Regional Education Advisor, Asia (anywhere with SC presence)

The Opportunity

The Regional Education Technical Advisor will use their in-depth contextual understanding, technical expertise, and relationship building skills to provide a critical link between the Save the Children’s global and country level technical work, strengthening our technical offer for education at the regional level. The role will contribute to building capacity and fostering networking and learning across country office technical experts. The role supports regional advocacy and influencing, and contributes to strategic partnerships for new business development. It provides input into the design and implementation of monitoring and evaluation systems to demonstrate impact, while sharing learning across country offices, and ensuring quality of our programmes. The role provides support to the sourcing of technical assistance for country office in both emergency and development programming. This role includes a focus on external representation on priority issues including: early childhood care and development, basic education, inclusive education, and foundational learning and uninterrupted learning to ensure all children have access to education leading to learning and wellbeing outcomes.

The role will drive Save the Children’s involvement in the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), liaising with country office and government stakeholders as a strategic priority, and will also support the development of other regional strategic partnerships for education.

In the event of a major humanitarian emergency, the role holder may be expected to work outside the normal role profile and be able to vary working hours accordingly.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Leadership:

• Provide overall thought leadership of Child Education work in APAC region
• Develop and monitor the implementation of a Regional Education Strategy in consultation with the Regional Humanitarian Education in Emergencies TA, and other TAs in member and country offices.
• Drive participation in education technical working groups & communities of practice on behalf of movement, leading regional groups where appropriate, promoting innovation and collaboration.
• Support Country Office teams in developing and pursuing strategic plans for their work in early childhood development and basic education
• Drive Asia’s involvement in the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) by: Participating in and developing Global Partnership for Education (GPE) strategy, community of practice and knowledge exchange platforms; preparing regional and country-level GPE engagement plans; support country offices to position for GPE funding by supporting country offices to work with the Local Education and Development Partners Groups, develop proposals and design programs; as well as deliver, monitor, evaluate and report on existing GPE awards.

Programme Design and Development

• Oversee the design, implementation & monitoring of regional Education programmes; ensure that sectoral and internal technical best practice (including Save the Children’s Common Approaches) is applied in collaboration with relevant Country Office technical colleagues.
• Support Country Offices with the program design, proposal development and donor engagement for key strategic programmes and opportunities; and Support Country Offices to develop concepts that can be ‘pitched’ to donors.
• Work with Child Rights Governance colleagues to ensure that a rights based approach is reflected in our programme design and implementation (in line with our child rights programming approach), with a strong focus on child participation.
• Promote a Systems Strengthening approach as the overarching framework, that supports working in collaboration and partnership with governments and regional bodies, working towards impact, scale and sustainability.
• Explore innovative opportunities and trends which could be applied in Education programming in the region and support country offices to pilot, and document, new or updated tools and guidance, especially with a focus on gender, disability, and resilience.

Program Implementation and Quality Assurance:

• Ensure that programmes in country are aware of relevant global and regional thematic steers and have sufficient resources and expertise at hand to implement, build capacity, monitor, quality-assure, capture evidence and learning, and develop further in their ability to provide quality and rights-based educations interventions for children.
• Support to CO implementation and monitoring of regional/multi-country programmes, to ensure high quality delivery, monitoring (including Quality benchmarks) and evaluation.
• Support Country Offices in their implementation and monitoring of key strategic education programmes, to ensure high-quality delivery, monitoring and evaluation. Ensure that gender, disability and resilience considerations are reflected in our programme design and implementation.
• Respond to requests for technical expertise from Country Offices in the region where possible/appropriate through Save the Children’s flexible Technical Expertise systems (e.g. Global Humanitarian Surge Platform; TE Request platform), and identify support from others for key regional technical needs.
• Work with the Regional Humanitarian Education TA to support Emergency preparedness, recovery, and where appropriate response, including country office capability building for humanitarian response, emergency preparedness planning.

Evidence & Organisational Learning

• Ensure that COs have access to and use internal and external best practice and evidence in the design of new education programs, including through common approaches.
• Support Country Offices in their implementation and monitoring of key strategic education programmes, to ensure high-quality delivery, monitoring and evaluation.
• Drive regional and multi-country education research agendas; drawing together evidence of impact and facilitating cross-CO learning, including common approach research and learning agendas.
• Work with the Regional Research and Evaluation Unit to fill education research agenda gaps.
• Ensure that CO and regional lessons and operational realities contribute to global level technical thought leadership, advocacy, Common Approaches & standard setting.
• Play an active role in the GPE Technical Community of Practice, working with technical experts from other regional offices to build institutional knowledge and share challenges and lessons learned.

Technical Capacity Building & Mentoring

• Capacity build, mentor and build networks across Country Office Education technical experts in the region; identify top talents, capacity gaps and facilitate opportunities for learning
• Act as a focal point on GPE for the region, transferring knowledge on government engagement and GPE’s new operational model to Country Office Education technical experts.
• Facilitate Cross-Country Office learning between Education technical experts in the region; identify creative ways to share learning, best practices and collectively address challenges
• Bridge the Global-County divide by supporting technical experts to understand and contextualise global guidance, learning and evidence and ensure that learning from the region informs our global evidence and strategic direction in Education.
• Support the recruitment, talent management and retention of CO Education technical staff.

External Engagement:

• In collaboration with regional New Business Development, contribute to regional strategic partnerships; identify partners and donors to strengthen our Education portfolio in the region and maintain an overview of the Education situation and needs.
• In collaboration with Advocacy and Child Rights Governance colleagues, influence key regional stakeholders and policy-makers to ensure they reflect the needs of children in the countries where we work. Through collaborative regional partnerships, including representation on regional education clusters, working groups and technical fora.

The Organisation

We employ approximately 25,000 people across the globe and work on the ground in over 100 countries to help children affected by crises, or those that need better healthcare, education and child protection. We also campaign and advocate at the highest levels to realise the right of children and to ensure their voices are heard.

We are working towards three breakthroughs in how the world treats children by 2030:

• No child dies from preventable causes before their 5th birthday
• All children learn from a quality basic education and that,
• Violence against children is no longer tolerated

We know that great people make a great organization, and that our employees play a crucial role in helping us achieve our ambitions for children. We value our people and offer a meaningful and rewarding career, along with a collaborative and inclusive workplace where ambition, creativity, and integrity are highly valued.

Application Information

Please apply using a cover letter and up-to-date CV as a single document. Please also include details of your current remuneration and salary expectations. A copy of the full role profile can be found at www.savethechildren.net/careers

We need to keep children safe so our selection process, which includes rigorous background checks, reflects our commitment to the protection of children from abuse.

All employees are expected to carry out their duties in accordance with our global anti-harassment policy.