National Advocacy Support Lead WaterAid

The National Advocacy Support Lead is a pivotal role, reporting to the Global Campaigns Director, that will provide advocacy thought leadership and expertise to WaterAid teams across the organisation to scale up the impact of our influencing and achieve our ambition. It will work closely with country teams and experts within and outside WaterAid to provide bespoke influencing advice and support to successful advocacy within country programmes. It will also provide advocacy thought leadership and expertise to WaterAid teams across the federation.

You will:
• Provide sustained expert advocacy advice and support to an identified set of countries to embed and strengthen influencing as part of reorienting programmes in line with country 5-year strategies.
• Design and deliver influencing trainings and workshops for country programme teams.
• Support national influencing strategy planning and review processes.
• Provide quality-control thought leadership to WaterAid’s advocacy work, identifying trends in areas of improvements or weaknesses, and developing and implementing initiatives to address this.
• Lead programmes of advocacy skill-building and peer learning for the organisation

About You:
• Extensive experience of delivering impactful advocacy, particularly in African countries
• Political savviness and experience on applying this to advocacy work in order to achieve scale of impact
• Experience in leading advocacy learning programmes
• Willingness to travel extensively – with a significant amount of time spent visiting different WaterAid programme countries
• Ability to navigate complex organisational dynamics, bringing diplomacy and negotiation skills, in order to achieve progress on projects and priorities

Pre-employment screening: In order to apply for this post, you must be able to demonstrate your eligibility to work in the respective country. All pre-employment checks will be carried out according to the applicable laws in the respective country.

Key Skills
• Strong coaching and mentoring skills to support teams and individuals
• Working style that reflects WaterAid’s values of Respect, Accountability, Courage, Collaboration, Integrity and Innovation.
• Excellent communications skills, with the ability to write and present confidently in English (essential), French (desirable), Portuguese (desirable)

Closing date: Applications will close 23:59 on 12th November 2023. Availability for interview is required from week commencing 20th November 2023. Interviews will be via video-link.