Social Development Advisor

The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office pursues our national interests and projects the UK’s role in the world. We promote the interests of British citizens, safeguard the UK’s security, defend our values, reduce poverty and tackle global challenges with our international partners. We employ more than 17,000 staff in 179 countries and territories, across our diplomatic and development offices worldwide, which consists of 282 officially designated Posts. Our UK-based staff work in King Charles Street, London, Abercrombie House in East Kilbride and in Milton Keynes.

We are looking for a highly motivated and enthusiastic Social Development Advisor to lead delivery of Humanitarian, Food Security and Resilience Department’s Inclusion and Gender Equality agenda. Drawing on your technical skills and knowledge, you will be responsible for developing and driving forward appropriate policy and programmatic initiatives, building networks, and providing analysis on key inclusion and equalities issues to regularly update the agenda. This work is closely related to areas of high Ministerial interest including supporting women and girls in crises and conflict situations in addition to protection from Gender-Based Violence in emergencies where the UK has historically played a leading role.

This role will focus on inclusion related to the specific and diverse needs people have in humanitarian crises and the barriers they face when trying to safely access appropriate humanitarian assistance.  These needs, and the protection risks people may face (violence, coercion, deprivation), are shaped by social norms and historical forms of marginalisation (potentially based on gender, age, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, location and ethnicity). These are often accentuated in times of crises and intersect.

An inclusive approach to humanitarian action necessitates actively seeking to understand who is at risk of being left behind to ensure they safely access the assistance they require, with dignity. This can only be achieved through the effective participation of those affected. The successful candidate will play a critical role in defining, developing and supporting implementation of concrete inclusion-focused deliverables to enable the department to meaningfully ‘walk the talk’ on inclusion in humanitarian action, meet public commitments and take strategic opportunities to advance this file.

Roles and Responsibilities

The successful candidate will:

Deliver high quality, context specific expert social development advice, providing a technical challenge function and advisory support to key work planning processes, such as policy development, to ensure inclusion is embedded.

• Champion learning and use of evidence, including through seminars, technical guidance and analysis, working closely with the Social Development Head of Office and relevant policy and research teams.
• Build understanding, capacity and confidence and facilitate learning amongst staff across the Department. Providing technical leadership on inclusion, support for women and girls and broader equalities across the department’s work.
• Identify synergies and opportunities for further coordination and collaboration between Humanitarian, Food Security and Resilience Department Groups and the FCDO more widely to consolidate and embed best practice.
• Develop constructive links with Social Development advisors and Humanitarian Advisors in relevant posts as well as wider networks of internal and external inclusion leads.
• Work closely with the Humanitarian Response Department when responding to humanitarian emergencies, including surging in response to sudden onset crises to provide technical expertise.
• Work to ensure emergency preparedness undertaken by Response Department is inclusion sensitive.
• Collaborate with the wider humanitarian and social development cadres, seek to identify, learn from, and disseminate, approaches to humanitarian inclusion across the network, whilst also staying abreast of emerging evidence and wider developments within the sector.
• Engage closely with policy leads across Humanitarian, Food Security and Resilience Department and FCDO more widely working on disability, freedom of religion and belief and gender-based violence.
• Draw on core technical expertise through the Humanitarian Stabilisation and Operations Team (through task management of discrete and time-bound pieces of work).
• Design and oversee implementation of small-scale programming through the Departments Humanitarian Diplomacy Fund.

The FCDO operates an agile workforce. To facilitate this, you may be required to undertake other duties from time to time as we may reasonably require. Candidates who secure a role that is considered specialist/technical, may be required to affiliate to the relevant specialist network, if not already a member.

It is essential in your application that you provide evidence and proven examples in each of the following Minimum Criteria, the Behaviours and the Technical question as far as you are able to do so. These responses will be further developed and discussed with those candidates invited for interview.

You must be a British Citizen at the time of application and, if invited to interview, you will need to bring proof of identity (British Passport/Driving Licence etc.) with you.

This role requires you to attain Developed Vetting (DV) security clearance.

For more information about this process, click here. Attaining DV will require you to have been resident in the UK for five of the last ten years. At least one year of this must have been a consecutive twelve-month period. Serving overseas with HM Forces, in some other official capacity as a representative of His Majesty’s Government or having lived overseas as a result of your parents’ or partner’s Government employment counts as UK residency for the purposes of security clearances.

Minimum Criteria

• Demonstrable track record of delivering social development outcomes in humanitarian settings at Expert level through strong capability in social development technical competencies (further details in the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework) and ability to apply this in humanitarian and FCAS crisis
• Demonstrable track record of and ability to apply technical knowledge to deliver Social Development outcomes through programming, policy engagement, diplomatic channels, collaborations with other Development Partners etc.
• Experience of providing social development technical advice and inputs in relation to policy and programmatic work in humanitarian and/or fragile and conflict affected settings.
• Knowledge of the evidence base and/or understanding of approaches to tackle inclusion and gender issues in humanitarian contexts, including preventing violence against women and girls.
• Experience of building and influencing a strong network of internal, external, and international stakeholders on inclusion issues and the ability to collaborate and partner across diverse teams and external stakeholders.
• Confidence to deliver at pace, including the ability to juggle multiple competing priorities and maintain timely and professional outputs.

We’ll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Seeing the Big Picture
• Working Together

We only ask for evidence of these behaviours on your application form:

• Communicating and Influencing

We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Social and Political Analysis for practical application – Please refer to the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework
• Gender Equality and the Rights and Empowerment of Women and Girls – Please refer to the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework
• Social Protection – Please refer to the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework
• Empowerment and Accountability – Please refer to the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework
• Poverty and vulnerability monitoring and analysis – Please refer to the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework
• Motivation question at interview.

We only ask for evidence of these technical skills on your application form:

• Social and Political Analysis for practical application – Please refer to the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework
• Gender Equality and the Rights and Empowerment of Women and Girls – Please refer to the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework
• Social Protection – Please refer to the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework
• Empowerment and Accountability – Please refer to the FCDO Social Development Competency Framework