Program Development and Quality

Future Job Opportunity as Program Development and Quality (PDQ) Director. 

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.

We would like to invite you to leave your resume and cover letter here The Talent Team will review your resumes periodically and reach out to candidates once the position is confirmed.

General Job Responsibilities: 

Strategy, Planning and Reporting 
• Lead the development/update of the Child Rights Situation Analysis, including analysis of country context taking into account child rights principles, ensuring participation and buy-in from all relevant staff, partners and other stakeholders as necessary
• Lead the SLT to develop/update and drive forward the Country Strategy Plan (CSP) in line with the global strategy, Ambition 2030, with child rights at the core of all programming and advocacy work.
• Provide leadership on development of the Country Annual Plan, monitoring of progress against the plan, and completion of accurate, on-time Country Annual Report of outcomes and impact for children, aligned with the Global Results Framework.
• Facilitate development and pursuit of thematic and cross-cutting strategic priorities in line with the CSP, including gender equality, to guide current and future SC programming and Humanitarian Strategies.
• Support ownership and commitment to the Country Office strategy by all staff and departments through clear communication, regular feedback on progress and engagement of all functions in updates.
• Participate in global discussions and working groups to represent country office, and voice of children, in strategy design and policy development.
• Support organizational/programmatic change processes and roll-out new ways of working to improve achievement of the CSP.

Program Design & Development 
• Based on tracking provided by the Awards Management team, review prospects and opportunities that will drive the CSP.
• In consultation with the Country Director and Member Countries, ensure technical engagement with donors to pre-position and prepare for opportunities, and engage in strategic positioning of SC. 
• Play a leading role in designing proposals, including:
o Engaging with technical experts as needed to ensure high quality, evidence-based designs that draw on needs assessments (in humanitarian, development and environmental sustainability context), learning from past programs and child safeguarding principles;
o Ensuring partners are identified and appropriately engaged in program design, linking with Operations and Awards teams as need be for assessments, especially to strengthen child rights governance, gender sensitivity and environmental sustainability at design stage;
o Ensuring proposal designs and their budgets include robust MEAL plans that are aligned with the Global Results Framework (and, therefore, advance towards our Breakthroughs), incorporate Common Approaches as relevant, and build in critical research and learning questions.
o Ensuring budgets will enable projects to be delivered as designed.
o Incorporating child and community participation into design processes and implementation arrangements, as relevant.

Program Quality and Program Technical Excellence 
• Ensure the country program delivers high quality, multi-sectoral programming in humanitarian, development and environmental sustainability contexts (as appropriate).
o Monitor and advance technical and operational quality of programmes, including conducting regular field visits to provide feedback on quality benchmarks, soliciting inputs for design of new programs and collecting ideas for innovation.
o Monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and, in partnership with other functional leads, take steps to improve the quality programming platform to meet agreed upon standards.
o Work closely with the Director of Operations to ensure Quality Framework standards are met and procedures are followed throughout the project life-cycle and across the portfolio.
o Ensure technical experts proactively and regularly communicate planned requirements for program design, learning and implementation to relevant CO departments/functions. 
o Ensure the strategic direction, technical quality, and operationalization of the multi-member funded programs, by ensuring strong member, donor, and government communications and technical collaboration with field-based implementation teams.
• Build and lead a team of program technical experts needed to successfully deliver against the CSP. Ensure effective working relationships with SC global, Member and regional technical advisors, procuring technical support as needed to support program and advocacy efforts, including during Emergencies.
o Ensure that program technical experts engage in larger communities of practice within and external to Save the Children, to link with the most relevant and evidence-based approaches and conduct timely and useful review of project reports to support quality reporting for Members and donors.
o Ensure different technical sectors of the Country Office are coordinated, integrated and support each other to optimize programs and projects.
o Ensure child safeguarding and safe programming is embedded in program design and considered throughout implementation to ensure that we do all we can to ensure children in our programs are safe, in line with our child safeguarding policy.
• Convene the CO’s Gender Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) High Level Committee (GESI HLC), which steers the CO’s technical and operational work to promote and integrate GESI at all levels

Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, Learning (MEAL) and Knowledge management 
• Oversee a monitoring system that provides timely and accurate project results by embedding MEAL across program implementation. This requires ensuring effective collaboration across MEAL staff, Technical Specialists, Technical Advisors and program implementation teams to develop logframes, indicators, implementation plans, quality benchmarks, monitoring, evaluation, learning and accountability frameworks.
• Lead programme quality improvements by monitoring and improving performance against KPIs, including resourcing and conducting high-quality evaluations to demonstrate outcomes and impact and ensuring that learning and accountability mechanisms are in place for all projects so that identified actions are resolved, with critical issues escalated to senior management.
• Ensure the research, evaluation and policy work of the Country Office contributes to generation of evidence for development and improvement of Common Approaches, sound decision-making and policy influencing internally and externally.
• Establish effective program learning and knowledge management systems to support adaptive programming and innovation that improves outcomes for children.

Advocacy, Campaigns, Communications and Media 
• Ensure development of an advocacy strategy and annual plans linked to the CSP, with clear Campaign deliverables, for the Country Office.
• Represent Save the Children as part of advocacy and networking with government authorities, donors, partners, civil society actors, children and other stakeholders to build relationships to facilitate achievement of CSP strategic goals and success of our projects for children.
• As part of the campaign committee, oversee the development of communications and media strategies to support Save the Children’s visibility and achievement of the CSP and Campaign objectives
• Lead political economy analysis, determining our impact and added value, developing change objectives, power mapping, 
• Develop a strategic approach or influencing techniques to our Advocacy and policy engagement and measuring our progress. 
• Capacity building and raising Advocacy & campaigns funding 
• Ensure Advocacy and Campaigns is integrated into programme development and implementation.

Partnership 
• Coordinate strategic partnerships with local and international civil society organizations, NGOs, governments etc., in advancing the country and global strategy to inspire our three breakthroughs for the most deprived and marginalised children.
• As appropriate to the country context, provide technical support and capability building to implementing and strategic partners.

Staff Management, Mentorship, and Development 
• Ensure appropriate staffing of Program Development and Quality team, and engagement of additional technical support when needed to deliver quality project design and delivery.
• Ensure that all PDQ staff understand and are able to perform their role in delivering first-class, quality programs for children in both development and emergency contexts through effective onboarding and clear workplans.
• Manage individual and team performance using principles of leadership agility, and Save the Children’s performance management system.
• Ensure that staff proactively build and maintain technical, managerial and leadership skills, including competencies in child rights programming, child safeguarding and Common Approaches, providing coaching opportunities when needed.

*The above job responsibilities may change upon job opening.