highly by donors.
• Demonstrated capacity for successful fundraising and growing programmes in organisations similar to Oxfam.
• Knowledge of donor environment, understanding of funding issues in relation to INGOs work in emergencies and development.
• A creative and innovative approach to promoting Gender Justice and Women’s Rights agenda.
• Strong analytical and conceptual thinking skills, and ability to translate complex issues into clear workable actions and plans.

Cross-cutting

• Knowledge of training tools and methods and proven experience delivering training on gender-inclusive and gender-transformative interventions.
• Excellent people skills, with proven ability to motivate others and work collaboratively, requiring strong self-awareness and interpersonal skills.
• Ability to adapt and work within a multicultural, multilingual and multidisciplinary environment.
• Ability to travel regularly at short notice.

Feminist Leadership approach

• Self-Awareness Able to develop a high degree of self-awareness around our own strengths and weaknesses and our impact on others. Our self-awareness enables us to moderate and self-regulate our behaviours to control and channel our impulses for good purposes. We self-moderate appropriately to different contexts thereby optimizing our ability to achieve goals
• Mutual accountability We can explain our decisions and how we have taken them based on our
  organisational values. We are ready to be held to account for our actions and how we behave, as we are also holding others to account in a consistent manner.
• Enabling We all work to effectively empower and enable others to deliver the organisation’s goals by creating conditions of success. We passionately invest in others by developing their careers, not only their skills for the job. We give more freedom and demonstrate belief and trust, underpinned with appropriate support.

At the interview, shortlisted candidates will also be assessed on our values and organisational attributes, as outlined above.

Desirable

Arabic language skills.

Experience working in the Middle East.

We offer:

We offer a competitive salary and a range of additional benefits to staff including flexible working options, generous pension scheme, annual leave, additional leave allowances, company sick pay, life assurance and a range of other benefits.

From the day you join Oxfam we invite you to stretch and learn in your role. Our wide range of Learning & Development opportunities includes in-house courses, e-learning modules, on-the job learning opportunities, coaching and mentoring, and much more.

You can read more about all Oxfam has to offer here.