Vacancy Announcement from Practical Action : Finance and Administrative officer

CAREER OPPORTUNITY

Finance and Administrative Officer

ABOUT US
We are an international development organisation putting ingenious ideas to work so people in poverty can change their world.

We help people find solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems. Challenges made worse by catastrophic climate change and persistent gender inequality. We work with communities to develop ingenious, lasting and locally owned solutions for agriculture, water and waste management, climate resilience and clean energy. And we share what works with others, so answers that start small can grow big.

We’re a global change-making group. The group consists of a UK registered charity with community projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America, an independent development publishing company and a technical consulting service. We combine these specialisms to multiply our impact and help shape a world that works better for everyone.

OUR AIMS
We help people find solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems, made worse by catastrophic climate change and persistent gender inequality. Our aims are to:

Make agriculture work better for smallholder farmers, many of them women, so they can adapt to climate change and achieve a good standard of living
Help more people harness the transformational effects of clean affordable energy and reduce avoidable deaths caused by smoke from indoor stoves and fires.
Make cities in poorer countries cleaner, healthier places to live and work.
Build disaster resilience into the lives of people threatened by hazards – reducing the risk of hazards and minimizing their impact on lives and livelihoods.

HOW WE WORK
We work on holistic solutions that change systems and have a framework to help us achieve our aims:

Analyse the root causes of a poverty and vulnerability.
Define the change at scale we need to make.
Develop activities along three complementary paths: Demonstrate, Learn and Inspire.
– Demonstrate that our solutions are sustainable in the real world.
– Learn by capturing evidence and adapting our approach.
– Inspire wider support to multiply our impact.

OUR ORGANISATION
Practical Action is an unconventional, multi-disciplinary change making organisation.

A highly innovative community development charity operating in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Practical Action community projects use ingenious ideas to design, test, refine and prove new ways to overcome poverty and disadvantage and then ‘open source’ knowledge of what works so that it can be implemented at a greater scale by others.
A world-class consulting operation that helps socially responsible business, government policy makers and other development organizations. This draws on learnings from our own development work as well as the combined brainpower of a roster of over 2,000 expert consultants. Practical Action Consulting helps to extend the reach of our influence by providing the best advice to others, whose work can make a bigger difference.
A well-respected specialist development publisher. Practical Action Publishing brings together development practitioners, researchers and thought leaders to create publications that stimulate discussion, strengthen peoples’ capabilities, and inspire sustainable change.

The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance:
The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (the Alliance) is a consortium of nine organizations, including international NGOs, the private sector and research organizations, who have come together with the support of the Z Zurich Foundation to influence funding, policy, and practice at the international, country and community level to reduce the negative impact of climate hazards, in particular floods and heat, on people and communities’ ability to thrive.

Phase 1 of the alliance program ended in 2017 and Phase 2 of the Alliance program ended in December 2023. We’ve now entered the new Phase 3 of the Alliance programme from January 2024, in Phase 3 we will cover additional climate hazards – current heat and wildfires, potentially storms in the future.

In the context of Nepal, the alliance will focus on floods and heatwaves. In Nepal Practical Action, Mercy Corps and IFRC are the alliance partners in Nepal and will Contribute to the alliance objective spelled out on common advocacy strategy and common Knowledge plan. The Alliance will have a much stronger focus on influencing and systems change.

Our definition of resilience: The ability of a system, community, or society to pursue its social, ecological, and economic development and growth objectives, while managing its disaster risk over time in a mutually reinforcing way.

Vision: Floods have no negative impact on people’s and businesses’ ability to thrive.

Goal: To increase social, political, and financial investment in community-based climate resilience – building through public, private, and third sector partnerships.

Three overarching objectives:

Funding for climate smart risk informed development with a focus on flood and heat resilience is increased and equitably disbursed.
Laws, Policies, Plans and Strategies for climate smart risk informed flood and heat resilience are implemented.
Climate smart risk informed flood and heat resilience practice becomes “business as usual”

Climate Resilience Program and Practical Action Nepal:
Climate Resilience Program known as Climate smart risk informed Flood Resilience Program embeds the Zurich funded program with other overarching projects that include “Resilience through Early warning system and insurance Transfer” (RESIST), “Index based flood Insurance” (IBFI) and strengthening and localization of Multi Hazard Early Warning system and Impact based Forecasting in Sudurpaschim and Lumbini Province of Nepal.

To achieve Overall desired outcomes (ambitions) of phase 3, following are the assumptions to meet the target.

Build ex-ante resilience of communities at risk of flood and heat impacts (prevent risk through enhanced adaptive capacity) by working together with decision makers at all levels.

Our entry point will be communities, we have calculated direct Climate Resilience Measurement for Communities (CRMC) roll out (48660 people from 57 communities) and estimated we’ll reach 100% of the CRMC community over the course of project duration. The reach to CRMC communities will be through our ex-ante interventions and early warning early action interventions.

Improve early warning and early action in advance of probable hazards risk (reduce the probability and volume of losses through anticipatory action).

For our early warning and early action, we will form 285 groups in total i.e., 5 groups from each community (CDMC, 1st Aid task force, EWS task force, search and rescue task force, volunteer groups). These groups will help us to reach the people living in the communities by door-to-door visit explaining actions required in flood events and helping them to test FEWS and act in flood events. Beyond the CRMC communities we will be working with DHM, local government, Province emergency operation centre and communities in the risknpolygon of Flood early warning system. Within the FEWS risk polygon we will work with adjoining communities to strengthen early warning coverage and potential insurance coverage. We assume we will reach 60% of the people living in the 13 local governments where we work, through FEWS and heatwave messages.

Enable people who experience livelihoods losses due to floods and heat to recover quickly through compensation and/or insurance (avoid long-term erosion of resilience).

For insurance reach we will identify cooperatives/MFIs as potential aggregators for insurance in the risk polygons of FEWS. The Hydromet gauge station for FEWS potentially will be our reference point for insurance. Through education on insurance via local aggregators we assume 60% of the people in the river risk polygons potentially the same covered by FEWS.

The direct beneficiary will be the population covered by CRMC roll out, ex-ante interventions, early warning and early action and insurance; we envision this will be 60% of the people living in 13 local government units. 60% of 844,986=506,990 (the number may change as we will investigate the population from the latest census data potentially it will increase.

By 2035 total impact population from the program and leveraging projects is assumed by creating impact at local governments and Province government with whom we work and national level through our interventions and knowledge and advocacy we generate. We envision 20% of the population of two province where we work benefit from our interventions, knowledge, and advocacy, we will work with province emergency operation centers (PEOC) to track the FEWS messages, Ministry of internal affairs and home of province government and at national level with Department of hydrology and meteorology on increasing the coverage by early warning messages of flood and heat peril. We will work with other national level ministry like MoFAGA to fill the policy gaps of local governments. We calculate this impact number by adding the population of Lumbini province (5122078) and Sudurpaschim province (2694783) where we work, total equals to (7816861) minus the population we cover in 13 local governments (844986) where we work multiplied by 20%.
Total Scaling Impact: = (7816861-844986) multiplied by 20% = 1394975

Climate smart risk informed Flood Resilience Program and overarching projects “Flood and Heat Resilience Program, Resilience through Early warning system and insurance Transfer” (RESIST), “Index based flood Insurance” (IBFI) and strengthening and localization of Multi Hazard Early Warning system and Impact based Forecasting in relevant Province of Nepal.

The Climate Resilience Measurement for communities’ (CRMC) approach
What is CRMC?
The Climate Resilience Measurement for communities’ (CRMC) approach has a CRMC tool to apply the CRMC approach. CRMC tool is built around the notion of five types of capital (the 5Cs: human, social, physical, natural, and financial capital) and the 4Rs of a resilient system (robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity). The “sources of resilience” are grouped into the five capitals of the “Sustainable Livelihoods framework” and other classifications that assist in interpreting the results for making decisions. These “sources of resilience” are graded from A (best practice) to D (significantly below standard) based on the data collected from communities. Results are displayed according to the 5Cs and 4Rs, plus several additional groupings, to give the approach further flexibility and accessibility.

The CRMC framework has been developed into an integrated, web-based, mobile device platform that allows the collection of data needed to measure community flood resilience. The tool enables users—usually stakeholders working with heat and flood-prone communities—to create questionnaires, collect data, and assess community flood and heat capacities. The tool generates and visualizes results, thereby providing evidence for informed decision making on intervention design and ex-ante investment in climate resilience with focus on flood and heat.

Index Based Flood Insurance (IBFI)
Overall objective:

Increase resilience of climate-vulnerable smallholder farmers and marginalized people in Western Nepal by enabling access to risk transfer mechanisms.
Outcome A: Enabling environment & knowledge is created for piloting and scaling up of a parametric insurance product that caters to the need of climate-vulnerable farmers.
Outcome B: Vulnerable households have access to innovative risk-transfer mechanisms to secure their assets and build resilience to climate shocks and stresses.

Resilience through Early warning systems and Insurance Transfer (RESIST)
Project combine two approaches:

To improve flood early warning system and impact-based monitoring for currently unmonitored rivers, using new LiDAR-based technology and remote weather stations which has been proven to have a high level of accuracy
To expand proven Index Based Flood Insurance coverage to new climate impacted communities in western Nepal.

Strengthening and localization of Multi Hazard Early Warning system and Impact based Forecasting in Sudurpaschim Province of Nepal.

The overall objective of this project is to strengthen multi-hazard EWS of Province governments, improve EWS governance, effective and simplified risk communication and enhanced coordination and linkages between and among all concerned stakeholders in the DRRM landscape.

JOB PROFILE
Responsible to: Program Manager – Climate Smart Risk Informed Flood and Heat Resilience Programme – Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance
Matrix manager: Finance and Awards Manager
Grade: 5
Line Manages: Driver
Unit: Programme Delivery
Location: Field office: Project Management field unit Dhangadi/ Project Field Office, Rajapur Bardiya

Purpose, Scope, and Relationships
The purpose of the role is to provide overall financial and administrative management of the Climate smart risk informed Flood Resilience Program and overarching projects of the program namely “Flood and Heat Resilience Program, Resilience through Early Warning System and insurance Transfer” (RESIST), “Index based flood Insurance” (IBFI) and strengthening and localization of Multi Hazard Early Warning system and Impact based Forecasting in Sudurpaschim and Lumbini Province of Nepal. To implement project’s activities related to achieving the objectives stated in the program and overarching project document in consistent with strategic direction of Practical Action Country Office thereby making a major contribution to the development and articulation of Practical Action Nepal Country Programme – Resilience That Protects.

The scope is to be responsible for effective administrative and financial management, inventory management, logistic management, review of financial report of partners, monitoring partners’ account and capacity building on FAMAS to cluster offices & partners. Moreover, provide admin/finance/logistic support to the partner organizations. Prepare the financial reports of the program and overarching projects contributing to the Practical Action, donor, and stakeholders (Social Welfare Council-Central Project Advisory committee and Local Project advisory committees – local governments) requirements.

The key working relationship is with Program Manager, project team, Thematic Team, Programme Delivery Team, Finance and Services Team, Gender and Social Inclusion Specialist, local partner. The role will engage and collaborate with all staff and external stakeholders (clients, partners, local governments, and province Government Ministries.)

Job Functions and Responsibilities

Provide financial and administrative support to Cluster Office.
Support in budget planning and expenditure as per plan.
Collect invoices/bills and make payments ensuring the prevailing financial rules and regulations of Practical Action.
Manage hard copies of documents (Journal Vouchers) from the Practical Action cluster office and partner organizations.
Maintain office equipment, office building, materials, and properties.
Maintain office premises to provide a good working environment.
Ensure the safety of office supplies, materials, equipment, and physical facilities.
Manage vehicle movement and arrange for vehicle servicing, maintenance, and regular check-ups;
Arrange venue for the seminars and meetings; and provide logistic support.
Assist properly tracking time sheets of staff.
Managing for purchase of the supplies, materials, equipment, and physical facilities required in the project.
Support in Financial Management and Accounting Systems (FAMAS) software in cluster offices and partner organization.
Review and monitor partners’ financial report/documents on periodic basis and provide feedback to the partners for improvement.
Conduct field visits as necessary for project implementation to ensure compliance with Government of Nepal and Donor standard.
Admin/finance/logistic support to the partner organisations as per requirement.
Collect monthly financial reports from partner organizations, review it, and produce necessary feedback for improvement and fit it into import map for compatible in Business Central (BC) system.
Assist the process of financial and project annual audits.
Ensure our ethics and values, as set out in our Code of Conduct and related policies, including safeguarding, are embedded in team culture, and well modelled by others.
Support program manager and field team in planning, execution, monitoring of scope, Schedule, Budget and cost, Quality delivery, appropriate Resource management, balanced Communication,
Support Field team in assessing the budget tracking (commitment and disbursement) of the sub-national governments.
Support field team and program manager in assessing the gender budget of the program and projects.
Engage with community and local partners and assist the field team in ensuring the records of public, hearing, public review and final commissioning on program project interventions.
Participate and support implementing partners to prepare monthly/quarterly plans and to generate quality financial progress reports and documents capturing project learning’s and good practices.
Undertaking any other duties as assigned by Program/Project Manager

Organizational Policies, Safeguarding and Code of Conduct

Ensure that all involved acting on the organisation’s behalf is well aware on Safeguarding Policy, Diversity and Dignity in the Workplace Policy, Code of Conduct, Fraud policy and Whistleblowing policy.
Ensure beneficiaries whom we work with are aware of the safeguarding policy including the reporting lines when appropriate.
Be responsible that anyone acting on our behalf has signed up to the Safeguarding and Code of Conduct policies
Ensure our ethics and values, as set out in our Code of Conduct and related policies, including safeguarding, are embedded in team culture and well modelled by others. Ensure that reporting structure are well promoted and respond to all concerns appropriately.
Responsible for gender responsive behaviour in all actions and decisions. Ensure non-discriminative behaviour based on gender, age, sex, race, ethnic background, culture, disability, nationality, religion and marital status. Is sensitive and adaptable to gender and social inclusion.

PERSON PROFILE
To be successful in the role, the ideal candidate will be able to demonstrate:

EXPERIENCE & KNOWLEDGE

At least 3 years of working experience in the related field;
Proven experience in administrative and finance management of projects/programme;
Experience in teamwork and managing relationships with excellent networking and communication skills.
Strong presentation and reporting skills.
High levels of demonstrated skills in prioritizing tasks and meeting deadlines.
Good communication skills in English and Nepali.
Excellent interpersonal verbal and written skills.
Able to work remotely and independently with an understanding of working in a multi- sited environment.
Fair understanding of project cycles with focus on planning and budgeting, implementation, and monitoring.
Willingness and enthusiasm to work in challenging and difficult situations and with vulnerable communities.
Willingness to visit and work with partner offices frequently.
Willingness to work with communities and visit communities frequently.
Experience of working with communities enhancing participatory process
Proactive and able to handle assignments with adequate supervision.
Excellent skills and knowledge in computer, particularly Excel and Word.