Grants Coordinator

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC offers lifesaving care and life-changing assistance to refugees forced to flee from war or disaster. At work today in over 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities, the organization’s mission is the enduring purpose: to help people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster, including the climate crisis, to survive, recover and gain control of their future.

The IRC has been working in Somalia since 2006, providing essential services to conflict and disaster affected communities. The IRC has been operational in Banadir (Mogadishu), Puntland, Galmudug and Southwest State implementing interventions in the areas of livelihoods, WASH, governance, and peacebuilding, women’s protection and empowerment, nutrition, education, and health reaching hundreds of thousands of conflict and drought affected people.

SCOPE OF WORK:

The Grants Coordinator is the focal point for proposal development, donor reporting, grants information management and grants management capacity-building efforts. The Grants Coordinator also supports programmatic and budgetary monitoring, compliance with donors and internal IRC rules and regulations.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Proposal Development

• Support the Country Program Senior Management Team in identifying new funding opportunities, maintaining good relationship with current donors, and updating the Fundraising Plan.
• Proactively identify new sources of funding in collaboration with sector teams.
• Analyzing requests for proposals and providing guidance for a go or no-go decision.
• Lead the development of proposals for submission to donors in coordination with sector leads and the finance and operations teams. This includes:
  • Analyzing requests for proposals
  • Overseeing proposal development process, developing timelines, sharing, templates, and guidelines for proposals,
  • Working with program staff, ensuring proper review at the HQ level, gathering input from technical coordinators, technical advisors, Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning staff, and the Regional Units
  • Lead in drafting general context sections of proposals (non-technical); Provide copy-editing for all technical proposal documents, resulting in clear, succinct, and coherent text Coordinating with programs and finance staff regarding proposal writing and budgeting.
  • Compiling, reviewing, and editing proposals.
  • Collate proposal supporting documents.
  • Packaging proposals for submission.
• Draft and/ review budget narratives, ensuring coherence with the budget and donor requirements.
• Act as focal point with donors in-country for the proposal development process.
• Liaise with the Awards Management Unit to ensure proposals meet internal standards, apply IRC’s Outcomes Evidence Framework (OEF), are in line with IRC Somalia Strategic Action Plan (SAP) and are donor compliant**.**

Grants Management and Reporting

• Maintain the Opportunities and Grant tracker ensuring, and other information management systems are up to date.
• Ensure quality information management through regular maintenance of grant files, reporting calendars, timely submission and updating of internal IRC documentation and other Grant Unit tools, including coordination and preparation of documents and files for internal and external audits.
• Monitor and facilitate compliance of programs with donor and IRC requirements and raise issues affecting external/internal compliance.
• Monitor burn rates and implementation progress of the grants and flag grant underperformance and compliance issues to relevant Technical Coordinators and the Senior Management Team. Support follow-up actions to resolve grant challenges.
• Assist in preparing, reviewing, and modifying memoranda of understanding and grant agreements.
• Provide inputs to the country wide and sectoral fact sheets, providing relevant information for dissemination to donors, regional office, HQ and others.
• Responding to donor, auditor and external requests as needed.
• Support the Program Cycle Meetings to happen monthly (called by the project leads) to ensure that grants are implemented in compliance with the IRC and relevant donor regulations, to ensure strong financial management, to ensure the proper operational openings and closings of grants, and to ensure monitoring and evaluation of programmatic progress. Support the follow-up to action points from these meetings.
• Lead all aspects of donor reporting processes to ensure the timely submission of accurate programmatic reports, and coordinate with the Finance department to ensure timely submission of budget modification requests and financial reports. This includes tracking and disseminating reporting schedules and templates, as well as, reviewing and submitting reports to donor.
• Ensure that reports to donors are submitted on time; that reports are coherent and accurate and that the internal reporting tracker and IRC’s Opportunity Tracking Information System (OTIS) reporting functionality are up to date.
• Coordinate information on beneficiary numbers and indicator targets achieved with the MEAL team.
• Lead capacity development of Program staff to ensure that they have the skills and knowledge on how to write donor reports.
• Undertake other key grants management, program development, monitoring and evaluation, communications and external relations activities as requested.

Team Coordination, Management and Capacity Building

• Build grant management capacity of field staff by facilitating training and providing one on one follow up support in report writing, proposal development and other related topics.
• Coordinate and manage the Grants team (consisting of 2 staff and 2 interns) to consistently deliver high quality results.
• Provide orientation and on-the-job training to the Grants team members. Topics may include donor compliance rules and regulations, BVA, OTIS, project design, proposal development, budget development, Project Opening and Project Closing meetings etc.
• Hire, manage and supervise staff and interns. Coach and develop team members to grow professionally and technically in their positions. Lead annual performance reviews for Grants Team.

Administrative/Other

• Ensure OTIS, Box Drive is up to date for all assigned new proposals and grants. Secure all OTIS approvals for the assigned new proposals prior to submission to the donor.
• Supervise and complete special projects as assigned by the Deputy Director-Program Support that may fall outside the job description.

KEY WORKING RELATIONSHIPS:

• The Grants Coordinator reports to the Deputy Director-Program Support and work with sector leads and departments.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Master’s degree in international relations, international development, or a related field preferred.
• At least 5 years of international work experience in relief or development programs, including playing a significant role in, or leading, proposal and donor reporting for institutional donors.
• Prior grants management experience and familiarity with US (USAID-BHA), European (EU, ECHO, SIDA, DMZ, GFFO), FCDO, and UN (WFP, UNPBF) donor regulations, procedures, and requirements.
• Familiarity with international standards for key program areas (Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS), Sphere standards, health, WASH, protection, and gender-based violence)
• Familiarity with IRC systems and processes is a plus.
• Excellent organizational skills and ability to determine priorities and meet multiple deadlines.
• Detail-oriented with good multi-tasking abilities and communication skills, both oral and written; and
• Able to work well both within a team and independently, in a challenging and fast-moving multicultural environment.
• Ability to work with tight deadlines for report writing/ information requests.
• High-level knowledge and experience with Word, Excel, Teams, Outlook, etc. required.
• Excellent written and spoken English required.