Job Description
Danish Refugee Council (DRC), one of the world’s leading humanitarian NGOs, is currently seeking a highly qualified Inclusive Systems Coordinator for its operations under the Hope, Empowerment and Resilience (HER) Project in Ethiopia and Sudan. The project is a multi-country, consortium-led initiative funded by Agence française de Développement (AfD) and aims to strengthen the resilience of displacement-affected women and girls by addressing immediate humanitarian needs while laying the foundations for inclusive, gender-responsive, and sustainable systems recovery across protection, health and nutrition, economic recovery, and social cohesion.
Operating in highly complex and fragile environments characterized by displacement, weakened public systems, thin markets, and evolving political and economic constraints, the HER Project adopts an inclusive systems approach. This approach focuses on strengthening local systems and actors rather than substituting them, while remaining responsive to urgent humanitarian needs and protection risks.
The Inclusive Systems Coordinator is a core technical position within the Consortium Management Unit (CMU). The role provides strategic leadership, technical guidance, and hands-on support to ensure that HER interventions are designed and implemented using coherent, context-appropriate systems approaches that balance humanitarian responsiveness with longer-term resilience and recovery objectives. The position operates at the interface between the CMU and country implementation teams, ensuring alignment between strategic oversight and field-level implementation.
Job Responsibilities
Systems-Based Technical Design and Quality Assurance
The Inclusive Systems Coordinator provides technical leadership and quality assurance on the application of inclusive systems approaches across the HER project lifecycle. The role guides consortium partners in applying appropriate systems analysis methodologies, including market systems analysis, institutional mapping, and political economy and risk analysis, with particular attention to gender, power, and exclusion dynamics. The position supports the design of layered and sequenced interventions that combine immediate assistance with medium- and long-term systems strengthening, and advises on balancing direct delivery with facilitation and partnerships in fragile environments.
Economic Recovery and Women’s Economic Empowerment
The role provides technical guidance on inclusive economic recovery strategies, including market-based programming, livelihoods, and financial inclusion approaches suitable for displacement-affected and conflict-impacted contexts. The Inclusive Systems Coordinator ensures that women’s economic empowerment is embedded across interventions by addressing structural barriers related to skills, finance, markets, services, and decision-making power, while supporting engagement with private sector, community, and public system actors.
Integration Across Sectors and HDP Nexus Programming
The Inclusive Systems Coordinator works closely with technical leads across protection, health and nutrition, peacebuilding, and social cohesion to promote integrated systems programming. The role supports cross-sectoral designs that reduce protection risks, mitigate GBV, strengthen social cohesion, and advance economic and systems outcomes, while contributing to Technical Working Groups to ensure coherence across interventions.
Adaptive Management, MEAL, and Learning
In collaboration with MEAL and Accountability teams, the role ensures that MEAL systems are appropriate for tracking systems-level change, indirect outcomes, and contribution pathways. The Inclusive Systems Coordinator supports the development of theories of change and learning questions that reflect systems logic, promotes adaptive management, and documents learning on inclusive systems practice for internal and external stakeholders.
Capacity Strengthening and Partner Support
The role builds the capacity of consortium partners and country teams to understand and apply inclusive systems approaches through coaching, mentoring, and training. It supports organizational readiness by identifying constraints and opportunities related to systems programming within humanitarian and nexus contexts.
Contribution to Governance and Strategic Decision-Making
As a core technical advisor within the CMU, the Inclusive Systems Coordinator contributes to strategic planning, risk analysis, and decision-making. The role provides systems-focused analysis to inform CMU and Project Steering Committee deliberations and supports alignment between consortium strategy, field realities, and AfD expectations on sustainability and systems change.
Job Requirements
Experience
Minimum of seven to ten years of progressively responsible experience in inclusive systems, market systems development, economic recovery, or related fields. Demonstrated experience applying systems approaches in fragile, conflict-affected, or displacement contexts is required. Strong understanding of the humanitarian-development-peace nexus and experience working with local partners, private sector actors, and public institutions is essential. Experience in East Africa or the Horn of Africa is an advantage.
Technical Competencies
Strong expertise in systems analysis and facilitation-based programming, experience integrating gender equality and protection considerations into systems interventions, familiarity with adaptive management and complexity-aware MEAL approaches, and excellent analytical and strategic thinking skills.
Education
Master’s degree in Economics, Development Studies, Social Sciences, Business Management, or a related field is required. A Bachelor’s degree combined with substantial relevant experience may be considered.
Languages
Full professional proficiency in English is required. Arabic and or Amharic is strongly preferred.
Contract Details
Contract Length: 12 months
Contract Type: National Contract
Band: G1, Non-Management
Duty Station: Benishangul Gumuz or Gedaref (TBD), with frequent travel to Addis Ababa
Start Date: ASAP
Salary and benefits in accordance with Danish Refugee Council Terms of Employment for National Employees
How to Apply
All applicants must submit a cover letter and an updated CV of no more than four pages in English. Applications submitted by email will not be considered.
Application Link: https://drc.ngo/job?id=175196
Closing Date: February 13, 2026
Equal Opportunity and Gender Equality
Danish Refugee Council is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. Female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply. All applicants are considered strictly on merit.