Program Manager – Universal WASH
Position Summary Expectations - Duties, Responsibilities
SALARY: Competitive INGO Package
LOCATION: Phnom Penh, frequent travel to provinces
EMPLOYMENT BASIS: Unspecified duration constract
REPORT TO: Head of Programs
Start date/effective date: January/ February 2024.
Explanation of the role
Program Manager – Universal WASH requires a dynamic person who can motivate national and sub-national government partners and stakeholders to strengthen systems for sustainable sanitation services and facilitate collective learning. The position requires someone with well-developed advisory, facilitation, coaching, documentation and critical thinking skills who can collaborate and work with a diverse range of people, particularly sub-national government.
The Program Manager – Universal WASH will lead WaterAid Cambodia’s work toward achieving universal access to WASH services. The Program Manager will actively engage in policy and strategy discussions at the national level to enhance the enabling environment, leading to improved WASH services for all Cambodians. The Program Manager will support all program coordinators within the systems strengthening team to enhance sub-national leadership, accountability, institutional development, coordination, planning, financing, monitoring and service quality improvement. The Program Manager will draw lessons from these sub-national programs to address system bottlenecks at the national level and influence universal access to WASH services in areas beyond WaterAid’s target provinces.
The Program Manager – Universal WASH leads the systems strengthening team to build on the team’s values-based culture of adaptive management and learning and raise the profile of WaterAid Cambodia as a role model of systems strengthening within the WaterAid Federation and global WASH sector.
Reporting to the Head of Programs based in Cambodia, the Program Manager will support the WaterAid Cambodia team and partners to develop and implement the country's strategic intents/outcomes and manage program and grant operations as follows: ( Please find in attachment below )
- National sector influencing and advocacy
- Provide visionary leadership to show how the WASH sector can operate more effectively and develop advocacy strategies to bring about these changes.
- Establish and maintain relationships with national authorities, including Ministry of Rural Developmental, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Industry, Science, Technology and Innovation (MIST), Council for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) and National Committee for Sub-National Democratic Development (NCDD), and continually collaborate with a range of actors at the local level to maximise available local resources and strengthen sector processes at sub-national level.
- Feed lessons from WaterAid’s programs into dialogue with Royal Government of Cambodia and other development partners regarding decentralisation of WASH services.
- Make regular use of sector coordination mechanisms such as Technical Working Groups and sub-working groups to promote key learnings and change objectives.
- Cultivate champions for WASH, both government and non-government, to raise the profile of WASH with the aim of increasing political willingness to prioritise WASH.
- Collaborate with national authorities to clarify roles and responsibilities related to WASH at the national and sub-national level and support development of performance planning and capacity building processes for continual improvement in the leadership, skills and capacity of government WASH professionals.
- Collaborate with national authorities to improve the effectiveness of national and sub-national coordination mechanism for WASH and ensure improved functionality for resolving sector issues and providing platforms for learning exchange.
- Provide ongoing input to decentralisation of WASH services and encourage scaling of good practice and lessons learnt
- Design and demonstrate processes for improving transparency of service quality and accountability between service providers and service users at scale
- Use a range of advocacy approaches to institutionalise existing leadership and capacity building programs such as Civic Champions, into government systems
- Lead WaterAid’s support to MRD’s engagement with the Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) partnership and fulfilment of Cambodia’s SWA commitments related to financing and monitoring.
- Help to shape national plans for achieving universal sustainable access to water, sanitation and hygiene, ensuring that such plans draw on good practice programming from WaterAid and other NGOs.
- Actively contribute to MRD’s development of a financing strategy for rural WASH.
- Contribute to the ongoing development and use of MRD’s MIS for rural WASH for monitoring of progress against the National and Provincial Action Plans.
- Team Leadership and development
- Recruit and lead a dynamic team of Cambodian professionals to deliver system strengthening programs in line with WaterAid’s values
- Coach the team to excel and play a role as future sector leaders in their areas of expertise.
- Identify and manage expert inputs as required, from across the WaterAid Federation and externally.
- Program development and delivery
- Design and manage programs based on WaterAid’s systems strengthening approach, in line with ‘Agenda for Change’ principles and fitting with latest decentralisation reforms in Cambodia.
- Use adaptive management techniques to evolve the program to maximise opportunities during program implementation.
- Prepare annual plans and budgets for delivery of systems strengthening programs.
- Establish new partnerships with local private sector and NGOs for effective delivery of the system strengthening program.
- Learning and Knowledge Management
- Lead documentation activities using a creative range of communication approaches to ensure that lessons reach key audiences and feed into policy dialogue in Cambodia and globally.
- Maintain positive relationships with other WaterAid Country Programs working on system strengthening and make high quality contributions to global publications and global learning events based on the Cambodian experience.
- Sub-national advisory support
- Design and facilitate workshops to monitor sub-national systems using WaterAid’s systems strengthening and advocacy approaches in order to identify and resolve key bottlenecks in WASH systems.
- Provide strategic and technical advice and coaching to program coordinators and subnational authorities on:
- Engaging and cultivating the leadership of provincial and district leaders from the political, technical and social spheres.
- Role clarity, capacity building and leadership development.
- Effective decentralisation and fulfilment of transferred responsibilities.
- Accountability between service users and service providers and effective platforms for gathering and responding to feedback to ensure improvements in service quality, especially for most marginalised groups.
- Improving functionality and effectiveness of provincial working groups.
- Developing and implementing strategic and action plans for universal, sustainable WASH services for rural and urban sittings which draw on global good practice.
- Accessing and using financial resources from government and non-government sources in order to fund sustainable WASH service delivery.
- Using and improving the accuracy of monitoring systems to track progress of against WASH indicators and make evidence-based service delivery decisions.
- Ensuring WaterAid’s water supply programming is meeting water quality standards and improving water quality of water supply services generally.
- Grant Management, reporting and compliance
- Manage relationship with donors for effective project delivery.
- Lead outcome monitoring and evidence gathering in order to exceed grant requirements.
- Manage systems strengthening grants and support program coordinators to manage grants, including budget management, narrative and financial reporting in conjuction with WaterAid’s policies, guidelines, procedures and donor’s requriments.
- Organisational responsibilities
- Line manages up to three program coordinators
- Actively contribute to the management of WaterAid Cambodia as a member of the Senior Management Team
- Input to development of WaterAid Cambodia’s annual Business Plans.
- Build strong linkages with other WaterAid Cambodia programmes of work and actively seek to integrate programming in order to maximise synergies.
- Represent WaterAid when delegated at external forums.
- Other tasks as requested by Head of Programs.
- Qualifications
- Essential
- Bachelor's qualification in social sciences, community development and development management or other relevant discipline.
- Desirable
- Masters level qualification.
- Qualification in rural development, governance, development management or WASH-related fields.
- Experience
- Essential
- Five to ten year’s work experience in a related field.
- Managing development programs at scale.
- Providing advisory support to government counterparts at national and sub-national level.
- Establishing and managing partnerships with local government, private sector and local NGOs.
- Managing knowledge and M&E systems, including use of digital platforms.
- Development and delivery of advocacy strategies to bring about change.
- Desirable
- Familiarity with ‘Systems Strengthening Approach’ and ‘Agenda for Change principles’.
- Engaging with government leaders at the national level.
- Behaviour change strategies.
- Mentoring and coaching of local partners.
- Experience working in rural development particularly WASH sector.
- Water security issues, risk assessment and participatory planning.
- Experience of nationa monitoring systems.
- Knowledge and skills
- Essential
- Governance issues at national and sub-national levels.
- Issues relating to system strengthening in the WASH sector.
- Detailed understanding of sub-national planning and budgeting processes.
- Knowledge of current decentralization reforms.
- Ability to transfer knowledge and skills to others.
- Documentation skills, drawing on program learning and presenting to various audiences
- Strong computer literacy.
- Strong communications skills in Khmer and English (both written and verbal), good editing skills, and ability to tailor communication materials for different audiences
- Desirable
- Understanding of ISAF and social accountability frameworks
- Understanding of the research and development (R&D)
- Leadership development approaches
- Issues relating to systems strengthening in the WASH sector.
- Understanding of WASH sector financing.
- Skilled in data analysis and presentation.
- Familiarity with Sanitation and Water for All mechanisms.
- Able to use mWater and/or equivalent digital monitoring platforms.
- Personal qualities
- A collaborator and a networker able to generate collective impact.
- Able to form and maintain influential relationships.
- Willingness to learn and ability to think creatively.
- Well-organized and delivers products on time.
- Strong interpersonal skills and supportive behaviours.
- Strategic-minded and results oriented.
- A strong commitment to gender sensitive, inclusive and pro-poor development work.
- Commitment to Child Safeguarding, program and grant safeguarding and to WaterAid’s values.
- Willingness to work within an organisational framework in the spirit of mutual trust and respect.
- Ability to travel regularly to target areas.
