War Child UK is now going through a period of exciting change, with a scale up in its portfolio of programmes in DRC. The Country Office extended its geographical presence through the opening of a new programme in Tshikapa, Kasai, and Masisi, North Kivu. We now need to secure these recent positionings and continue to have ambitious plans to increase the scale and sustainability of our programme. The Head of Programmes in DRC will lead the response to this challenge. The position will drive a growing team forward and ensure the effective implementation of new and existing programmes and lead the development of additional programmes.

An integral part of the Senior Management Team in country, the Head of Programmes will be responsible for ensuring good strategic leadership of programmes, managing key risks and supporting the Programmes team to deliver their goals in DRC; Kinshasa (Representation office), Goma (Coordination office), Masisi, Kananga, Mbuji Mayi and Tshikapa, (Operational offices).

An integral part of the Senior Management Team in country, the Head of Programmes will be responsible for ensuring good strategic leadership of programmes, managing key risks and supporting the Programmes team to deliver their goals in DRC; Kinshasa (Representation office), Goma (Coordination office), Masisi, Kananga, Mbuji Mayi and Tshikapa, (Operational offices). It is a criticalrole requiring a motivated and experienced individual with a desire for a new and exciting challenge in a small but rapidly growing organisation. The role also ensures information from the country programme is shared across stakeholders and will represent War Child at the highest levels with donors, national authorities, clusters and national partners in DRC.
Your responsibilities
• Actively participate, in coordination with the Country Director and Programme Quality Manager, in programme development implementation and funding strategy in the themes of Child protection, education and livelihoods, ensuring cross cutting themes (gender, disability, and accountability) are integrated in programme engagements.
• Ensure War Child’s strategic positioning in DRC’s Humanitarian Sector by ensuring active and constructive presence, in key humanitarian and development forums and clusters; foster strong operational partnerships with donors and partners (INGOs, local NGOs, authorities).
• Assist the CD in fundraising efforts at country level by providing strategic information and analysis for proactive fundraising.
• Lead on the management of all grants: coordinate and ensure timely and effective reporting (internal and donor/partner), monitor grant management plans and BVAs, proactively raise concerns and risks, and manage operational donor communication.
• Working with SMT and support teams to ensure that WCUK and donor guidelines/policies are fully followed during all project implementation, reducing the risk of disallowable costs.
• Ensure the quality of projects implemented by WCUK, by monitoring and driving their compliance with internal and sector standards. Maintain overview of internal and external programmatic audits and ensure any findings/ recommendations are acted upon.
• Responsible for operational support (supervision, coherence, coordination and collaboration) between all the programme teams in DRC, Head Office as well as with various internal and external stakeholders of the organisation to achieve DRC programme strategy. Monitoring of security context and contributing towards the problem solving and troubleshooting required to keep the programme progressing.
• Ensure that child safeguarding is central in all project designs, implementation and monitoring, in accordance with War Child’s child safeguarding policy and related management tools.
• Provide line management leadership to all Programme Managers and, where gaps exist, Project Managers, ensuring they are well supported and guided to supervise the projects in line with the organisational Achievement and Development process.
• Lead on the organisation and chairing of internal capacity-building, strategic design and planning workshops/trainings for Programmes department by identifying needs, mapping internal capacities and knowledge sharing.