Director of Programmes

Syria

R&D | Projects - Humanitarian/Disasters

Not Specified

1. Country Programme Strategy and Portfolio Leadership
• Lead the development, review, and implementation of AFH's Whole of Syria programme strategy, ensuring alignment with organisational strategy, country priorities, humanitarian principles, community needs, and evolving response and recovery frameworks.
• Maintain a coherent and balanced country portfolio across geographic areas, sectors, and funding modalities, promoting appropriate linkages between emergency response, early recovery, resilience, and longer-term development programming.
• Analyse humanitarian, political, socioeconomic, access, displacement, return, climate, and donor trends, and translate them into clear programme priorities, positioning decisions, and adaptive management actions.
• Provide strategic programme advice to the Country Director and Senior Management Team, including evidence-based recommendations on programme expansion, consolidation, redesign, transition, suspension, or closure.
• Ensure programme strategies and decisions are informed by needs assessments, community priorities, MEAL evidence, protection and conflict analysis, lessons learned, operational capacity, value for money, and organisational risk appetite.
2. Programme Design, Business Development, and Resource Mobilisation
• Lead the identification and prioritisation of funding opportunities that fit AFH Syria’s strategic direction, technical capacity, geographic presence, and risk profile.
• Oversee the full proposal-development process, including go/no-go recommendations, concept development, design workshops, theories of change, results frameworks, implementation approaches, workplans, staffing structures, risk analysis, and budget development.
• Ensure proposals are technically sound, evidence-based, realistic, cost-effective, conflict-sensitive, protection-mainstreamed, and fully compliant with donor requirements and AFH policies.
• Work with Finance, Operations, MEAL, Technical Advisers, Area Teams, and the International Office to develop competitive submissions with adequate programme delivery costs, support-cost recovery, and appropriate management arrangements.
• Build and maintain a diversified and sustainable funding pipeline; track opportunities, submissions, success rates, portfolio gaps, co-financing requirements, and forecasted funding coverage.
• Develop strategic consortium and partnership approaches where these improve technical quality, geographic reach, local leadership, access, or competitiveness.
3. Programme Implementation, Quality, and Accountability
• Provide overall oversight of all Syria projects and ensure delivery against approved scope, outcomes, workplans, budgets, targets, quality standards, contractual commitments, and donor regulations.
• Establish effective country-level programme management and quality-assurance mechanisms, including portfolio reviews, project start-up and close-out processes, implementation tracking, quality benchmarks, field monitoring, and escalation protocols.
• Ensure timely identification and resolution of programme delays, underperformance, quality concerns, spending variances, access constraints, partner issues, and material changes to project assumptions.
• Ensure technical standards, standard operating procedures, sector guidance, and cross-cutting commitments are consistently applied and contextualised across all operational areas.
• Promote integrated and area-based programming where appropriate, ensuring complementarity across sectors and avoiding duplication or fragmented delivery.
• Champion Accountability to Affected Populations, meaningful community participation, accessible feedback and complaints mechanisms, inclusion, gender and protection mainstreaming, conflict sensitivity, and do-no-harm approaches throughout the programme cycle.
• Ensure that programme decisions use monitoring data, evaluations, community feedback, research, and learning, and that corrective actions are documented and followed through.
4. Grants, Financial, Compliance, and Risk Oversight
• Maintain senior oversight of the Syria grants portfolio and ensure high-quality, accurate, and timely narrative reporting, donor communication, amendment requests, and contractual deliverables.
• Review programme and grant performance jointly with Finance and Operations, ensuring expenditure is aligned with implementation progress, forecasts are credible, and corrective action is taken on underspend, overspend, ineligible costs, and cost-recovery gaps.
• Ensure programme teams understand and comply with donor conditions, AFH policies, delegated authorities, partnership obligations, procurement and financial procedures, safeguarding requirements, and applicable Syrian laws and regulations.
• Own programme-level risk identification and mitigation, ensuring significant delivery, fiduciary, safeguarding, access, reputational, partnership, and compliance risks are escalated promptly to the Country Director and relevant functions.
• Support internal and external audits, donor monitoring, due diligence, investigations, and management-response processes, and ensure agreed programme actions are completed on time.
• Ensure complete, accurate, and auditable programme documentation and effective use of approved grant and programme management systems.
5. MEAL, Evidence, Learning, and Programme Development
• Work closely with the MEAL function to ensure robust results frameworks, indicator plans, data-quality controls, evaluations, assessments, learning agendas, and appropriate use of evidence across the portfolio.
• Promote systematic learning between projects, sectors, and operational areas and ensure lessons are incorporated into programme adaptation, new designs, technical guidance, and organisational decision-making.
• Strengthen AFH Syria’s ability to demonstrate outcomes, value for money, reach, inclusion, and accountability through credible evidence and clear programme analysis.
• Encourage responsible innovation and context-appropriate approaches while ensuring that pilots have clear objectives, safeguards, evidence plans, and pathways for adaptation or scale.
6. Partnerships, Localisation, and External Representation
• Provide strategic oversight of programme partnerships with Syrian civil-society organisations, international organisations, technical institutions, and consortia, ensuring complementarity, equitable engagement, mutual accountability, and effective risk management.
• Ensure partner selection, capacity assessment, contracting, support, monitoring, performance management, and close-out are conducted consistently with AFH policies and donor requirements.
• Advance AFH’s localisation commitments by strengthening partner leadership, institutional capacity, meaningful participation in design and decision-making, and sustainable collaboration.
• Represent AFH at senior programme meetings with donors, UN agencies, authorities, NGO fora, clusters/sectors, working groups, and strategic partners, as delegated by the Country Director.
• Maintain credible, transparent, and solutions-focused donor relationships; communicate programme achievements, constraints, risks, and required decisions accurately and promptly.
• Ensure AFH has purposeful and technically credible representation in national and sub-national coordination structures and that relevant information is communicated back into programme decision-making.
7. Emergency Preparedness, Access, and Adaptive Management
• Ensure AFH Syria maintains practical, regularly updated programme preparedness and contingency arrangements for rapid-onset emergencies, displacement, access changes, and other major shocks.
• Lead programme aspects of emergency assessments, response design, prioritisation, scale-up, and transition, in close coordination with the Country Director, Operations, MEAL, Security, Finance, and field teams.
• Ensure programme approaches are operationally feasible and adapted to changing access, security, legal, and community conditions without compromising humanitarian principles, staff safety, safeguarding, or programme quality.
• Support principled programme access and acceptance through strong analysis, community engagement, coordination, and clear separation of humanitarian decisions from inappropriate influence.
8. People Leadership and Departmental Management
• Provide clear leadership, direction, and line management to Area Programme Managers, programme coordinators, Technical Advisers, and other direct reports within the agreed Syria structure.
• Establish clear departmental objectives, workplans, decision rights, performance indicators, communication routines, and accountability lines across Damascus and field offices.
• Recruit, induct, coach, and develop high-performing programme teams; conduct fair performance management; address underperformance promptly; and support succession and capacity-development planning.
• Promote collaboration across Programme, MEAL, Finance, Operations, HR, Safeguarding, Security, Communications, and the International Office, resolving bottlenecks and preventing siloed decision-making.
• Model inclusive, respectful, accountable, and ethical leadership, and foster a culture in which staff can raise concerns, challenge assumptions, learn from mistakes, and focus on results for affected communities.
• Manage the Programme Department’s operating budget, consultancies, technical support, and other resources responsibly and in accordance with delegated authority.
9. Organisational Responsibilities
• Serve as an active member of the Senior Management Team and contribute to country governance, strategic planning, organisational risk management, business continuity, and major management decisions.
• Champion and ensure compliance with AFH’s Code of Conduct, safeguarding framework, Protection from Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Harassment commitments, anti-fraud and anti-corruption standards, whistleblowing arrangements, and zero-tolerance policies.
• Promote the Core Humanitarian Standard, humanitarian principles, protection of personal data, environmental responsibility, duty of care, and responsible use of organisational resources.
• Undertake other duties consistent with the seniority and purpose of the role, as assigned by the Country Director.

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Oct 03, 2026