JOB DETAILS
LOCATION: This role can be located in a country where Oxfam has a presence, subject to Oxfam’s ability to employ in that location, the affordability of doing so and right to work requirements being met. Follow this link to see where we work as a guide to where Oxfam may have the ability to establish a contract of employment. Due to legal constraints, it is not currently possible for this role to be based in some Oxfam locations. These include, but are not limited to, Brazil, France, Italy and Sweden.
Please indicate your preferred location and whether you have the right to work there on your application.
CONTRACT TYPE: Open-ended
JOB FAMILY: Programme
ONE OXFAM GRADE: B ZONE: 2
DEPARTMENT: Global Humanitarian Team
TEAM: Performance and Innovation Team
SALARY: Competitive salary and benefits packages will be offered in line with local cost of living and national pay structures. Exact details to be confirmed by employing Affiliate.
HOURS: Full time – According to contracting affiliate and location
FLEXIBLE WORKING
We believe flexible working is key to building the Oxfam of the future, so we’re open to talking through the type of flexible arrangements which might work for you.
COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
We are committed to ensuring diversity and gender equality within our organization.
GLOBAL HUMANITARIAN TEAM PURPOSE: The Global Humanitarian Team (GHT) has designated responsibilities to support, coordinate and lead humanitarian response and policies to reduce the impact of, prepare for and respond to crises, harnessing the resources of the whole Oxfam confederation to deliver support for Oxfam’s strategic plan.
The GHT has designated responsibilities to support, coordinate and lead humanitarian response and policies to reduce the impact of, prepare for and respond to crises, harnessing the resources of the whole Oxfam confederation to deliver support for Oxfam’s strategic plan. The GHT works across Oxfam countries and regions and in close coordination with others working GHT will work with others to maximize the quality and impact of Oxfam’s humanitarian program by:
- Delivering rapid, safe and high-quality emergency surge capacity.
- Supporting program strategy, operational design, humanitarian preparedness and response.
- Promote greater local humanitarian leadership and collaborate on our approach to fragility and across the nexus.
- Facilitate the development of humanitarian capacity across Oxfam and partner organizations through building and brokering a cross-confederation network and community.
- Supporting the gathering of evidence to enable learning, innovation and advocating for change across the sector.
- Working with Campaigns and Policy to influence for greater respect of the basic rights of crisis affected men and women.
- Working closely with affiliates in their roles as EAs and PAs for the best interests of the humanitarian program.
- Ensure connection with global and technical humanitarian system and coordination.
PERFORMANCE & INNOVATION TEAM PURPOSE: The Performance and Innovation Team (PIT) is composed of experts in each Oxfam key programming and quality area, to provide strategic leadership, expertise and support to the confederation’s humanitarian programme and global positioning. They PIT builds and brokers a network of practitioners in key technical areas to improve coordination, coherence and learning across the confederation. It sets and monitors programme standards, uses evidence to drive organisational learning and innovation, gathers evidence, analyses performance and makes recommendations for internal change or adaptation and to ensure Oxfam remains a key humanitarian actor able to influence the global sector. The PIT leads innovation and collaborates with external partners and stakeholders to improve the humanitarian system.
JOB PURPOSE: To drive high quality responses at the global level, by ensuring high quality MEAL work, with focus on learning and evaluation, alongside and jointly with the other GHT Advisors to contribute to and achieve high quality and effective emergency responses as part of the GHT mandate. As well as to contribute to research and development that informs humanitarian community internally and externally through learning and best practice in MEAL.
To support other advisors and technical teams and countries in integrating of MEAL in the responses to
guarantee Oxfam advances in relation to plans, strategies and international commitments. Be
accountable for ensuring community participation shapes programme decisions, actively seek a
local partnership approach and integrating feminist principles including strong awareness of power
dynamics.
To work proactively to ensure safe-programming and gender in MEAL.
JOB REPORTS TO
GHT MEAL & Knowledge Management Lead
JOBS REPORTING TO THIS JOB
MEAL HSP (Humanitarian Support Personnel)
BUDGET RESPONSIBILITY
N/A
GEOGRAPHICAL SCOPE
The scope is global, with focus on supporting priority countries that have large scale humanitarian responses
DIMENSIONS of the Role
- Helps shape objectives at the affiliate level (or divisional level in larger affiliates) in a specific programme unit or team/region.
- Plans and manages human and financial resources and processes related to a specific programme unit and/or area of expertise.
- Manages a broad spectrum of programs or geographies, requiring a variety of competences and skills of the job holder. Management tasks and problems are diverse and complex and involve a significant degree of risk (financial, security, brand).
- Produces, assimilates, analyses and uses programme information from varied and diverse sources to provide in-depth analysis in the specific programme unit or policy area.
- Decision-making is strategic and operational with a high degree of judgement based on specific problem-solving experience, drawing on a range of external and internal factors.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
The MEAL Advisor will:
- Contribute to the design and implementation of an evaluation and learning agenda to monitor the performance of Oxfam humanitarian work and specific strategic aspects defined by the team and sectors.
- Provide support for the improvement of the evidence gathering and methodological implementation of the strategy.
- Contribute to development in technical sector.
- Contribute to learning and influencing within Oxfam and the humanitarian sector as a whole.
- Provide practical technical support to countries and regions for incorporating MEAL and Knowledge Management (KM) inputs consistently across responses through supporting other advisors.
- (particularly, MEAL Advisor-PST) and technical teams in integrating MEAL standards, planning strategies ad donors’ requirement in programmes.
- Advise programme staff and managers on improving humanitarian programme quality (Core Humanitarian Standard – CHS) throughout the programme cycle (assessment, planning, implementation monitoring and evaluation).
Management
people, budgets, assets, projects and decision-making
- Provide technical support on humanitarian evaluation and learning to countries and regions.
- Provide practical advice and support to key programme staff to translate Oxfam’s MEAL and KM Strategy into practice influencing the programming and strategy development, adapted to specific contexts and issues and supporting an enabling organisational environment.
- Advice programme staff and managers on improving humanitarian programme quality (CHS) focusing on evaluation and learning
- Support capacity building initiatives to improve evaluation and learning within regions and countries, and amongst Oxfam’s partners in accordance with Oxfam’s strategic plans
- Work closely with all sectors in the team to provide support and ensure an evaluation and learning plan is developed to support quality response in countries affected by crises.
- Support, under specific request, rapid scale-up for Category 1 and 2 emergency responses. This may require traveling at short notice for temporary deployments and include responsibilities such as: leading or advising on supporting technically needs assessment and response analysis, program strategy and design, starting up programming and coordinating in the initial response phase, setting up MEAL systems and/or evaluating our responses as needed.
- Provide remote support to country and regional staff to ensure oversight of the design and implementation of humanitarian evaluation and learning, working with staff and partners to ensure.
- Learn from the design and implementation of social accountability systems to promote this among responses, regional platforms and teams.
- Ensure responses are timely and effective, think creatively and be prepared to seize opportunities as they arise to maximize the speed and the quality of the response.
- Support, with the rest of advisors and managers, the understanding and use of key analytical tools and frameworks related to safe programming.
Analysis and Problem Solving
information, complexity, creativity and forward planning
- Lead on evaluation learning and ensure it is applied across the region and between regions. Design an agenda to cover gaps in practice and to ensure documentation of key trends and evidence in strategic or/and thematic evaluations.
- Collect findings from key evaluations and ensure dissemination.
- Provide technical input to support Affiliate Programme Funding Departments with proposal development.
- Identify and engage in the use of new and innovative methodologies, processes, or technologies that improve evaluation and learning in MEAL systems.
- Provide strategic leadership, coordination and support to the capacity development plan and its implementation. Build the capacity of regional and country level MEAL and technical staff specifically on evaluation and learning.
- Lead on a specific technical area and contribute to Research and Development and fundraising in that technical area under the matrix management from the MEAL and KM lead.
- Lead the development, dissemination, monitoring, and analysis of evaluation and learning in Oxfam MEAL standards (CAMSA), guidelines, policies, and tools to ensure Oxfam program quality. Work with the GHT and regional platform teams to ensure coordination around standards, tools and procedures. Lead the institutionalization and feedback process for the use of these throughout the organization and with partners.
- Ensure programmes are safe, are sensitive to gender and other power dynamics and ensure that they are informed by the community to benefit from the work
Impact
contacts, communication, advice, and consequences
- Represent Oxfam at external fora on areas of work, influence the sector and contribute to broader influence of humanitarian sector as a whole.
- To track humanitarian information, learning and knowledge developed in responses, research and global fora and ensure these are actively shared and managed internally and externally
- Support the development of knowledge products including identifying and designing research programme learning, methodological guidance and communications products to inform programme and policy direction and build a sound evidence base to inform Oxfam’s development and humanitarian programming, lobbying, advocacy and influencing actions and resource mobilisation.
- Represent Oxfam and/or ensure representation in coordinating with relevant government officials, UN agencies, other NGO staff, and relevant clusters during emergencies.
- Develop Oxfam’s work in core technical (and particularly the priority) areas of MEAL, drawing on learning from Oxfam’s work, and promote this externally. Share best practices and lessons learned on MEAL in external platforms, and lead the development, refinement and dissemination of external materials.
- To foster an appropriate working culture built on Oxfam’s values, respectful and cognisant of power imbalances internally and between Oxfam, our partners and the communities we serve.
Other
- Eager and required to adhere to Oxfam’s principles and values (click here) as well as the promotion of gender justice and women’s rights (click here).
- Understanding of and commitment to adhere to equity, diversity, gender, child safety and staff health and wellbeing principles.
PERSON SPECIFICATION
Most importantly, every individual in Oxfam needs to be able to:
- Live our values of INCLUSION, ACCOUNTABILITY, EMPOWERMENT, COURAGE, SOLIDARITY and EQUALITY (read more about these here)
- Ensure you commit to our ORGANIZATIONAL ATTRIBUTES (including adhering to the Code of Conduct):
1. Be committed to our feminist principles, and to applying them in your day-to-day behaviour and your work. Be ready to keep learning, with accountability to those who experience oppression as a result of their identities, such as their gender, race/ethnicity, disability, class, or LGBTQIA identity.”
2. Be committed to undertaking Oxfam’s safeguarding training and adhering to relevant policies, to ensure all people who come into Oxfam are as safe as possible.
EXPERIENCE, KNOWLEDGE & COMPETENCIES
ESSENTIAL
- Self-Awareness
- Mutual accountability
- Strategic Thinking and Judgment
- Systems Thinking
Technical Skills, Experience & Knowledge
- In-depth knowledge and experience in humanitarian MEAL with proven practical experience of MEAL positions in an international humanitarian crisis context, in complex emergency responses, including start-up of a Cat 2 response.
- Experience & knowledge of the international humanitarian sector and an understanding of
humanitarian standards, principles and guidelines including Sphere, Red Cross and Red Crescent Code
of Conduct, Core Humanitarian Standards. - Understanding of programme quality issues in a humanitarian context including putting women at the heart of what we do.
- Experience in developing evaluation and learning processes in a large scale or rapid onset emergencies/ response, with experience in quantitative and qualitative research methods.
- Advanced education in at least monitoring and evaluation. Extensive relevant experience may substitute for education but not vice versa.
- Demonstrable experience of developing and delivering outcome-focused training programmes and staff development and in coaching teams.
- Proven ability to develop effective relationships at a distance and deliver high quality remote
management, guidance and support. - Highly effective influencing skills within the team, with senior management and field teams, particularly around translating evaluation findings into actionable recommendations (Knowledge into action).
- Sensitivity to cultural differences, and the ability to work in a wide variety of cultural contexts.
- Ability to represent Oxfam at a strategic level and in high profile environments, including strong self-
awareness and excellent inter-personal communication, facilitation and partnership building skills. - Competent to work with significant levels of autonomy, showing creativity and initiative, with excellent prioritization and time-management skills.
- Knowledge of and experience in using ICTs in data collection and analysis.
- Very good IT skills, strong knowledge of MS Excel.
- Excellent written and spoken English and another language (e.g. French, Spanish).
- The ability to travel for up to a maximum of 12 weeks per year and the ability to travel with 48 hours’ notice. In addition, this might include a block of up to 6 weeks’ continuous, in extremis, not more than once a year. Travel above this amount can be agreed on a case-by-case basis.
Desirable
- Ability to identify and implement opportunities for innovation.
- Experience of successful external representation and influencing on programme issues with key allies and networks.
- Working knowledge of French, Spanish or Arabic.
SAFER RECRUITMENT
Oxfam is committed to preventing any type of unwanted behaviour at work including sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse, lack of integrity and financial misconduct; and promoting the welfare of children, young people and adults. Oxfam expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment through our code of conduct. We place a high priority on ensuring that only those who share and demonstrate our values are recruited to work for us. Offers of employment will be subject to satisfactory references and appropriate screening checks, which can include criminal records and terrorism finance checks.
