---(2025/006) Governance Advisor (local)- IGOR

Band: 4

Governance Advisor (local)

Job Profile

1. Required qualifications, competences and experience

Formal Education

• Bachelor’s degree in social sciences, Political Sciences, Economy, Law, Sociology.

Professional Experience

• 5 years of working experience working in international development or humanitarian assistance.
• 3 years of experience working on Good Governance, Decentralization and working with municipalities.
• Working experience with GIZ is considered an advantage.

Other knowledge, additional competences

• Arabic native speaker, fluency in English
• Good working knowledge of ITC technologies and related software (e.g. MS Outlook, MS Office, MS Excel, MS Power Point)
• Excellent time management skills and ability to organize a daily workload by priorities
• A proactive approach to problem-solving with attention to details and ability to multi- task
• Must be able to meet deadlines in a fast-paced quickly changing environment
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Gender sensitivity
• Ability and willingness to travel inside Lebanon as needed by the project.
• Technical digital knowledge in Office 365, including OneDrive, MS Teams and SharePoint.
• Basic knowledge of the EU GDPR and general understanding of Information Security.

1. Major Responsibilities

In your role, you support the overall implementation of the project with all its technical and organisational activities. In consultation with your line manager, you will be responsible for planning, steering and monitoring of project activities. You ensure that tasks in your area of work are dealt with promptly and thoroughly and GIZ rules and regulations are adhered to. You engage actively in knowledge exchanges with other stakeholders in the governance sector and assume a proactive role in communication processes. Additionally, you are required to perform tasks assigned to you by your line manager where required.

More specifically, you will be responsible for providing expert advisory on local governance and for implementing project activities in component 2 – local governance, alongside another national advisor. This works includes identifying suitable pilot municipalities, together with the head of project, establishing strong and trusting partner relationships with these municipalities and implementing various activities to improve municipal service delivery and thereby advancing their citizen participation. You advise the partner municipalities in adopting suitable and inclusive measures for citizen participation, such as dialog sessions, community mobilization and town-halls.

Further, this role involves monitoring, evaluation and reporting tasks. You will be responsible for monitoring the achievement of the project’s goals along their success indicators, applying standard GIZ monitoring tool and developing them further, based on the project needs. You also act as a focal point to the GIZ M&E structure on cluster and country levels.

The responsibilities include, but are not limited to the following:

• Steering of project activities in project component 2 – Local Governance.
• Monitoring and Reporting for overall project activities and act as focal point for GIZ-Cluster and GIZ country-wide M&E structures.
• Establishing strong and trusting partner relations with the selected partner municipalities in Lebanon (potentially Mount Lebanon and North Lebanon) as well as with national level counterparts, such as the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities.
• Conceptualizing and steering of project activities for improved service delivery on municipal level and enhancing inclusive citizen participation, including conducting citizen dialog sessions.
• Technical backstopping of grant agreement partners who implement activities in the same component.
• Pro-actively contributing to a positive, collaborative and appreciative team environment, in which each team member is responsible for their assigned field of work but seeking strong interlinkages between activities to achieve greater impact.
• Pro-actively contributing to the further development of the project, including developing ideas for horizontal and vertical scaling-up.
• Contribute to team-internal learning and growth, including supporting new colleagues during their onboarding and sharing lessons learnt through proper knowledge management. 

1. Tasks

The position holder:

• Together with another advisor working in the same component, and the head of project, identifies the two pilot municipalities of the project, one in Mount Lebanon and one in North Lebanon
• Identifies local needs in the pilot municipality and implements projects for improved and more inclusive municipal service delivery, including digital services
• Manages Grant Agreements with local organizations (NGOs) that work alongside GIZ to implement project activities
• Monitors the overall project’s progress along the project’s objectives and indicators, applying standard GIZ monitoring tools and procedures, feeding into the GIZ-country-wide M&E system.
• Tracks project achievements, supports reporting and public communication & external relations of the project and the GIZ Lebanon Cluster Governance, Peace, and Migration.
• Participates in technical exchange and steering meetings within the sector and makes sure GIZ project activities are aligned with and do not overlap with other agencies’ contributions in the sector.
• Ensures proper knowledge management, filing and sharing of lessons learnt on project, GIZ Lebanon Cluster-level and within GIZ Lebanon as a whole.

About the project “Support to Inclusive Governance and Reform Processes: *

Lebanon is facing an unprecedented crisis characterized by political stagnation, economic collapse, and social tensions. Corruption is deeply entrenched at all levels of governance, eroding public trust and undermining institutional efficiency. Civil society plays a crucial role in addressing the crisis by voicing grievances and promoting social participation but faces significant challenges, including limited resources, brain drain, and insufficient cooperation with government agencies. International organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund, have tied their support programs to long-overdue reforms in governance and anti-corruption. The recent "grey listing" by the Financial Action Task Force for deficiencies in combating money laundering and terrorist financing has added further pressure for reform. While Lebanon has adopted some reform plans and strategies, substantial deficits in their implementation persist. Overall, governance suffers from a pronounced lack of accountability, transparency, and performance, which continues to deteriorate the state-citizen relations. This has created an urgent need to address systemic weaknesses and rebuild trust between citizens and institutions.

In response, the project "Supporting Inclusive Governance and Reform Processes in Lebanon" aims to strengthen governance by enhancing accountability, transparency, participatory decision-making, municipal performance management, and civil society. It focuses on building the capacities of key governmental bodies at the national level, such as the Lebanese National Anti-Corruption Commission and the Public Procurement Authority, as well as at the local level by promoting participatory governance in selected municipalities. Civil society actors and journalists are empowered through training in investigative journalism, evidence-based reporting, and transparency mechanisms, thereby enhancing their oversight role and ability to hold the government accountable. The project’s objective is to improve governance in Lebanon in terms of accountability, transparency, participatory approaches, and municipal performance management.