"Director" Jobs
For more than 30 years, War Child has been driven by a single goal – ensuring a safe future for every child affected by war. We aim to reach children as quickly as possible when conflict breaks out and stay long after the cameras have gone to support them through their recovery. We work with local communities and governments to help protect and educate children, and support them to heal and learn, for a safer, brighter future.
Last year, War Child UK agreed to come together with War Child Holland, War Child Germany, War Child Sweden and Children in Conflict in the USA, each of whom previously operated as independent NGOs, to form the War Child Alliance, which went live in January 2024. The new Alliance now runs our overseas projects, our research, scaling and advocacy programmes on behalf of us all, utilising our collective power and influence to have the greatest possible impact for children affected by war. As a member of the new Alliance, War Child UK is now a highly effective and innovative fundraising entity, raising crucial funds and awareness of our work globally.
Join us as our Director of Finance and IT at War Child UK, a pivotal role within our Leadership Group reporting directly to Helen Pattinson, CEO. Your role is to lead our finance and IT, but as a member of our leadership group to take joint responsibility with other Directors for leading the organisation.
As Finance and IT Director, you'll lead the optimisation of our finance and IT systems to streamline recording and reporting of financial transactions. Your analytical skills will be essential as you explore cost and income centres, supplying vital data necessary to significantly enhance our fundraising efforts.
Beyond day-to-day operations, you'll play a strategic role in long-term financial planning, fostering collaboration across the War Child Alliance. Together with fellow leaders, you'll steward the wider organisation, ensuring War Child UK is ready for success and equipped with ambitious financial investment frameworks.
Success in this role also entails ensuring our IT systems maintain the highest standards of excellence, delivering accurate and timely financial performance insights. You'll contribute to a vision where War Child UK achieves extraordinary results within a financially sound Alliance, empowering members to maximise their impact while being accountable for every penny raised.
You will be a qualified accountant with exceptional strategic and operational experience. You do not necessarily need to have prior international development experience, although you will need to demonstrate that you can build effective working relationships with overseas counterparts. Experience of working within a complex fundraising environment would be highly advantageous though. For this role, we are also as keen to hear from experienced directors who are excited by what we do as we are from those for whom this would be their first senior leadership role.
Tall Roots is acting as an employment agency partner to War Child UK. If you would like an informal discussion about the role, please email Mark Crowley at Tall Roots.
Job title: Regional Director, East and Southern Africa
Principal Location: Nairobi (other strategic locations in East Africa negotiable)
Role Purpose:
Street Child is a rapidly growing, child-focused, humanitarian and development organisation. In 2023, Street Child celebrated reaching over one million children across 25 countries over its fifteen years of existence. This was accomplished with and through a growing network of more than 200 national and local actors. The Regional Director will be a standard bearer of this ambition in East and Southern Africa, providing leadership across all countries where Street Child is operational while monitoring and pursuing growth opportunities across the region. As Street Child’s most senior representative in the region, the Regional Director will guide and drive the organisation to deliver on the objective of ensuring all children are safe, in school, and learning.
As Street Child actively seeks opportunities to expand its support for the most marginalized girls and boys, the Regional Director will be responsible for providing outstanding leadership and for resourcing and delivering high impact programming across East and Southern Africa. The Regional Director will work to identify and advance partnerships with regional, national, and local actors, as well as donors. This will require bringing a strong network to the role along with energy to represent Street Child in organisational, regional, and global forums. As Street Child country teams drive delivery for girls and boys, the Regional Director will work with country directors to develop high-functioning teams to deliver and resource ambitious regional and country strategies.
The Regional Director will manage one regional programme coordinator and will progressively assume responsibility for line management of country directors in East and Southern Africa.
Key Responsibilities:
- The Regional Director will act as chief motivator, working collaboratively with country, regional, and head office teams to:
- Cultivate enthusiastic and high-performing teams through outstanding leadership:
- Build, lead and motivate an ambitious and enthusiastic team of Street Child Country Directors and Strategic Leadership Teams.
- Oversee and support the recruitment and development of passionate, motivated, and technically excellent Street Child staff.
- Strengthen Street Child’s culture of learning, for both staff and local partners, by identifying professional and organisational development opportunities that respond to self-identified capacity gaps.
- Build a supportive network of learning and information exchange between regional county teams.
- Be a frequent in-person presence in operational countries, sometimes spending extended periods to support leadership at the country level, including in insecure contexts.
- Oversee the management of partnerships in countries in East and Southern Africa where Street Child does not maintain a direct presence.
- Drive resource mobilization across the East and Southern Africa region, for country programmes, regional strategy, and partners:
- In close collaboration with country leadership, identify country-level needs, seek out opportunities, and support in the development of winning proposals for country programmes.
- Across the region, identify needs and gaps, and drive new potential expansion opportunities in line with Street Child’s global strategy.
- Guide programmatic excellence across the region through robust strategy development and high-quality programme delivery:
- Develop a technically robust and evidence-based regional strategy that identifies Street Child’s comparative value and strategic goals in the region, across humanitarian, development and refugee contexts.
- Continuously consult with Country Directors, programme managers and local partners to ensure programme design and delivery is iterative, adaptive and quality-assured and impact is clearly measured.
- Provide support to local partners to develop organisational development plans and their own high-functioning leadership structures.
- Oversee and work closely with the regional finance team in their development and delivery of accurate, value for money budgets and robust operational processes.
- Ensure that operations and programmes in East and Southern Africa are conducted in line with Street Child’s policies and standards, including in the areas of safeguarding, safety and security, HR, finance.
1) Be a passionate representative of Street Child and our partners, across the organisation and in external forums:
- Represent Street Child at the highest level in East and Southern Africa, including pro-active participation in relevant coordination mechanisms at national and regional level.
- Represent Street Child and the needs of children in East and Southern Africa in global for a as required.
2) Advance and diversify partnerships with the local actors who respond to the needs of girls and boys in their communities, and with donors who can resource the work:
- Lead the development of strategic partnerships with relevant actors including donors, INGOs and local/national government, including at the regional level.
- Oversee the development of a resource mobilisation strategy for the region based on Street Child’s expertise and donor priorities.
- Lead and/or support Country Directors in the development of high-quality and highly competitive institutional funding proposals.
- Proactive engagement with Street Child UK head office and programmes team on strategic, networking and fundraising activities.
- The Key Responsibilities provide a high-level view of the Regional Director role. These responsibilities will evolve as the Regional Director expands Street Child’s reach across East and Southern Africa. Street Child operates with an entrepreneurial spirit that may require staff to step-up and step-in to reasonable tasks beyond the initial description of their role. The Regional Director may occasionally be called upon to provide surge or scoping support to other parts of Street Child Programmes as delegated by the Director of Global Programmes.
Qualifications and Experience:
- Significant senior management experience, leading high-functioning programme regional or county teams in the humanitarian and development sector. Previous experience as a country or regional director is preferred.
- Strong strategic thinker, with demonstrated expertise developing, resourcing, and delivering strategic plans at the regional or country level.
- Demonstrable experience of proposal development and/or winning funding; Experience in both humanitarian and development contexts.
- Strong command of the localisation agenda, and commitment to local level leadership and decision-making.
- Strong experience delivering high quality education and/or child protection programming.
- Excellent written and spoken communications in English.
- Experience working in the East and Southern Africa region.
- Demonstrated experience working closely with and in support of a multitude of partners including those from local civil society, government, and the private sector.
- Excellent relationship building skills, with an ability to skillfully navigate both national and international stakeholders.
- Willingness to actively engage in program development with country teams including extended missions to support at country level (significant travel expected).
- Additional language skills with a preference for Swahili, Portuguese, French, Somali, or other regional language
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
Programme Manager (Executive)
Location: Based in London with travel to sub-Saharan Africa
Hours: Full time (Office Based)
Salary: £75,000 – £90,000 (Negotiable dependent on experience)
Our client is an independent foundation that invests in children and young people in developing countries to improve their lives and to maximise demographic dividends for long term economic growth.
They do this by partnering with visionary African governmental leaders to deliver on initiatives that have the potential to positively and dramatically enhance the life outcomes of their people and the trajectories of their countries.
Focusing on and supporting the efforts of their partners to aid success, our client has recently adopted a new strategy with a clear accountability target: Over the next five years, they want to have played an integral role in substantially and tangibly improving 23.5 million lives.
The role
This is a key role within the organisation, internally support the Senior Program Directors, as well as externally working directly with government partners to provide implementation guidance, in order to ensure the successful delivery of transformational, cross-sectoral initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In this role, you will review and develop program-related materials that drive strategic priorities; monitor program achievement progress; manage local consultants and technical assistance providers; provide financial oversight of grants; identify and highlight compelling stories about leaders with whom they work; document and help disseminate best practices across their programs; and track and document results across programs.
This role is focused on working directly with inspiring government leaders to implement their human capital development goals for their people, and you will be expected to interface in a respectful, savvy, and non-prescriptive manner with government colleagues, while simultaneously providing the honest feedback of a true partner.
In this role you can expect a dynamic environment and a culture of collaboration, innovation, and drive for highly leveraged outcomes.
Experience
To be successful you will need extensive experience in managing complex and large-scale program implementation, ideally in Sub-Saharan African countries.
You will have a good understanding of how governmental departments work (ideally with direct experience working within government) and have had significant interactions at high policy levels within governments, with proven experience in managing complex and politically sensitive relationships with different stakeholders.
Able to demonstrate methodical program oversight and management, you will need an exemplary work ethic with a drive for achieving concrete results from often complex environments. You will be experienced in the use of program management tools such as dashboard creation, program monitoring and strategic planning and be able to example good financial acumen and excellent research and analytical skills, with ability to synthesise comparative research clearly.
Knowledge wise we are looking for substantial, relevant expertise in one/some of the following: health, nutrition, job creation, urban development or education, ideally in Sub-Saharan Africa. This will include familiarity with evidence, key actors, and proven interventions in a broad range of human development areas.
This role will suit someone who is used to working at the most senior levels and brings excellent people skills and highly developed communication, presentation, negotiation and influencing skills. You will support the ambition of policy champions at national level Applicants must have the right to work in the United Kingdom.
Successful candidates will be required to complete an enhanced DBS check.
CV’s are being assessed and sent to the client on a rolling basis so early application is advised. Please apply directly through our website.