Project Coordinator, Scaling Nutrition-West Africa

Background/IRC Summary:  The IRC’s Airbel Impact Lab designs, tests, and scales life-changing, cost-effective solutions for people affected by conflict and disaster. By applying the IRC’s deep technical expertise and field experience with a range of skills from the behavioral sciences, human-centered design, rigorous research, and multi-disciplinary problem-solving in humanitarian contexts, we work to develop breakthrough solutions that combine creativity and rigor, openness and expertise, and a desire to think afresh with the experience of a large-scale implementing organization.

Scope of Work and Objectives:

The Project Coordinator, Scaling Nutrition will work closely with the Research and Innovation and Health teams to support the coordination of a delivery model for scaling the treatment of wasting in multiple countries. The Project Coordinator will support the Project Director as the main operational lead on: progress monitoring, knowledge management and quality assurance.

Major Responsibilities

1.  Progress Acceleration: Ensure the project to generates a timely, proactive response to challenges, delays and new opportunities by: (a) developing and sustaining a comprehensive project monitoring framework that tracks progress and risks and (b) providing consistent, supportive backstopping to country-level Delivery Advisors, in those countries in which they are seconded.

To this end, the Coordinator will:

-          Update and adapt the global project delivery tracker, ensuring it provides both high-level and detailed snapshots of progress (or barriers to and implications of a lack of progress)

-          Prepare monthly project management reports (internal) and progress reports (external)

-          Develop tailored communications materials to highlight the project’s progress, (i.e., briefing notes, blog posts, social media posts, etc.),

-          Ensure coherent flows of information so that all relevant stakeholders are updated regularly, with the most relevant materials for their role and participation level

-          In countries with seconded Delivery Advisors, act as the primary interface with each Delivery Advisor, supporting these roles to develop and detail country scaling action plans (and track progress against them)

-          In countries without Delivery Advisors, as requested and appropriate, directly support local stakeholders to detail country implementation plans / SOWs

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Deliverables:

-          Consistently updated global project delivery tracker

-          Monthly project management reports / progress reports

-          Draft country support and implementation plan / SOWs, in collaboration with Delivery Advisors and/or other country-level stakeholders, in at least 3-4 countries

-          Concise and compelling project communications materials

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2. Knowledge Management: Facilitate the seamless sharing of knowledge across stakeholder groups (especially between in-country support and the global project groups) and documentation of lessons learned.

To this end, the Coordinator will:

-          Consolidate relevant resources (i.e., tools, guides, protocols, etc.) into a global ‘binder’ of resources for use by in-country partners, working with project teams to adapt or upgrading these resources to/for specific country contexts, where relevant

-          Ensure wide public accessibility of key products, including but not limited to GCG minutes and activities, as well as the binder of in-country resources

-          Create a system to capture, deepen and document lessons identified through the Global Coordination Group and Project Implementation Caucus

-          Lead the evaluation of the project’s support services, documenting user experiences through exit interviews and other methods to provide recommendations on future adjustments

-          Document progress, challenges, and lessons learned as countries develop scaling action plans, to fold into knowledge management work

Deliverables:

-          Accessible and user-friendly binder of resources for in-country partners

-          Accessible knowledge projects (e.g. GCG minutes)

-          Framework to capture GCG/PIC lessons learned, leading to 3 country case studies and an evaluation of available support services for scale

3. Quality Assurance: Ensure quality delivery within and across key project workstreams, such that deliverables and services meet and exceed stakeholder expectations.

To this end, the Coordinator will:

-          Co-develop a cross-organization ways of working (‘call-down mechanism’) to facilitate expert service delivery, leveraging the strengths of existing models and assessing/anticipating potential administrative barriers to timely deployment

-          Prepare, standardize and adapt onboarding and offboarding materials for key support roles (i.e., Delivery Advisors and Technical Experts)

-          Provide consistent backstopping for these support roles - especially those in French-speaking contexts - during their secondments or deployments, ensuring that needs or challenges identified are appropriately addressed by the project or other relevant groups

-          Provide surge support to the global technical assistance support mechanism, as needed and relevant over project implementation

-          Oversee the development of meeting agendas for the Global Coordination Group and Project Implementation Caucus, ensuring that minutes with clear action points are circulated  

Deliverables:

-          Administrative roadmap to anticipate and prepare for the allocation (either remotely or in-person deployment) of country-level support via the various existing technical assistance support channels

-          Accessible, streamlined onboarding/offboarding materials for support roles

-          Weekly monitoring calls with support roles during deployments

-          Development and dissemination of meeting agendas and minutes (including action points) for at least 5 GCG and 5 PIC meetings