Program Manager, Humanitarian Response

Reporting to the International Program Director, the Program Manager, Humanitarian Response will support and provide technical expertise into Veterinarians without Borders/ Vétérinaires sans Frontières VWB/VSF’s humanitarian programming. Work alongside the Executive Director and International Program Director to develop VWB/VSF’s strategic direction for humanitarian work. Provide cutting edge, innovative thoughts, best practices and advice around humanitarian work.

Primary Roles and Responsibilities:

• Develop and manage response operations, providing technical expertise to ensure that humanitarian programs are delivered according to international standards and utilize a gender responsive and localization-driven approach.
• Monitors, analyzes and reports on humanitarian developments, disaster relief/management programmes and emergency situations in VWB/VSF’s areas of focus; develops and maintains a “watch list” of countries with potential for humanitarian crisis.
• Leads the development and implementation of VWB/VSF’s livestock humanitarian response framework including disaster assessments and VWB/VSF’s international humanitarian response;
• Build and maintain positive donor relationships and strategic partnerships
• Overseeing financial management of portfolio through the project cycle
• Contributing to the creation of tools, systems, and processes for continuous improvement with a strong commitment to learning and feedback mechanisms.
• Support to country programs to ensure all tools, guidelines, and procedures required in humanitarian contexts are in place, understood, and utilized by VWB/VSF staff and partners.
• Provide technical solutions to teams and partners, remotely and on-site, for strategic planning and how to best apply standards, best practices, partnership principles, and tools, helping to ensure high-quality implementation.
• Conduct partner due diligence assessments and provide tools and plans to capacity build key partners to improve operational efficiency.
• Collect and analyze program data, capture and share lessons learned and best practices for specific projects to facilitate improvements in decision-making and contribute to global learning and platforms.
• Contribute to the development of the technical design for proposals. Support the process of preparation, design, submission and approval of project concepts and full-fledged proposals. Advise on integrating donor strategies, priorities and technical requirements into VWB/VSF’s approach.
• Promote systematic program learning to ensure that lessons learned are identified, effectively documented, and shared across country programs and the overall portfolio
• Support monitoring and evaluation teams to ensure data and project learnings effectively inform current and future programming.
• Assist with all other tasks as needed to forward emergency operations and programming.

Representation & Communication

• Act as VWB/VSF’s external representative with a range of key donors, policy makers, governments, public and private partners, and news media.
• Attend and participate in external meetings, workshops, conferences etc. and brief the program team as needed.
• Organizes and participates in work groups, meetings, conferences, consultations with other agencies and partners humanitarian-related matters
• Support Public Engagement activities and provide input for the website updates and ways of profiling VWB/VSF to a wider audience.

Travel: Must be willing and able to travel up to 40 % of time, often at very short notice (within 48 hours) and for an average of four to six weeks (with a maximum of two consecutive months under exceptional circumstances). Candidates should have capacity to live and work in difficult/stressful environments and serve wherever agency needs dictate.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Strong humanitarian responder with proven experience managing response operations in the field
• Strong finance and grant management skills, and accounting software user skills required.
• Knowledge of humanitarian codes, principles and practice and experience in their use
• Knowledge of design requirements and regulations for humanitarian donors required;
• Extremely flexible and have the ability to cope with stressful situations in humanitarian environments.
• Strong 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.
• Ability to maintain performance expectations and strong working relationships in diverse cultural contexts and psychologically/physically stressful environments.
• Good strategic, analytical, problem-solving and systems thinking skills with capacity to see the big picture and ability to make sound judgment and make decisions independently.
• Excellent interpersonal and negotiation skills.
• Ability to work both as a motivating member and a leader of a diverse team.
• Good supervisory skills.
• Demonstrated ability to provide leadership in strategic planning initiatives.
• Proven ability to analyze reports or issues and to provide appropriate recommendations required.
• Strong knowledge of effective management practices desired.
• Experience with staff care in humanitarian settings.
• Good technical writing skills.
• Presentation, facilitation, training, mentoring, and coaching skills.
• Proactive, resourceful and results oriented.

Preferred Qualifications

• Budgeting and budget management experience, including developing comprehensive budgets and budget narratives for proposals.
• Experience with program monitoring and evaluation, including applying data collection tools and methodologies, data analysis, and data presentation.
• Experience in establishing and maintaining effective partnerships and in building the capacity of local organizations.
• Knowledge of capacity strengthening best practices. Proven expertise in coordinating operations management and procedures training programs to support the development of humanitarian response staff.
• Experience in mentoring, coaching, facilitation and training applying adult learning principles and practices.
• Knowledge of Integral Human Development, SPHERE standards, Core Humanitarian Standards
• Knowledge/experience of integrating cross-cutting themes such as capacity strengthening, protection mainstreaming, gender, good governance, and peace building.
• Knowledge of the relevant public donors’ regulations will be highly desired.
• Knowledge of commodity accounting package or similar software highly desired.
• Familiarity with the application of ICT and GIS products in emergency preparedness and response an asset.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum of five years relevant work experience with progressive responsibilities, ideally with an international NGO, with minimum of two years relevant field-based experience in Humanitarian Operations.
• Knowledge of technical principles and concepts in Humanitarian Response, with special focus on finance and grant management. General knowledge of other related disciplines to ensure proper cross-sectoral approach.
• Knowledge of technical principles and concepts in Humanitarian Response. General knowledge of other related disciplines to ensure proper cross-sectoral approach.
• Experience in project design and proposal development. Experience in writing content for proposals.
• Knowledge of capacity strengthening best practices.
• Experience with program monitoring and evaluation and analysis.
• Experience and skills in networking and relations with donors, peer organizations, and civil society partners. Understanding of partnership principles.
• Proficient in MS Office packages (Excel, Word, PowerPoint), Web Conferencing Applications, information and budget management systems, knowledge-sharing networks.