Partnership Officer

Background/IRC Summary: The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC offers lifesaving care and life-changing assistance to refugees forced to flee from war and disaster. At work today in over 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities, we restore dignity and hope to millions who are uprooted and struggling to endure. The IRC leads the way from harm to home.

IRC has been working in Pakistan for approximately 40 years, managing and delivering large, complex programs to meet the needs in health, education, safeguarding, environmental health and livelihoods for displaced, poor and disaster affected communities. With the support of the federal and provincial governments, and generous donors like FCDO, ECHO, GAC, EU Delegation, Irish Aid and Australian Aid Agencies the IRC is currently implementing projects across the country.

Position Summary: The Partnership Officer reports to the Senior Partnership Manager, will support IRC Partnership sections to increase and strengthen their engagement with various partners. Partnership officer will be responsible to manage strong partnerships with a wide variety of partners in line with IRC’s Partnership Excellence for Equality and Results System (PEERS) policy and donor regulations.

Job Responsibilities:

A. Partnership:

• Coordination with partner organizations in developing and finalization of project narrative and financial proposal.
• Coordinate and co-lead Partnership Capacity Analysis (PCA) process, including contributing to and facilitating the collaborative risk analysis and management.
• Conduct and coordinate Partner Identity and Background Review (Vetting) processes, including completion of the report.
• Coordination with project leads to review appropriate partnership agreement type and draft agreement, taking into account the due diligence outcomes and specific project and donor requirements.
• Facilitate the collaborative development and delivery of the Partner Project Support Plan, ensuring that it appropriately addresses issues identified in the due diligence process, and coordinate with relevant departments for the timely, quality implementation of the plan.
• Liaising with HQ for approvals and/or review of documents and agreements on OTIS.
• Support and co-lead Partnership Project Opening, Review and Closing Meetings, together with the relevant team members.
• Coordinate and participate in timely and effective partner program, finance, and compliance monitoring, and work with the technical leads and finance staff to address any project performance issues.
•  Coordinate narrative reporting processes and liaise with finance on finance reporting processes, including review and feedback, ensuring that appropriate checklists are completed.
• Coordinate for partner support as identified during the PCA or implementation.
• Coordinate with Finance to ensure timely transfer of payments to partners.
• Draft and process sub-awards modifications in a timely manner ensuring that the relevant IRC units (in-country and at the HQ) provide their inputs and approve the modification.
• Maintain complete and organized partnership files for each partner.
• Maintain up to date Partnership Tracker/Monitoring Schedule.
• Lead the completion of the Partnership Review Memorandum process to review the performance of the partners, of the IRC (including on the basis of partner feedback), and of the partnership, including successes, challenges and lessons learned, fostering ongoing partnerships beyond the sub-award project cycle.
• Lead on all partnership agreement closeout processes.
• Support Program Leads in communications of partners’ results to relevant stakeholders.
• Conduct Anti-Terrorism Compliance (ATC) of partners and partners’ vendors as per IRC policy.

B. Finance:

• Work with the finance department on partners' budget development & reviews.
• Collaboration with the finance department in developing/verifying partners’ financial reports.
• Support finance team in conducting grant opening and closeout meetings.
• Orient/facilitate partners in developing financial reports and record keeping as per IRC/Donors standards.
• Carry out partners’ record verification in the field as per schedule.

Key Working Relationships:

Position Reports to:  Senior Partnership Manager

Coordination: Project lead, Project team, Partners’ Manager

Job Requirements:

Education:

• Masters’ degree in social sciences, development studies or any relevant field from any recognized University.

Work Experience:

• 05 years’ work experience in projects/programs development within a similar setup. At least 03 years of managing partnerships with local NGOs.

Skills and Competencies:

• Knowledge of donor rules and regulations for financial reporting desired (e.g. FCDO, ECHO, BPRM, USAID, EU)
• Demonstrated successful experience working with partners.
• Sound knowledge of budgeting, financial reporting & program designing.
• Demonstrated sound knowledge and expertise of managing and interpreting agreements regarding content and language
• Willing to travel partners’ offices and project sites across country.
• Excellent written and spoken Urdu & English language skills.
• Good knowledge of MS Office (MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint)
• Demonstrated interpersonal skills, sound judgment, planning, team building and facilitation skills.
• Excellent communication, negotiation and conflict-resolution skills.
• Strongly resilient to unfavorable situations.

The IRC Core Values and Commitments.

The IRC and IRC workers must adhere to the values and principles outlined in IRC Way - Standards for Professional Conduct. These are Integrity, Service, Equality and Accountability. In accordance with these values, the IRC operates and enforces policies on Beneficiary Protection from Exploitation and Abuse, Child Safeguarding, Anti Workplace Harassment, Fiscal Integrity Anti-Retaliation and Combating Trafficking in Persons.

IRC is committed to ensuring that IRC staff is suitable to work with children and have the knowledge s/he needs to uphold and abide by the IRC’s Child Safeguarding Policy.

Level of interaction with children: Frequent direct contact with children

IRC ensures that its staff must actively practice the roles and responsibilities related to client responsiveness, accountability to people in affected communities and must have competencies to solicits and listens to feedback and other’s perspectives, responds to feedback with maturity and sensitivity and takes appropriate decisions and makes changes to behavior or actions in response to feedback.

IRC recognizes that gender equality is fundamental to the achievement of our organizational mission. As such, IRC is committed to the promotion of gender equality in all aspects of our operations and programs. Our organizational policies, procedures and actions demonstrate this commitment.

Women candidates from minorities and differently-abled women are highly encouraged to apply.