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.
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Lead the design and delivery of the partnership learning pillar, coordinating cross-country learning cycles, documentation, and structured reflection between IRC and partners.
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Position women-led safety audits as community-generated risk analysis, and strengthen the pathway from that analysis into local decision-making and adaptive management.
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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.
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Ensure learning is co-owned with partners and feeds their own institutional positioning, not only IRC’s reporting obligations.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Advance the shift of analytical and decision-making authority toward partners with genuine institutional standing, including SSWC in Somalia and FODDAJ in Kenya, co-designing tools and thresholds with them rather than imposing them.
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Support the broader civil society and women’s movement ecosystem the partnership connects to, recognizing partners as governance and coordination actors in their own right.
Strategic focus on women and girls in conflict settings
The role keeps women and girls in active conflict and protracted displacement at the center of the partnership, including where conflict-related sexual violence is a feature of the context.
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Ensure program design and adaptation are anchored in the realities faced by women and girls across the six contexts, several of which are shaped by active conflict and large-scale displacement.
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Support conflict-related sexual violence sensitive practice where relevant, including safe and consent-based documentation, clinical pathways, and Do No Harm decisions taken at closest proximity to violence, with pattern awareness fed upward.
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Keep adolescent girls visible as a distinct group rather than folded into a general women-and-girls category.
Partnership and donor relationship management
The role supports coherence of technical delivery across countries and reporting cycles, contributing technical content into the strategic relationship with Irish Aid, which AMU stewards and holds overall.
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Serve as a central program coordination point for the POWER partnership, supporting planning, adaptive management, amendments, and quality reporting to Irish Aid in coordination with the European DE & Frameworks team (Irish Aid).
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Feed technical content on program direction, learning, and strategic opportunities into AMU’s communication with Irish Aid and the Department of Foreign Affairs. .
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Coordinate across the six country teams and the relevant IRC technical, advocacy, awards, and finance functions to keep the partnership coherent and its commitments met.
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Contribute technical input to AMU’s design and negotiation of the next Strategic Partnership phase (post-2027), including program scope, theory of change, and the monitoring, evaluation and learning framework, coordinating input from WPE pillar leads, country teams, and partners, under AMU’s overall lead on negotiation, timeline, and the donor relationship.