Consultant - Partner Safeguarding and Protection Mainstreaming - Poland/Ukraine

Mercy Corps has been responding to the Ukraine emergency since February 2022. Mercy Corps response program focuses on multi-purpose cash intervention and other key sectors, particularly food security, livelihoods, NFIs, and protection. Mercy Corps is also supporting local NGOs and other civil society actors currently supporting displaced populations, as well as those in Ukraine sheltering in place. As Mercy Corps pursues its objectives in the region it will continue to assess the security situation in areas of potential operation, with an eye towards the logistics of possible programmatic interventions and positioning going forward.

At Mercy Corps, safeguarding is a holistic term encompassing our prevention and response to sexual exploitation and abuse of program participants, sexual harassment in the workplace, trafficking, and child safeguarding. We seek to ensure that all team members, program participants and partners are able to safely exercise their agency, access resources they need, and use and share their power safely in order to cope, adapt and thrive in their environments.  Our safeguarding prevention efforts are embedded in an overall safe programming approach which includes coordination between our interventions to enhance safeguarding, protection mainstreaming, and accountability for affected populations. We strive to take proactive action to identify and mitigate risks of potential harm in service delivery, program design and implementation, and external factors, especially harm caused by our team members or anyone working on our behalf.

The Safeguarding and protection mainstreaming consultant will work closely with program teams to support the strategic management and oversight of partner’s safeguarding prevention, reporting and response systems across Poland, Moldova and Ukraine. The Consultant will coordinate and manage a process to assess safeguarding and protection mainstreaming risks within organizational structures, program implementation, and service delivery.  They will design practical guidance to support efforts that will enable stronger systems and actions for safeguarding and protection mainstreaming and mitigate potential risks of harm caused by staff, programming and operational systems.  The consultant will lead support to partners in assessing and identifying safeguarding and linked protection mainstreaming risks, take into account their specific operational program context, and reflect on the partners’ existing resourcing, knowledge, attitudes and current best practices to prevent, detect and appropriately respond to safeguarding and protection mainstreaming concerns. They will then support partners with developing and executing practical action plans to mitigate risks and support with awareness raising strategies with team members and partners and community sensitization.

Working in close coordination with the protection team, the consultancy is a collaboration with our partners to help them strengthen their procedures and practices and ensure all steps in the partnership program lifecycle integrate management and mitigation plans in accordance with Mercy Corps and donor standards around safeguarding and protection mainstreaming.

1. Lead a process of collaboration with partners to assess safe programming risks specific to partners’ operations, assess the strength of partners safe programming policies, procedures, and practices
2. Work with partners to jointly identify areas that need more strengthening and develop a capacity strengthening strategy for trainings, knowledge and skills building, communication, policy and procedure development, etc.
3. Coordinate with the Protection Advisor, GESI, CARM, Senior Advisor for Ethics and Risk program team to consolidate overlapping tools and processes to simplify the analysis and implementation of safe programming with partners and minimize unnecessary redundancies.
4. Seek joint collaboration with Safeguarding, CARM, Protection, GESI and Partnership teams especially with trainings, communication, etc.
5. Lead the development of an overall partner safeguarding strategy and contextualized partner specific workplans
6. Provide safeguarding trainings, with focus on Safe Programming concepts to key program management and partner staff in all countries.
7. Engage with the partnership, programs and CARM teams to ensure safeguarding risk analysis is integrated into existing partnership vetting  and onboarding processes

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• 5-10 years of experience in relevant technical field (required)
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent
• At least five years professional experience in development/humanitarian sector PSEA/ Safeguarding, Protection Mainstreaming, gender-based violence, including a deep understanding of s survivor-centered principles and approaches
• Experience in emergencies, fragile states or other complex, high-risk context preferred
• Excellent oral and written English skills; fluency in Russian and Ukrainian a plus
• Experience collaborating with local partners
• Experience with programming providing cash assistance is a plus
• Ability to work in a fast-paced emergency response environment and adapt to the rapidly evolving context as necessary
• Excellent listening, interpersonal, communication and networking skills in both remote and in-person contexts
• Proficiency with MS Office software required (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

Timeframe / Schedule:

4 months

The Consultant will report to:

Deputy Response Director

The Consultant will work closely with:

Regional and Global Safeguarding Team, Ukraine Response Protection Advisor, Program and Partnership teams, CARM, GESI, Security and Access team, HR, PAQ, Ethics and Risk