Emergency Response Roster - WASH Sector Manager

With 75 years of experience, our focus is on helping the most vulnerable children overcome poverty and experience fullness of life. We help children of all backgrounds, even in the most dangerous places, inspired by our Christian faith.

Come join our 33,000+ staff working in nearly 100 countries and share the joy of transforming vulnerable children's life stories!

Employee Contract Type:
International Assignment (WVI - Paid via GCLA) Fixed Term (Fixed Term)

Job Description:

*Country location to be determined based on response.

Children's lives can change in an instant in the wake of war, disasters and humanitarian emergencies. We see how vulnerable they are and how much they need our protection.

Joining our Emergency Response Roster means you can be a part of our response, providing immediate support when disaster strikes.

Here's where you come in:

Job Purpose

As a WASH Sector Manager in a response, you will lead the WASH response program and provide a technical oversight of all WASH activities in humanitarian settings and management of WASH programs during deployment in coordination with the National Office. Including managing the transition to NO at the end of the response.

S/He will be responsible for the sector

• To provide technical leadership and advice, offering specialist advice and input for the design, implementation, and operation of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) initiatives in WV humanitarian programs, coordinating with the National Office (NO) WASH Team Leader.
• To lead WASH response activities, collaborating with the WV National Office, Response team, and cluster to initiate and lead response activities for water, sanitation, and hygiene promotion.
• To ensure adequate resourcing, securing financial and staffing resources for all aspects of WASH program implementation, including behavior change and cross-cutting themes.
• To build and maintain partnerships that enhance national WASH dialogue, policy development, and implementation, positioning WV as a preferred partner and sector lead for donors and agencies.
• To represent WV in coordination forums that include WASH cluster meetings and coordinate with other development agencies and national-level WASH implementing partners to increase effective collaboration, prevent duplication, and identify gaps.
• Manage and oversee the transition from emergency WASH to early recovery, ensuring continuity and sustainability of WASH initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide sector leadership for timely and appropriate delivery of WASH activities, including the following.
• Ensure WASH is included assessments to identify robust responses.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of WASH programs with the programs and operations team, developing an integrated plan, budget, and detailed implementation strategy aligned with the response strategy.
• Ensure monitoring frameworks are understood and effective in meeting the needs of affected populations. Engage donors and other partners to ensure that WV is a viable partner.
• Manage WASH staff and promote technical excellence, applying minimum standards such as CHS and SPHERE, and incorporating cross-cutting themes into the design.
• Coordinate with other sectors to promote integrated programming in emergencies when possible.
• Collaborate with the Grants Acquisition and Management team to develop and roll out a WASH fundraising plan, including donor positioning, interaction, strategy development, and proposal submission.
• Coordinate with finance in the design and management of budgets.
• Develop key messaging for media teams related to WASH in emergencies.
• Assist in recruiting qualified local and expatriate staff to implement the WASH program
• Participate in WASH Management team meetings and update the response on WASH actions at programs and operations meetings.
• Review and refine WASH programs and budgets, supporting assessments, baseline measurements and evaluations.
• Represent WV at key coordination forums, such as Cluster and/or national, local government, and civil society planning meetings, ensuring WV work and plans are included in all reports, including 4/5Ws.
• Document and share lessons learned.
• Develop and implement sector plans with community engagement and utilizing Do No Harm approach.
• Determine sector organizational structure and staffing plan, ensuring review/adjustment of JDs and appropriate budgets, and contributing to setting performance indicators.
• Ensure sector programme and project logframes refer to technical standards, consider government standards, Sphere Standards, WVI Humanitarian Accountability and Protection and are aligned with the organization best practices and sector packages.

Capacity building

• Capacity assessment of WASH staff (including WASH cluster co leads) and develop a development plan which includes skill transfer. Facilitate WASH in emergencies training opportunities for relevant staff.
• Ensure that WASH staff understand the importance of working with other sector staff in the responses. This includes, health, nutrition, protection, child protection, education, livelihoods and economic development.
• Adapting national training materials as appropriate for NO and learning centres.
• Ensure that that all co-ordinators and team leaders are providing proper leadership and support to the projects according to their area of expertise and based on a defined action plan with Sector Lead.
• Work on empowering team members to take the appropriate decisions and actions and call for regular meetings for the unit staff.
• Assist staff in understanding and adapting project models to local contexts in alignment with local strategy.

MEAL and Evidence base

• Ensure monitoring and evaluation of WASH interventions supporting the Monitoring Evaluation Accountability and Learning (MEAL) team in evaluating the program and identifying lessons learned
• Formulate guidelines, processes, measurements, and standards for the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of WASH projects in collaboration with other advisers and MEAL.
• Ensure that accountability mechanisms are in place for community and stakeholders feedback on sector are reviewed with communities based on the concept of Community Based monitoring and evaluation.
• Through providing technical analysis and support in the development of research for best practices, WASH designs and application of core project models in humanitarian settings.
• Collaborate with health sector specialists to identify and adapt evidence-based WASH programs for implementation in context-appropriate local health program initiatives.
• Facilitate the production of high-quality reviews, analyses and reports and/or secondary research about the application of WASH initiatives and practices in programming.
• Through development of systems and reporting mechanisms for surveillance, field investigations, real time evaluation and post project evaluations to test the effectiveness and impact of WASH initiatives and practices.
• Develop a WASH plan aligned with the WVI Humanitarian Accountability Framework.
• Through developing specific tools and indicators to assist National offices for writing good WASH proposals.
• Track WASH programme progress toward targets through the ITT and other indicators, adjusting where necessary to attain programmatic goals
• Ensure continued post-implementation monitoring per relevant national office and global standards

Networking and partnerships

• Ensure the organization is effectively represented in key forums WASH clusters, UN and academic forum and other WASH related NGOS and organizations) and build and maintain these networks.
• Seek opportunities for interagency collaboration,
• Consider co-leading in WASH cluster and participating in technical working groups, conferences and forums to disseminate work.
• Support the learning centres to incorporate emergency preparedness and response into their strategies.
• Development of partnerships with organizations and agencies to fund and implement WASH in the response.
• Coordinate with the Global Centre and Regional Office to ensure strategic alignment of the WASH sector.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILL AND EXPERIENCE

Required Education, training, license, registration, and/or Certification

• Post graduate qualifications in Civil/ Environmental Engineering, public health and/or international development.


• Excellent networker.


• Ability to work in, and contribute to, a collaborative team-building environment.

• Willingness and ability to travel to project areas frequently.


• Excellent analytical/ problem solving skill and detail orientation.


• Minimum of 5 years of experience in emergency and WASH.


• Has experience in working with UN and/or INGO and other partners in the WASH sector.

• Proven ability in programme design and management including assessments, reviewing and writing grants, and evaluation.


Proven ability in capacity building including training.


Required Professional Experience

• At least 5 years in international humanitarian response and development work.
• Ability to communicate cross-culturally and sensitive to other cultures.
• Understanding of donor requirements and completion of emergency response funding and grants proposals.
• Understanding and ability to set up contracts and review tenders.

Preferred Experience, Knowledge and/or other Qualifications

• Registration with national engineering or public health body.
• Excellent computer skills,
• Understanding of the humanitarian architecture and the cluster system
• Detailed knowledge of current approaches to design and construction of small, medium and large scale community water and sanitation facilities in complex humanitarian emergency., with experience in assessing water, sanitation and hygiene promotion/public needs/actions in either a conflict/complex humanitarian emergency.
• Knowledge of the theory and practice of hygiene promotion and the relationship between WASH design and disease transmission dynamics including child and maternal mortality. In particular, to demographic and major and minor population health morbidity and mortality, the aetiology of diarrhoeal disease, arboviral (VBDs) infections and WASHs role in the management of chronic/acute malnutrition and HIV in disease management.
• Experience in managing diverse teams.
• Ability to manage multiple grants.
• Professional experience in using community engagement practices for the assessment, design and implementation monitoring and evaluation of water, sanitation and health promotion/hygiene projects/programs.
• Demonstrated experience in working closely within a team, collaboration, or group to analyse and implement WASH programs in local community settings.
• Demonstrated experience in professional writing on disease modelling, analysis of public health practice or management including sector analysis, problem -identification and problem-solving actions.
• Experience preparing advocacy briefs and fundraising for Water sanitation and hygiene programs.
• Completed hostile environment or security training.

Required travel and/or work environment accommodations

• Ability to travel to/within domestically and Internationally as required.
• Work hours are often in excess of 12 hours per day during difficult periods of the response.
• Responses are often mounted in insecure or natural disaster-prone contexts, which may disrupt normal work patterns and generate staff safety issues.
• Work and housing environments may at times be well below normal standards in terms of facilities, equipment, food availability and hygiene.

Required Language(s)

Effective written and verbal communication in English. Other UN languages such as French, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese, are preferred.

Applicant Types Accepted:
Local and International Applicants (IA's) Accepted