Strategic Partnership Program Lead

The International Rescue Committee is a global humanitarian aid, relief and development nongovernmental organization.

Strategic Partnership Program Lead

Job overview

The Strategic Partnership Program Lead  coordinates quality and learning across the six POWER country programs. The role works through country WPE and program teams, POWER’s women-led and local partners, and the  WPE Global Practice, and  coordinates with the Award Management Unit (AMU), which leads the donor relationship with Irish Aid. It is accountable for technical quality assistance against IRC core WPE standards and the IASC GBV Minimum Standards for the design and delivery of the  partnership learning pillar, and for tracking and reporting delivery against scope, timeline, and budget across the six countries so that deviation is identified early. The position contributes to the partnership’s advocacy pillar and to the design of the next partnership phase.

Major responsibilities

The role holds the technical quality of POWER delivery to IRC’s WPE standards, keeps the partnership and the WPE Global Practice in two-way exchange ,rather than a one directional flow of standards downward,  and tracks delivery across six countries against scope, timeline and budget so that deviation is flagged early enough for adaptive management

• Provide quality oversight across the six country programs, so that survivor-centered response, case management, women and girls’ safe spaces, clinical and MHPSS referral pathways, and social norms work meet IRC WPE technical standards and the IASC GBV Minimum Standards.

• Serve as the connective role between the POWER partnership and the WPE Global Practice, translating core standards into partnership contexts and carrying partnership-generated practice back into the core.

• Support the sequencing of prevention and social norms activities to context, so they are introduced only where women-led community analysis confirms the preconditions for safe implementation are met.

• Maintain coherence of approach across the six countries without flattening contextual difference, identifying where a shared standard applies and where local adaptation is warranted.

• Track and report on delivery against scope, timeline, and budget across the six country programs, flagging deviation early enough for adaptive management rather than end-of-cycle correction.

• Ensure MEAL and program data feed directly into program adaptation, so that what the data shows changes what the program does, not only what it reports.

• Connect program data and implementation evidence to wider sector trends and debates, including comparable protection and GBV programming elsewhere. undefined

Learning, evidence, and the partnership learning agenda

The role leads the program’s learning function, treating implementation learning as a legitimate evidence pathway rather than a lesser substitute for external research. It also support the partnership’s advocacy pillar, so that evidence generated with the partners informs partners’ own advocacy and IRC’s policy positioning.

• Lead the design and delivery of the partnership learning pillar, coordinating cross-country learning cycles, documentation, and structured reflection between IRC and partners.

• Position women-led safety audits as community-generated risk analysis, and strengthen the pathway from that analysis into local decision-making and adaptive management.

• Build the program’s evidence base on what enables and constrains change in protracted crisis settings, surfacing failure modes honestly, including referral systems that exist on paper but not in practice, and norms work that shifts survey scores without shifting community behavior.

• Ensure learning is co-owned with partners and feeds their own institutional positioning, not only IRC’s reporting obligations.

• Steward the POWER advocacy pillar, supporting partners to carry community-generated analysis into local, national, and global advocacy where they hold standing in their own right.

• Work with advocacy and policy colleagues so the partnership’s evidence informs IRC positioning toward donors, multilaterals, and normative bodies.

Strengthening the core and surge capacity of women-led and local organizations

The role supports partners on two distinct fronts, their institutional core and their capacity to surge in emergencies, resisting the pattern where localization language coexists with authority still held by the international actor.

• Support partner institutional strengthening across governance, financial systems, safeguarding, and MEAL in ways partners define and lead, consistent with the PEERS principles and the direct funding commitment.

• Strengthen partner surge and emergency response readiness under the emergency response pillar, so local organizations hold a credible role when crises escalate rather than being displaced by international surge.