Global Lead, Women's Protection and Empowerment Systems Transformation

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world's worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, the IRC is one of the world's largest international humanitarian non-governmental organizations (INGO), at work in more than 40 countries and 29 U.S. cities helping people to survive, reclaim control of their future and strengthen their communities. A force for humanity, IRC employees deliver lasting impact by restoring safety, dignity and hope to millions. If you're a solutions-driven, passionate change-maker, come join us in positively impacting the lives of millions of people world-wide for a better future.

Background

The Violence Prevention and Response Unit (VPRU) is one of IRC's four Technical Units, bringing together Child Protection, Women's Protection and Empowerment, and Protection Rule of Law across over 35 countries. VPRU is increasingly strengthening connective tissue across GBV, child protection, and case management through a shared social work systems lens, in service of IRC's Safety Strategy. IRC's Technical Excellence teams offer five core services to IRC country programs: Program Design, Quality Assurance, Business Development, Research and Learning, and External Influence.

Job Overview

The WPE field is at a strategic inflection point. The humanitarian system is contracting, siloed sectoral programming by default is under scrutiny, and the organizations that will define the next decade of protection practice are those that can ground a social work systems approach in feminist practice, building connective tissue with child protection, rule of law, and case management bridge prevention and response as two expressions of a single protective logic , and take seriously the financing of services for those most at risk of violence as a structural condition of impact rather than a donor-cycle variable.

The Global Lead, Women's Protection and Empowerment Systems Transformation is hired for this moment. They are IRC's organizational leader on GBV prevention and response and women's and girls' empowerment, a core member of the VPRU senior management team, and the person responsible for transforming how IRC delivers, finances, and positions its WPE work at a critical juncture for the sector. The role carries the full authority of a senior staff member and demands intellectual independence, diagnostic acuity, and appetite for institution-building.

A deliberate attention to financing is central to the mandate: how services are resourced, how prevention and livelihoods approaches are financed as integral parts of the protection architecture, and how IRC engages donors, governments, and multilateral actors to build more durable financing models for WPE outcomes — whether or not these are delivered by humanitarian actors. IRC's WPE work spans humanitarian response, recovery, and system strengthening, and this role's financing agenda is shaped by that full arc across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus.

Major Responsibilities

Strategy, program design and business development

• Lead the transformation of IRC's WPE practice, acting as the organizational reference point on GBV prevention and response, women's empowerment, and WPE systems strengthening, internally and externally.

• Lead strategic direction for WPE in line with S100 and the Safety Strategy; identify global areas of programmatic risk and elevate issues to Regional Leads and VPRU leadership.

• Lead global business development for WPE, bringing a clear distinction between financing for portfolio growth and financing for the quality, continuity, and sustainability of services. Advocate for funding architectures that cover the workforce, systems, referral infrastructure, and community relationships that make delivery possible — not only project outputs.

• Steer the adaptation of the WPE operating model to current conditions without compromising service integrity. Revenue generation matters as a condition of sustaining the mission, not as the mission itself, and the Global Lead holds both imperatives with clear-eyed honesty.

• Collaborate with Global Practice Leads and Regional Leads to promote programmatic synergies within WPE and across IRC sectors, with explicit attention to shared models with Child Protection and Case Management as foundational components of a social work systems approach.

• Line manage global practice area and strategic project staff; manage in partnership other roles as applicable.

Global practice implementation support

• Accountable for evidence-based technical oversight of WPE standards, methodologies, and tools, including cross-cutting issues such as diversity, inclusion, and climate adaptation; and for building working fluency in case management strategy and information system architecture.

• Approach quality as a diagnostic function, not a compliance one: distinguish between failures of implementation logic, funding or capacity constraints, context shifts that have rendered approaches maladapted, and policies that have not kept pace with the communities they serve. Ask not only whether targets are being met but whether the right targets are being pursued, and act on that diagnosis in partnership with country and regional teams.

• Support Regional Leads, Technical Advisors, and Technical Coordinators with thorny technical problems, capacity strengthening, mentorship, and career planning.

Research, data, knowledge management and learning

• Bring intellectual credibility to debates about evidence standards: make a rigorous case for implementation learning, longitudinal qualitative evidence, cross-system data linkage, practice-based inquiry, and community-level outcome tracking as legitimate, ethical, and contextually generative forms of knowledge alongside experimental evidence. Hold both orientations without collapsing into relativism.

• Guide research and evidence use with a genuine intelligence orientation: read across datasets — SRH, mental health, social protection, GBV — to build a coherent narrative on violence and help-seeking behavior. Be as interested in what the data cannot see as in what it shows; understand why certain populations and outcomes remain unmeasured, and treat those gaps as arguments for where the sector needs to go. Familiarity with data architectures in social welfare, public health, or financing systems adjacent to humanitarian protection is a meaningful asset.

• Establish and maintain relevant Communities of Practice; provide technical inputs to WPE-specific MEAL tools; support data interpretation in learning routines.

External influence, representation and thought leadership

• Exercise entrepreneurial judgment in external representation: identify where consequential conversations about women's safety, protection systems, and financing are happening before the WPE sector has found them, and position IRC there with an intellectual contribution, not primarily a funding ask. Build thought leadership presence across forums, publications, and cross-sector platforms including social work systems strengthening, care reform, social finance, and feminist movements beyond WPE's traditional scope.

• Act as key strategic advisor to Policy and Advocacy, Research and Innovation, and External Relations on WPE-related advocacy campaigns and policy shifts.

• Develop and maintain strategic relationships and partnerships with a wide range of actors — donors, UN agencies, INGOs, academia, social justice organizations, and financing institutions.

Team leadership and culture

• Lead the WPE global team through transition with integrity and care: manage people whose roles may evolve, hold team morale through institutional pressure, and model the balance between honest acknowledgment of difficulty and genuine forward orientation, creating conditions in which staff can do serious, difficult work without losing sight of why it matters.

• Hold serious work with humanity: sustain analytical rigor without clinical detachment, and support staff wellbeing without minimizing the weight of work that daily engages violence, trauma, and suffering. This is a named leadership competency for this role, not a peripheral consideration.

• Invest in the relationship between global technical leadership and field practitioners: case workers, community mobilizers, GBV officers, clinical staff, and community-based protection networks. Understand what the global function owes these practitioners in standards, tools, accessible guidance, and professional recognition, alongside the more visible external dimensions of the role.

• Contribute actively to VPRU unit culture, shared leadership, cross-team learning, and the collective responsibility of the senior management team for unit cohesion.

Key Working Relationships

On partnerships and collective action

Meaningful localization is a collective responsibility and organizational commitment, not a project deliverable. The Global Lead models this in how they build relationships with women-led and local organizations. Beyond this, the systems shaping outcomes for women and girls are changed through coalitions cutting across social justice movements, private sector actors, governments, and academia. The Global Lead builds bridges across these divides — connecting women's rights organizations with financing institutions, protection practitioners with public health researchers, feminist movements with social welfare system architects, and humanitarian actors with the domestic systems whose standards ultimately determine whether the structural conditions of violence change or persist. This is not relationship management. It is a theory of change.

Key internal relationships

• VPRU Deputy Director; VPR Regional Leads across 5 regions and regional WPE Technical Advisors

• Global Practice Leads for Child Protection, Protection Rule of Law, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Water and Sanitation, Economic Inclusion

• Safe, Inclusive and Transformative Programming Team; VPRU Policy and Advocacy Lead; VPRU Program Development and Partnerships Lead

• Global System Strengthening Team; Global HQ and AMU focal points

Key external relationships

The Global Lead actively expands and diversifies VPRU's external network beyond the conventional GBV coordination architecture. This includes GBV AoR and Global Protection Cluster leads; INGOs and Red Cross/Crescent counterparts; institutional and bilateral donors and policy makers; UN agency counterparts; and academic institutions working on gender, violence, and social work systems. Beyond the humanitarian sector: regional and national civil society and social justice organizations, philanthropic actors, social finance intermediaries, and feminist movements. These relationships are not supplementary to the mandate — they are part of how WPE systems transformation happens and how it is resourced.

Desired Experience and Skills

Core WPE and GBV expertise (required)

• Established or growing recognition as an expert at regional or global level, with 12+ years of progressive experience designing, leading, and implementing programs, including 7+ years in GBV/WPE is required.  Additional experience in social work, social welfare systems, or case management practice would be an asset. 

• Strong track record of driving uptake of evidence-based practice.

• Demonstrated experience in sectoral strategy design and planning; experience with policy and advocacy efforts and campaigns for change.

Systems, financing, and cross-sectoral orientation (strongly preferred; can be  further strengthened in role)

• Demonstrated interest in social work systems, case management practice, or integrated protection service delivery models, with genuine curiosity about how GBV connects to broader systems strengthening.

• Intellectual engagement with the financing of protection and prevention programming, including how services for survivors and prevention mechanisms are resourced, and how more durable financing models for WPE outcomes can be built.

• Experience working across sectoral boundaries (both programmatically and with different datasets)— GBV and child protection, health, livelihoods, social protection — is a strong asset; familiarity with, and curiosity in, data and financing architectures in systems adjacent to humanitarian protection is a meaningful additional asset.

Orientation toward inflection and institution-building

• Energized by building something as well as consolidating what works; thrives in strategic inflection moments; brings diagnostic clarity to distinguish core mandate from what can be adapted.

• An active thought leadership presence and a demonstrated ability to hold a clear directional view in ambiguous or transitional contexts, and to bring others along, even when the structure is not fully resolved

General leadership and management

• Ability to shape the transformative vision and agenda, complemented with excellent and an ability to identify and convert business development opportunities and the necessary communication, influencing, and storytelling skills to turn this vision into action ; 

• Demonstrated capacity to lead, grow and sustain high performing teams, including through transition 

• Demonstrated for self and staff; to influence across a wide range of diverse stakeholders; and to within the domain area.

• Demonstrated comfort engaging non-transactionally across donors, civil society, social justice movements, financing organizations, and academic communities: building and sustaining relationships  as a basis for influence and trust over time.

• An understanding of innovation that transcends technology, behavior change  and comfort with disruptive thinking 

• Fluency in English required. Arabic, French, and/or Spanish welcome. Fluency in Farsi, Urdu, Swahili, Bambara, or other languages dominant in IRC's programming footprint is celebrated as a form of professional capital: speakers of these languages bring proximity to the realities of the women and girls we serve that expands  technical expertise .

• Ability to travel globally up to 20% of the time.

Education

• Master's/post-graduate degree in Social Work, Social Policy, Gender Studies, International Law, Human Rights Law, International Development, Public Administration, or a related field required, or an equivalent combination of education and work experience demonstrating comparable depth.

• Candidates whose academic formation is in fields concerned with how social services are planned, governed, and financed — public administration, social policy, health systems, domestic social welfare architecture — are strongly encouraged to apply and will be weighted favorably alongside conventional humanitarian backgrounds.

• Sound training and/or demonstrated experience in the use of data and research evidence for programmatic decisions; rigorous analytic skills are an advantage.

IRC recognizes that the most relevant expertise for this role may have been built across institutional boundaries, and that a non-linear trajectory is often a marker of exactly the kind of cross-sector fluency this role demands. Career pauses — whether for caregiving, personal reasons, independent research, or other life circumstances — are not disqualifying and will not be treated as gaps requiring justification.

Some of the strongest candidates may have spent years in adjacent sectors — social welfare, public health, education, social protection, feminist movements, or financing — carrying a deep commitment to GBV and WPE work without a formal WPE title. If you have followed this field closely, hold a genuine view on where it needs to go, and have built the cross-sector fluency to help take it there, we encourage you to apply or to reach out with questions before doing so.

Additional Background -

Who we are looking for

This role is for someone who loves this field enough to want to see it move beyond itself, and who can hold a clear vision of the shifts it needs without losing sight of what makes it worth fighting for. Someone who has seen what survivor-centered, feminist, rights-based programming can do at its best, and who is equally clear-eyed about the ways the sector has sometimes missed opportunities, been left out of innovations that social services in other contexts have leveraged for better impact and scale, and built protection frameworks that keep women safe in the short term while leaving the structural conditions of violence entirely intact.

We are not looking for someone who mistakes disruption for progress, but for someone who leverages activist conviction for concrete change in policy and implementation. Someone who holds an uncompromising commitment to the rights of all women and girls in crisis alongside a clear-eyed understanding of the specific opportunities the WPE sector can champion in advancing those rights: not to carry the entire women's rights agenda, but to ensure that our sector's focus on safety and empowerment is ambitious, strategic, and transformative — and to bring the intellectual honesty to continuously ask whether we are adequately challenging the systems that enable violence, not only responding when it occurs.

IRC is a global organization embedded in systems of power and bureaucracy. Part of this role's mandate is to engage those systems strategically, not only position against them. We are looking for someone with the integrity to use access and influence for the people this work is meant to serve: neither naive about institutional constraints nor paralyzed by them. If you derive more satisfaction from naming power imbalances than shifting them, we thank you because this work is important, but this is not the role for you. If you know how to do both, we want to hear from you.

This role is open to all candidates located and with the right to work in the United States of America, Kenya, and United Kingdom.

This position is ALSO open to any internal, current IRC staff based in countries where IRC operates who have the right to work in their location and where IRC hosting is approved. The successful candidate will be hired on a local employment contract and according to the local salary scale.

Compensation: (US Pay Rate: $145,000 - $170,000/yr; UK Pay Rate: £73,184 - £86,906/yr). Ranges are based on various factors including the labor market, job type, internal equity, and budget.  Exact offers are calibrated by work location, individual candidate experience and skills relative to the defined job requirements. 

Professional Standards: All International Rescue Committee workers must adhere to the core values and principles outlined in IRC Way - Standards for Professional Conduct. Our Standards are Integrity, Service, Equality and Accountability. In accordance with these values, the IRC operates and enforces policies on Safeguarding, Conflicts of Interest, Fiscal Integrity, and Reporting Wrongdoing and Protection from Retaliation. IRC is committed to take all necessary preventive measures and create an environment where people feel safe, and to take all necessary actions and corrective measures when harm occurs. IRC builds teams of professionals who promote critical reflection, power sharing, debate, and objectivity to deliver the best possible services to our clients.

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Equal Opportunity Employer: IRC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. IRC considers all applicants on the basis of merit without regard to race, sex, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.