Director of Programme Development and Quality

ROLE PURPOSE:

As a senior leader and member of the Senior Management Team (SMT) in Lebanon, the Director of Programme Development and Quality (DPDQ) is responsible for leading the design, coordination and delivery of the Country Office Impact Model ensuring development and delivery of high quality, evidence-based, innovative programmes for children through a nexus approach, that contributes to Save the Children’s global Breakthroughs: Learn, Survive, Be Protected.

S/he is responsible for driving cross-functional engagement in the development and delivery of Country Strategy Plans (CSPs), developing annual plans and reporting on results. The DPDQ ensures quality sectoral and cross-sectoral emergency and humanitarian response and plays a key role in the emergency and humanitarian response and crisis management leadership. The DPDQ ensures that a robust research, monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (RMEAL) system is in place, that the country office engages in the collection and use of evidence and that this is shared across the global organization, and that reliable data is used for decision-making.

S/he is responsible for ensuring capacity strengthening, mentoring and coaching of technical advisors & specialists to support programme quality in line with global standards and key performance indicators. As a senior leader in the country office s/he plays a key representational role with the government, donors, partners, peer agencies, SC Members and others. The DPDQ supports strategic positioning with donors and partners and leads on project design to ensure that the country office strategy can be delivered in line with child rights programming principles.

CHILD SAFEGUARDING:

Level 3 - the role holder will have contact with children and/or young people either frequently (e.g. once a week or more) or intensively (e.g. four days in one month or more or overnight) because they work in country programmes; or are visiting country programmes; ore because they are responsible for implementing the police checking/vetting process staff.

SCOPE OF ROLE:

Reports to: Country Director

Staff directly reporting to this post: RMEAL Manager, Technical Advisors and specialists (education, child protection, child rights governance, shelter/WASH, FSL, climate),

Role Dimensions: As one of the most senior staff in the Country Office, the Director of Programme Development and Quality (PDQ) must demonstrate the qualities of agile and trustful technical leadership, have a passion for child rights, and be driven to make positive impacts on children’s lives. S/he plays a key role in defining and pursuing the strategic direction for Save the Children’s programmes in Lebanon, representing Save the Children vis-a-vis national authorities and line ministries, ensuring the relevance, coherence, safety and impact of our programmes for children in all contexts. This is a challenging role requiring an individual who can work with complexity and multiple tasks at one time. It is essential that the Director of Programme Development and Quality builds and maintains strong working relationships across functions within the CO, including with team members from Operations, New Business Development , Advocacy, campaigns, comms and media (ACCM) team, and Finance. S/he should lead by example in demonstrating this cross-functional collaboration. This role demands dedication to demonstrating outcomes for children, experience in integrated child rights programming and a highly motivated leader. S/he has specific oversight for ensuring that programmes demonstrate thematic excellence in contributing to Save the Children’s three Breakthroughs for children, especially for the most deprived and marginalized: no child dies from preventable causes before their fifth birthday; all children learn from a quality basic education; and violence against children is no longer tolerated.

KEY AREAS OF ACCOUNTABILITY:

Impact Model Leadership

• Lead the design, operationalisation and periodic review of the Country Office Impact Model, aligned with CSP and Theory of Change.
• Ensure clarity on: Strategy, Planning and Reporting Programme Design and Development Programme Quality and Programme Technical Excellence Evidence and learning, Research, Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, Learning (MEAL) and Knowledge management Partnerships and localisation Staff Management, Mentorship, and Development QUALIFICATIONS EXPERIENCE and SKILLS ADDITIONAL JOB RESPONSIBILITIES The duties and responsibilities as set out above are not exhaustive and the role holder may be required to carry out additional duties within reasonableness of their level of skills and experience. EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES The role holder is required to carry out the duties in accordance with the SCI Equal Opportunities and Diversity policies and procedures. CHILD SAFEGUARDING We need to keep children safe so our selection process, which includes rigorous background checks, reflects our commitment to the protection of children from abuse. FRAUD PREVENTION The role holder is expected to uphold high standards of integrity and transparency, and will have access to financial, operational, or programmatic resources that require strict compliance with SCI’s Anti-Fraud and Corruption Policy. This includes responsibility for preventing, identifying, and reporting any suspected fraud, corruption, or misuse of resources in the course of their work. SAFEGUARDING OUR STAFF The post holder is required to carry out the duties in accordance with the SCI anti-harassment policy. HEALTH AND SAFETY The role holder is required to carry out the duties in accordance with SCI Health and Safety policies and procedures.
  • What impact is pursued (outcomes & scale)
  • How impact is achieved (modalities, partnerships, advocacy, programming mix)
  • Ensure integration of programme delivery, advocacy, technical expertise, partnerships and learning into a coherent model.
  • Drive cross-functional accountability for impact across PDQ, Operations, ACCM, Partnerships and NBD.
  • Lead the development/updating of the Child Rights Situation Analysis, including analysis of country context and taking into account child rights principles, ensuring participation and buy-in from all relevant staff, partners and other stakeholders as necessary
  • Lead the SMT to develop/update and drive forward the Country Strategy Plan (CSP) that is in line with the global strategy, Ambition 2030, with child rights at the core of all programming and advocacy work.
  • Ensure CSP reflects:
    • Impact + Revenue + Operational structure alignment
    • Risk, funding viability, and partnership ambition
  • Embed localisation and system-level impact ambitions in strategy.
  • Provide leadership on development of relevant annual plans, monitoring of progress against the plan, and completion of accurate, on-time Country Annual Report of outcomes and impact for children, aligned with the Global Results Framework.
  • Facilitate the development and pursuit of thematic and cross-cutting strategic priorities in line with the CSP, including gender equality, to guide current and future SC programming and Humanitarian Strategies.
  • Support ownership and commitment to the Country Office strategy by all staff and departments through clear communication, regular feedback on progress and engagement of all functions in updates.
  • Participate in global discussions and working groups to represent country office, and the voice of children, in strategy design and policy development.
  • Support change processes and roll-out new ways of working to improve achievement of the CSP.
  • Play a leadership role in the design, development and delivery of emergency responses, and humanitarian responses to the protracted crisis, and ensure quality and accountability in all.
  • Based on tracking provided by the New Business Development team, review and position for opportunities that will drive the CSP.
  • In consultation with the Country Director and Members, ensure technical engagement with donors to pre-position and prepare for opportunities.
  • Leading strategic engagement with existing and prospective donors, aligned with New Business Development plans, together with NBD Senior Manager, CD, D-Ops and ACCM Senior Manager
  • Play a leading role in designing proposals, including:
    • Engaging with technical experts as needed to ensure high quality, evidence-based designs that draw on needs assessments, learning from past programmes and child safeguarding principles;
    • Ensuring partners are identified and appropriately engaged in programme design, linking with Operations and Awards teams as need be for assessments, especially to strengthen gender sensitivity at design stage;
    • Ensuring proposal designs and their budgets include robust MEAL plans that are aligned with the Global Results Framework (and therefore advance towards our Breakthroughs), incorporate Common Approaches as relevant, and build in critical learning questions.
    • Ensuring the project budget will enable the project to be delivered as designed.
    • Incorporating child and community participation into design, as relevant.
  • Ensure the country programme delivers high quality, multi-sectoral programming in both development and humanitarian contexts (as appropriate).
    • Monitor and advance technical and operational quality of programmes, including conducting regular field visits to provide feedback on quality benchmarks, soliciting inputs for design of new programmes and collecting ideas for innovation.
    • Monitor programme Key Performance Indicators and, in partnership with other functions, take steps to improve the quality programming platform to meet agreed upon standards.
    • Work closely with the Director of Operations to ensure Quality Framework standards are met and procedures are followed throughout the project cycle and across the portfolio.
    • Ensure technical experts proactively and regularly communicate planned requirements for programme design, learning and implementation to relevant CO departments/functions.
  • Build and lead a team of programme technical experts needed to successfully deliver against the CSP. Ensure effective working relationships with SC global, Member and regional technical advisors, procuring technical support as needed to support programme and advocacy efforts, including during Emergencies.
    • Ensure that programme technical experts engage in larger communities of practice within and external to Save the Children, to link with the most relevant and evidence-based approaches and conduct timely and useful review of project reports to support quality reporting for Members and donors
    • Ensure that the different technical sectors of the Country Office are coordinated, integrated and support each other to optimize programmes and projects.
    • Ensure that child safeguarding and safe programming is embedded in programme design and considered throughout implementation to ensure that we do all we can to ensure children in our programmes are safe, in line with our child safeguarding policy.
  • Represent Save the Children as part of advocacy and networking with government authorities, donors, partners, civil society actors, children and other stakeholders to build relationships to facilitate achievement of CSP strategic goals and success of our projects for children.
  • Oversee a monitoring system that provides timely and accurate project results by embedding MEAL across programme implementation. This requires ensuring effective collaboration across MEAL staff, Technical Advisors, Member technical experts, and programme implementation teams to develop logframes, indicators, implementation plans, quality benchmarks, monitoring and evaluation frameworks and related tools.
  • Lead programme quality improvements by monitoring and improving Programme KPI performance, including resourcing and conducting high-quality evaluations to demonstrate outcomes and impact and ensuring that accountability mechanisms are in place for all projects so that identified actions are resolved, with critical issues escalated to senior management.
  • Ensure the research, evaluation and policy work of the Country Office contributes to generation of evidence for development and improvement of Common Approaches, sound decision-making and policy influencing internally and externally. Ensure in particular a focus on impact at all times and at all levels.
  • Establish effective programme learning and knowledge management systems to support adaptive programming and innovation that improves outcomes for children.
  • Lead strategic partnerships and localisation ambition in line with SCI commitments
  • Ensure that Partnership strategy embedded in CSP and programme design and that SCI acts as facilitator, not only implementer
  • Position SCI as partner of choice for national/local actors, and help identifying and strengthening strategic partnerships with local and international civil society organizations, NGOs.
  • Provide key technical guidance towards the development & operationalisation of a localisation strategy, together with the Localisation &Partnerships Manager, D-Ops & ACCM Senior manager
  • Overall lead for strategic engagement with government at national level on technical and programmatic areas.
  • Ensure appropriate staffing of Programme Development and Quality team, and engagement of additional technical support when needed to deliver quality project design and delivery.
  • Ensure that all PDQ staff understand and are able to perform their role in delivering first-class, quality programmes for children in both development and emergency contexts through effective onboarding and clear workplans.
  • Manage individual and team performance using principles of leadership agility, and Save the Children’s performance management system.
  • Ensure that all staff proactively build and maintain technical, managerial and leadership skills, including competencies in child rights programming, child safeguarding and Common Approaches, providing coaching opportunities when needed.
  • Master’s Degree or Bachelor’s Degree, and experience in relevant social science (especially in Child Development or Community Development), human rights, development studies, NGO management or equivalent fields.
  • Fluency in Arabic and English, both written and oral – excellence in English writing is essential.
  • A minimum of ten years of progressively senior management experience in development or humanitarian agencies, including significant experience leading teams, programmes, and organizational operations.
  • Preferred: three years of international experience (working outside of one’s country of origin.), experience supporting multiple Country Offices or exposure to regional and global operations, Candidates without such experience may be considered if they demonstrate a strong ability to operate effectively within an international organization and collaborate across diverse cultural and geographic contexts.
  • Experience in one or more of Save the Children's thematic sectors: education, child protection, child rights governance, health and nutrition, child poverty, climate, evidence and learning, emergencies.
  • Understanding of advocacy, policy, and government systems, and particular experience with child rights programming, including UNCRC.
  • Strong skills and proven experience in leading strategic planning, change management and programme management processes; also from the knowledge and learning perspective.
  • Strong skills and proven experience in new programme development, project design and proposal writing with corporate, foundations and institutional donors.
  • Credibility to lobby, influence and represent Save the Children at all levels.
  • Experience in developing and managing monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning systems.
  • Excellent listening, inter-personal, communication and networking skills; proven experience and effectiveness working across functional teams and in a matrixed structure; and an ability to work with diverse populations.
  • Skills in training, capability building, coaching, mentorship, problem solving, and project cycle management.
  • High level of self-awareness and willingness to take feedback for growth and self-development.
  • Proven experience as a team player and leader in an international organisation.