Public Health Engineering Lead - Global Humanitarian Team

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES (Technical, Leadership, People and Resource management)  

The PHE lead will undertake the responsibilities listed below. Time allocations are approximate and will vary over time. The PHE Lead is expected to travel for up to 3 months per year. 

Management (people, budgets, assets, projects and decision-making) (30%) 

• Convene technical advisers and HSPs and delegate technical areas of responsibility to them 

• Matrix manages technical advisers in the 2 regional pools, line manage the WASH Fund Manager, HSPs and WASH Programme Accountant and a number of staff funded fully with restricted funds when applicable. 

• Focused support for Asia and LAC Oxfam WASH programmes by having regular meetings with the WASH staff in those countries and attending relevant meetings for these regions.  

• Represent Oxfam externally in the WASH sector and other specialised fora, coordination structures and strategic initiatives to ensure presence and influence the sector. 

• Manage a budget and WASH projects that the Lead will ensure are completed to a high standard and consistent with the GHT strategic direction and quality technical standards. 

• Provide technical input to affiliate programme funding teams with WASH proposal developments. 

Play an active role in the Performance & Innovation Team, providing constructive input to the team and actively engaging with it; 

• Be ready to support scale-up of Category 1 and big Category 2 emergencies, including travel which may  involve trips of 6 weeks duration or longer, if required. 

• Support, with the rest of Leads, Advisors and Managers, the understanding and use of key analytical tools and frameworks related to safe programming. 

Analysis and problem solving (information, complexity, creativity and forward planning) (40%)  

• Monitor and analyse trends in the WASH sector and develop a clear steer and strategy to influence the sector and position Oxfam (together with the PHP Lead). 

• Monitor and evaluate Oxfam’s own programme and policy work, feeding learning into policy development, guidance, tools and learning materials. 

• Set programme standards (including KPIs) and monitor these and use evidence to drive organisational and sector learning and performance. 

• Keep a check on the PHE and WASH work more broadly in regions and countries and ensure they are of good quality and where they are not, identify strategies to address this and follow up rigorously. 

• Identify niche, innovative areas for Oxfam to excel in and that can be applied at scale. 

• Work closely with the PHP Lead and the Protection and Gender Leads to ensure WASH programmes are safe, are sensitive to gender and other power dynamics. 

• Ensure that WASH programmes evolve and are adapted as far as possible to context and culture to reflect community feedback. 

• Together with other sector leads in the Performance & Innovation Team, contribute to a strategy for improving cross sector working and develop indicators for evaluating progress and impact towards a more holistic and community centred delivery of humanitarian programmes. 

• Ensure programmes are safe, are sensitive to gender and other power dynamics and ensure that they are informed by the community to benefit from the work. 

Impact (contacts, communication, advice, and consequences) (30%) 

• Ensure quality programme standards in WASH are clear to all among PHE Advisers and PHE HSPs and expectations of them are also clearly laid out. 

• Set up a baseline of where PHE advisers and HSPs are at in both ‘getting the basics right in engineering’ but also in their understanding of the community and their responsibility towards the community as well as issues around gender and other power dynamics.   

• Proactively promote and support through specific initiatives and work with other sectors and area Leads, community focused responses which are accountable, safe and sensitive to gender and other power dynamics. 

• Provide WASH sector leadership at global level, representing Oxfam externally at cluster level and in other fora, engaging with global policy areas on WASH, monitoring trends and feeding into advocacy, campaigns and policy and media messaging on WASH. 

• Document key learning in the sector and lead on the development of communication material to be shared internally and externally. 

• Explore and be proactive in finding funding opportunities for WASH work with institutional and non-institutional donors. 

• Foster an appropriate working culture built on Oxfam’s values, respectful and cognisant of power imbalances internally and between Oxfam, our partners and the communities we serve.