Business Support Assistant – Gender and Protection World Food Programme Experience: 3 to 5 Years Colombo, Sri Lanka Apply By: 09-10-2024

WHY JOIN WFP? 

• WFP is a 2020 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
• WFP offers a highly inclusive, diverse, and multicultural working environment.
• WFP invests in the personal & professional development of its employees through a range of training, accreditation, coaching, mentorship, and other programs as well as through internal mobility opportunities.
• A career path in WFP provides an exciting opportunity to work across the various country, regional and global offices around the world, and with passionate colleagues who work tirelessly to ensure that effective humanitarian assistance reaches millions of people across the globe.
• We offer an attractive compensation package (please refer to the Terms and Conditions section of this vacancy announcement).

BACKGROUND:

• The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is the world’s largest humanitarian agency dedicated to combating hunger globally, aiming for Zero Hunger. WFP ensures that no child goes to bed hungry and that the poorest, particularly women and children, can access nutritious food.
• In emergencies, WFP delivers food to those affected by disasters, conflicts, and epidemics, saving lives. Post-emergency, WFP helps communities rebuild. Annually, WFP provides food assistance to over 100 million people in 83 countries, leveraging its global reach and local expertise.
• In 2022, amid Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since independence, 3 in 10 Sri Lankans are food insecure, with soaring food and fuel prices making nutritious diets unattainable. Approximately 6.3 million people face acute food insecurity, with 66,000 severely affected. WFP aims to assist 3.4 million people urgently needing food and nutrition support and the affects of the crisis still remains. With emerging climate change risks and WFP’s work on supporting the national school meals programme, nutrition interventions, resilience programming and capacity strengthening of partners there is deeper commitment to ensure equality and supporting an inclusive programme agenda.
• WFP re-committed to Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP) in 2017, ensuring systematic engagement with those affected by food insecurity to meet their needs. This includes taking into account and being accountable to those affected, especially those facing participation barriers.
• The Business Support Assistant for Gender and Protection will focus on AAP and disability inclusion, supporting adjustments and innovations to tailor AAP approaches to diverse contexts and populations while supporting community feedback mechanism as a major component and will be reporting to the Programme Policy officer Gender and Protection and will be based in Colombo Sri Lanka with travel to support district programming.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES  

Business Support Assistant for Gender and Protection:

• Will be responsible for receiving, logging, and managing complaints and feedback through defined channels, ensuring compliance with protocols, with special reference to data protection and seeking necessary guidance from the CFM manager cum Gender and Protection Associate.
• Translate cases, assign them to relevant staff, review follow-up actions, and prepare information directories and FAQs.
• Support to edit Standard Operating Procedure of the community feedback mechanism and taking the lead of the document with guidance from the CFM Manager and Gender and Protection Officer.
• Developing sensitization documents, translation work, proofreading of documents related to programmes
• Supporting various business operations including travel arrangements, event support, and maintaining office records. This include supporting major field level activities, facilitating and conducting interviews in local languages to gather qualitative data, supporting to analyze the data gathered and develop field reports with support form Gender and Protection team leads.
• Supporting overall cross cutting mainstreaming activities led by the gender and protection teams including work related to coordinating with UN country team work related to Gender and Disability inclusion activities, WFP cross cutting coordination team, supporting to engage with all focal points in different departments
• Overall supporting to facilitate gender, protection for sexual exploitation and abuse, disability inclusion trainings in location languages and supporting trainers of trainer programmes through co-facilitation and event coordination
• Directly co-leading and engaging in main annual programmes of the Gender and Protection team including International Women’s day activities and 16 days programme by supporting with innovative design ideation and execution of the programmes with in the country office and externally.
• Engaging with WFP country team in diverse activities to learn important aspects of various programmes for gender and inclusion transformative programmes such as the Emergency response programmes (key), Nutrition and School Meals Programme, Resilience and climate adaptation programmes and cross cutting capacity strengthening programmes.
• Supporting the team to conduct monitoring of programmes and ensure all targets are achieved
• Engaging in supporting with wider organizational programmes including those conducted by Human resource, administration, logistics, finance, communications and digital assistance programming

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:

Education:

• Completion of Secondary Education necessary. Post-secondary certification of relevant functional areas including business support, gender,  disability or protection is an added advantage.

Experience:

• 4 years of experience in related professional area of work including supporting or engaging community feedback, accountability, gender, disability and protection

Knowledge & Skills:

• Fluency in written and spoken English. Fluency in written and spoken Tamil and/or Sinhala
• Working knowledge of gender, protection, disability thematic
• Languages: Fluency in English, Sinhala and Tamil language.

Source: https://wd3.myworkdaysite.com/en-US/recruiting/wfp/job_openings/job/Colombo-Sri-Lanka-DemSocRep-Of/Business-Support-Assistant—Gender-and-Protection_JR105258