Regional WASH Specialist (in Charge of WASH Infrastructure Quality Assurance & Quality Control)
With 75 years of experience, our focus is on helping the most vulnerable children overcome poverty and experience fullness of life. We help children of all backgrounds, even in the most dangerous places, inspired by our Christian faith.
Come join our 33,000+ staff working in nearly 100 countries and share the joy of transforming vulnerable children’s life stories!
Employee Contract Type:
Employé à durée déterminée (Fixed Term)
Job Description
Purpose of the position
World Vision is a Christiaan humanitarian organization with a mission centred on following Jesus Christ in service to the world´s most vulnerable children. Therefore, in all locations to the fullest extent legally permissible, the successful applicant will affirm our core documents, observe conduct compatible with Christian principles, serve at a high level of professional ethics and strive to act in accordance with cultural sensitivities. Furthermore, regular attendance with team and office devotions, chapel and prayer gatherings are expected in line with policies in the World Vision host location and its departments.
The Global Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Business Plan outlines our strategy to leverage $1 billion between 2021 and 2025, impacting 15 million people with safe water, 14 million people with improved sanitation, and 18 million with improved hygiene. As part of our goal to demonstrate sustainable impact, we are working to define and foster a Culture of Quality (COQ) to maintain infrastructure quality as our programming grows in complexity. The cost of poor quality can result in an average of 22% of an organizations funds being allocated to fixing errors or inefficiencies. This would mean $220 million of our $1 billion commitment would be allocated to correcting these errors. Otherwise stated, if these errors were avoided, we could provide 4.4 million more people with water (assuming $50 per person).
Therefore, to minimize and ensure we are learning and improving from our errors, we believe that creating a COQ will reduce the costs of poor quality and promote reliable, long-lasting services to the communities we serve and sound stewardship of donor funds. Ultimately, this means providing increased impact with the same amount of funds.
Intermittent water supply (i.e., water not consistently available when people need it) can be caused by insufficient design and operational strategies. As part of fostering a COQ, we are outlining best practices for design and quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) data collection and management to improve operational strategies. However, implementing these practices requires oversight and periodic auditing to ensure they are being implemented as recommended. Existing Global Center and National Office (NO) leadership can and must communicate the importance of quality and support COQ activities; however, truly demonstrating that quality is a priority requires delegating quality-focused tasks to others since current workloads are already full.
This specific position will oversee the COQ strategy implementation primarily in the West Africa region and francophone countries including: Burundi, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Major responsabilities
Strategic Priorities & Technical Oversight
• Working with WVI WASH SLT and Support Offices Technical leads to outline a strategy to improve organizational quality culture including shared messaging, quality-specific objectives, and a plan for adaptive management.
• Support the Regional WASH Director and Support Offices to manage WASH infrastructure activities in the designated duty counties by providing quality assurance and quality control for the design and construction of limited to medium-scale WASH infrastructure, which are to be in compliance with WVI and Global WASH standards, environmental and construction codes, reporting, and management requirements.
• Developing and maintaining a quality management system for WASH infrastructure.
• Provide key quality improvement input by closely overseeing WASH infrastructure projects and activities undertaken by contractors in the field.
• Support National Offices in the production of tender documents, contracts, and bills of quantities and provide inputs on WASH infrastructure site selection, surveys and designs, specifications, deliverables, and evaluation criteria.
• When called upon by the National Offices, in collaboration with Supply Chain participate in bid evaluations committees to aid in the selection of qualified contractors or vendors for WASH materials.
• Provide technical guidance on WASH infrastructure design
• Routine reporting on quality metrics to the regional WASH Director
• Working with 10+ countries to build technical capacity and implement their country-specific quality management strategy
• In collaboration with other leaders, lead training on quality and technical issues (e.g. adequate supervision, hydraulic modeling best practices, material sourcing)
• Serving as a quality ambassador for your region of responsibility including presenting on quality-focused topics at routine meetings and conferences
• Performing periodic audits and surveys to understand our culture of quality and ways to improve
• Review of WASH infrastructure designs including engineering standards adherence, review of contracts, and review of material selection for adherence to World Vision policies
• Participating in audit reviews and post-audit corrective action plan development
Resource Development (Prepositioning work, programs development & grants management)
• Technically back-stop grant acquisition and strengthen GAM acquisition rates for grants in collaboration with the regional WASH Director and the GAM department.
• Support prepositioning for donor funding where necessary and participate in regional networks raising the profile of World Vision.
• Establish networks and alliances with stakeholders in the field for the purpose of enhancing program quality.
• In collaboration with the Regional WASH Director, work with Regional Resource
• Development & National Offices to maintain strong donor relationships at the regional level, developing sector engagement strategies for each donor or a group of donors
• Provide technical support to Regional Resource Development Unit and in NOs during prepositioning meetings with bilateral, multilateral, foundations and Public Private Partners.

Evidence and Learning
• Contribute towards completion of WVI inventory of WASH assets in the global monitoring and evaluation database. Support in the data critical for updating monitoring of WASH programs and mapping of WASH assets using geographical information systems.
• Ensure accountability by using evidence and learning, analysis, and interpretation of data to provide regional evidence of impact for the sector.
• Coordinate the documentation, publication, and dissemination of promising quality assurance/quality control practices across the partnership.
• Promote adoption and scale-up of promising practices, project models and innovations in the WASH infrastructure domain.
• Facilitate cross-learning between NOs, learning from Support Offices (SO), other regions and peer organizations
• Contribute to the development of annual regional impact reports in collaboration with SEL, Communications, and the other sector leads.
Collaboration and cross-functional working:
• Participate in the global WASH community of practice and major sector networks in the region.
• Mobilize technical expertise across the region, ensuring effective knowledge management, learning, and continuous improvement of programming in the region.
• Collaborate with key regional entities on defined collaboration matrix and joint projects.

General Responsibilities
• Contribute towards other regional office strategic initiatives and Technical Working Groups (TWGs) as necessary.
• Perform any other tasks assigned by the Regional Integrated Technical Services Director.
Required Professional Experience
• Work experience of 10+ years required in areas of water and sanitation design, construction, supervision, and quality assurance/quality control data collection.
• Required Education, training, license, registration, and certification: Master degree in Civil Engineering or WASH-related discipline.

Preferred Knowledge and Qualifications
• Proven experience leading WASH infrastructure development programs in a variety of contexts.
• Experience working with and managing large grants in sector programming for major bilateral and multilateral donors.
• Previous experience working in a Country Office/National Office or Regional Office setting will be advantageous.
• Experience working in fragile, conflict, post-conflict, and/or difficult operating environments is preferred.
• Experience with mWater use, or any other water mapping technology West Africa experience is highly preferred.
• Recent and extensive experience living and working in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Effective in written and verbal communication in French and English. Additional languages representative of the countries WV serves in an advantage.
• Fluent in both French and English
• Very strong commitment to WV’s mission, vision and core values

Travel and/or Work Environment Requirement
Travel: The position requires the ability and willingness to travel domestically and internationally up to 30% of the time.
This role involves being part of a virtual, geographically dispersed team (Remote working is highly encouraged).

Location: Dakar – Senegal, other remote locations possible

Key working relationships
Contact (within WV or outside WV):
• Line Manager: Weekly or as needed: Engagement to provide updates on executions and critical processes, receive required support from leadership and address challenges.
• GC/WV US: Monthly or as needed: Engagement to provide updates on executions, reporting, feedback and receive required support and discuss challenges.
• Peer Organisations/WASH Technical Group: as need: Engagement on opportunities of partnership and collaboration for broader impact, innovation.
• Decision Making: Responsibility to take decision on operational processes, budget execution and necessary adjustment to ensure approved projects and processes are implemented.

Core Competencies – For all positions, select the top 3 prioritized competencies from below.

• Be Safe and Resilient
• Be Accountable
• Partner and Collaborate
• For Management positions only, select the top 2 prioritized competencies from below.
• Engage, Influence, Lead
• and Grow Others
• Run an Effective
• and Agile Organisation