Technical Advisor II - Child Protection and Care System Strengthening

Catholic Relief Services; Baltimore, Northern (MD, KY); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Catholic Relief Services seeks a Technical Advisor II to provide technical leadership and support for child protection and care systems strengthening across multi-country programs. You will guide design, implementation, and learning to advance protective outcomes for vulnerable children and families, aligning with CRS standards and donor requirements.

The role emphasizes regional support, cross-country knowledge sharing, and capacity-building of government partners, civil society, and networks

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in technical design for child protection programs.
• Ability to coordinate across regions and with diverse partners.
• Knowledge of monitoring, evaluation and learning methods.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical leadership for child protection and care system strengthening.
• Provide remote and on-site technical solutions for program design, M&E, governance, and policy.
• Support government institutions, faith actors, and civil society to deliver quality services.
• Ensure CRS standards align with donor guidelines and best practices across countries.
• Lead capacity-building through training, curricula, mentoring, and knowledge sharing.
• Contribute to learning, documentation, and dissemination of lessons learned.

Skills

Technical leadership

Child protection

Program design

Donor guidelines

Cross-cultural collaboration

Education

Master's degree in a related field

Job description

CRS is recruiting in anticipation of an award – recruitment for all candidates is contingent upon successful award of the project.

Background

CRS is seeking Technical Advisor candidates foran anticipatedmulti-countrychild development, care, and protection project. The overall objective of the project is to strengthen national systems that protect vulnerable children, support families, and improve early childhood development through locally led and sustainable approaches. The project will improve outcomes for vulnerable children by strengthening child protection systems, supporting families and caregivers, advancing integrated early childhood health and development, and reducing reliance on residential care.

Job Summary

As Technical Advisor II - Child Protection and Care Systems Strengthening, you will provide technical leadership, advice, guidance, and support to a wide range of program design and implementation issues with a focus on child protection and care systems strengthening. These will all be in line with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) program quality principles and standards, donor guidelines, and global best practices. You will support regional and Country Program (CP) teams to advance the delivery of high-quality programming for vulnerable children and families. Your technical expertise will contribute to determining how effective, adaptive, evidence-based, and innovative CRS' child protection and care system strengthening programming is across participating countries. The Technical Advisor will serve as the project's lead technical resource for strengthening child protection and care systems, promoting safe and nurturing family-based care, supporting government-led reform efforts, and ensuring technical excellence across all project interventions in diverse contexts.

Roles and Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to the development and implementation of agency-wide strategies, standards, tools, and best practices in child protection and care system strengthening that effectively engage program participants, partners, donors and governments. Help ensure a cross-sectoral approach integrating gender, safeguarding, protection mainstreaming, disability inclusion, and early childhood development.
• Provide technical solutions to regional and CP teams, remotely and on-site, for strategic planning and how to best apply program design and implementation standards, best practices, partnership principles,tools, and M&E, ensuring high-quality implementation of child protection system strengthening and care reform interventions including key elements such as governance/policies, social service workforce, financing/resources, child protection management information systems.
• Lead the development and refinement of technical approaches, guidance, tools, and implementation frameworks related to child protection system strengthening, care system strengthening, family care reform, deinstitutionalization, gatekeeping, case management, social service workforce strengthening, and safeguarding systems.
• Support participating countries and partners to strengthen the capacity of government institutions, faith actors and networks, civil society organizations, and social service workforces to provide quality child protection and family care services.
• Contribute to regional and CP efforts to pre-position CRS for growth opportunities in child protection and care system strengthening. Lead or contribute to the development of the technical design for large and/or complex proposals, including defining appropriate monitoring systems and indicators. Advise project teams on integrating donor strategies, priorities and technical requirements into CRS’ approach.
• Contribute to capacity-strengthening initiatives for CRS and partner staff through development of learning strategies, training curricula, technical guidance, workshops, mentoring, and coaching. Promote cross-country learning, knowledge management, and the exchange of best practices, lessons learned, and innovations across participating countries and partners
• Contribute to knowledge management and learning through collecting and analyzing program data, evaluating strategic projects, assisting with measuring program impact, documenting promising and best practices, and producing technical reports and learning products. Support achievement and technical verification of milestone-based deliverables and assist project teams in applying adaptive management approaches to strengthen performance and results
• Establish and maintain relationships with donors, partners, peer organizations, research and other institutions. Participate in forums related to child protection, family care reform, safeguarding, and care system strengthening to share evidence-based best practices and promote CRS’ work.
• Liaise with the Family Strengthening Technical Advisor II to coordinate technical support to regions, country programs and the broader initiative