Job Title
Classification Level
Organizational Unit / Duty Station
Immediate Supervisor’s Title
Technical Manager’s Title
Number of Direct Reports
Organizational context (where the job is located in the Organization)
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is the world’s largest volunteer-based humanitarian network. IFRC is a membership organisation established by and comprised of its member National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Along with National Societies and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the IFRC is part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. IFRC’s headquarters is in Geneva, with regional and country offices throughout the world.
COVID-19 is a global health crisis, an information crisis and increasingly a wider socio-economic crisis. One of the major learning of the past decade, from the West Africa Ebola outbreak to natural disasters and complex emergencies, is the critical need to engage communities from the very beginning of a response.
For humanitarian responses to be effective and have long-term positive impacts, humanitarian organizations need to work collectively to ensure a community-centred approach at all levels of a response. This means: facilitating access to life-saving information and essential services; proactively enabling the participation of affected communities in relief efforts; ensuring decisions at all levels within the humanitarian architecture are taken and adapted according to community feedback, concerns and priorities, as well as social insights; and supporting local responders to lead responses whenever possible. Such approaches help build trust with communities and local gatekeepers, increase the uptake of protective and health seeking behaviours, and ultimately ensure sustainability of humanitarian work. Living up to our 2017 IASC commitments on Accountability to Affected Populations as well as core protection and localisation principles is now more critical than ever.
Globally, the interagency coordination of Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) for the COVID-19 response is co-led by WHO, IFRC and UNICEF. In East and Southern Africa the RCCE technical working group (TWG) is co led by IFRC and UNICEF. Thanks to a substantial funding grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the current interagency structure is being scaled up to provide a collective service to improve collaboration among key partners at all levels, support the collection and analysis of multiple sources of data from communities, and provide technical support to a wide-range of actors at regional and country level. This will support the implementation of the RCCE strategy at country level, as well as the Global Risk Communication and Community Engagement Strategy and the WHO COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan 2021.
The IFRC and UNICEF Africa Regional offices in Nairobi will co-host the RCCE interagency coordination structure for East and Southern Africa, which will include a coordinator (UNICEF), social science (UNICEF), information management (IFRC), and country surge support (IFRC) positions. The inter-agency regional surge coordinator will be expected to work with regional and country level RCCE staff within IFRC, UNICEF and WHO respectively to ensure that strategic plans and activities utilize the strengths of the respective agencies and are designed and delivered collaboratively. Organigrams for RCCE staff within IFRC, WHO and UNICEF within ESAR can be found here.
Job purpose
The RCCE Interagency Regional Surge Coordinator will establish and lead the RCCE collective service’s country level technical support for strengthening coordination and response action in East and Southern Africa, including supporting national RCCE technical working groups. He/she will work to; improve country level RCCE coordination and collaboration between agencies responding to COVID-19 in Eastern and Southern Africa; identify and share common approaches for addressing regional and national RCCE issues and challenges, including developing shared resources and guidance for country level response actions; collate and analyze trends in community feedback and social science research on COVID-19 and the humanitarian response; identify actions to strengthen the response with other technical pillars, country working groups and the national response leadership. The position will help to strengthen RCCE coordination across technical pillars and between the country, regional and global level. The surge coordinator will work within a team composed of a regional coordinator, an information management delegate, and a social science delegate. As the majority of COVID-19 cases are currently in southern Africa, and as South Africa is a priority country for the RCCE Collective Service’s support, this position will be based in Pretoria, South Africa[1]. This will help to facilitate inter-agency coordination on RCCE within South Africa and will also enable travel more easily within southern African countries (according to national travel policies). Whilst the position will be based in South Africa, this remains a regional position and therefore the surge coordinator will still be expected to support countries in east Africa as well.
Job duties and responsibilitiesCoordination:**
Support the convening, facilitation and coordination of the national RCCE Technical Working Group (TWGs) in east and southern Africa, including strengthening linkages with the global and regional RCCE coordination forums. As per the terms of reference, the RCCE TWG activities include:
Regularly update and adapt national RCCE interagency strategies and workplans based on the evolution of the pandemic and behavioural insights
Bring together all actors working on RCCE at the country level, including traditional and non-traditional actors, to improve collaboration and coordination of activities and map coordination capacities and roles and responsibilities of the main partners involved
Identify key RCCE challenges impacting the effectiveness of the COVID-19 response and discuss common approaches to address them
Promoting the use and adaptation of existing tools and guidance (or development of new ones) for the regional and country-level implementation of coordinated community engagement approaches (including needs assessments, perceptions surveys, partners mapping, community feedback approaches etc)
Discuss and agree actions based on trends and priorities identified in community feedback
Coordinate the identification of topics for social science research on COVID-19 including primary research, when necessary, in partnership with the social science officer.
Engage with the media to encourage responsible reporting, sharing of key health information and tackling the spread of rumours and misinformation.
Mapping resource mobilization sources and opportunities for engagement with donors to advocate for RCCE funding at country and regional level.
Developing and reporting on common RCCE indicators as part of the COVID-19 response monitoring framework.
Support the community feedback sub-working group efforts at regional and country level to collect, analyse and agree recommendations based on the trends in community feedback across agencies. Help to track actions taken and provide support to follow up where needed.
Coordinate WG-related performance monitoring and recommend corrective action where and when needed.
Support and ensure alignment with other regional and national coordinators in the strategic approach and ensure wide dissemination and exchange of tools and best practice.
Advisory and technical support:
Facilitate the regional and national RCCE WGs to undertake rapid needs assessments and agree on specific technical support to be provided, with focus on priority countries (to be defined on a needs/demand basis appropriate to the region).
Support priority countries to update/adapt RCCE interagency plans, according to the evolution of the pandemic.
Support country level RCCE coordination working groups, clusters, pillars and other relevant responders (on demand) with RCCE expertise and ensure support to country coordination approaches, promoting engagement of national/local organizations that represent the social, cultural, gender, age, and religious distribution of the communities (i.e faith-based organizations, youth organizations, CSO networks, private sectors and other influencers).
Provide RCCE technical advice and support to the other national TWGs (Case Management, IPC, MHPSS and Continuity of Services & Surveillance, Lab and Point of Entry) including supporting them to address key recommendations arising from community feedback data and social science research.
Work with RCCE partners, to develop demand-driven guidance/tools based on assessment of gaps and support needs from other national TWGs and country level coordination groups.
Capture and document examples of RCCE best practices, including community-driven approaches to COVID-19 prevention and management, for example physical distancing, hand washing, isolation etc
Develop and manage a repository of existing RCCE materials and resources including strategies, guidance notes, country level key messages and tools for reference in a diversity of accessible and applicable formats and common languages across the region by ensuring physical or online libraries are established.
Coordinate joint remote and in-person capacity building exercises to address specific gaps identified.
Working with the Information Management Officer and RCCE Working Group members, ensure the compilation of, and regularly updated 4Ws (Who does What, Where and When) mapping at regional and country levels.
Representation:
Duties applicable to all staff
Actively work towards the achievement of the Federation Secretariat’s goals
Abide by and work in accordance with the Red Cross and Red Crescent principles
Perform any other work related duties and responsibilities that may be assigned by the line manager
Position Requirements
Education
Experience
Knowledge and Skills
Languages
Competencies (to be filled in by HR)
This vacancy is archived.