Coordination Unit (Forum) Coordinator Sudan Kauda

Background:

South Kordofan, particularly Region 1 (R1) Nuba Mountains, continues to experience significant humanitarian needs driven by protracted conflict, displacement, and limited access to basic services. The complexity of the operational environment is characterized by hard-to-reach areas, fragmented service delivery, and dynamic population movements requiring strong, well-coordinated humanitarian action to ensure effective and timely assistance.

R1 benefits from long-standing coordination structures that have been in place for decades, including efforts led by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the existing Coordination Unit (CU). These structures have played a critical role in facilitating humanitarian response on the ground.

In this context, the position will look at reinforcing coordination of humanitarian response on the ground. The position will strengthen and reinforce existing coordination mechanisms rather than establish parallel systems, ensuring efficient use of limited resources and building established operational foundations. This approach aligns with global humanitarian coordination principles that prioritize localized, context-driven, and system-strengthening interventions over duplication of structures.

This position will be hosted by NRC (and subject to NRC safety and security protocols) and will sit within the Coordination Unit in Nuba Mountains and report to the CU management team, ensuring direct integration into existing coordination frameworks while benefiting from NRC’s operational support. This role is explicitly designed as an enabling and facilitative function, fully complementary to existing structures. Technical leadership and strategic direction will remain under the relevant coordination unit and other related frameworks, with the position holder will serve as a field-level interface to enhance operational coherence, collaboration, and responsiveness.

What you will do:

This position will serve as a neutral convener of multi-sectoral humanitarian coordination in R1/ Nuba Mountains. This role is central to supporting collective planning, identifying and addressing service gaps, improving referral pathways, and strengthening the interoperability between emergency response and longer-term programming. Under the supervision of the CU management the position holder will support the local coordination structure and will engage with OCHA and other coordination mechanisms. Under the CU leadership, the position will ensure that key assessments to inform broader planning, that clusters are engaged to support cluster-specific coordination and technical harmonization, and that all humanitarian actors—regardless of consortium membership—can participate in and benefit from joint planning and alignment processes.

This position will ensure that existing national and cluster-level tools, SOPs, and coordination protocols apply. Any local contextualization or adaptation will be done in consultation with relevant stakeholders were needed. The supporting role of the position requires strong facilitation, diplomacy, coordination, and contextual knowledge of the humanitarian landscape in Sudan and Nuba Mountain in particular.

General Responsibilities:

1. Ensure adherence to NRC, and donor policies, tools, handbooks, and guidelines.
2. Support CU in the facilitation and coordination at the area level, ensuring inclusive, neutral, and solutions-oriented engagement of humanitarian and development actors.
3. Support CU in the design, implementation, and adaptation of joint response strategies and operational plans based on identified needs, service mapping, and gaps analysis.
4. Support capacity strengthening, learning exchanges, and peer-to-peer engagement among local and international partners under leadership of CU
5. Identify lessons learned, promote adaptive management approaches, and contribute to continuous improvement of the area-based coordination model.
6. Supporting CU to ensure joint planning and prioritization among humanitarian actors across sectors,
7. Enhancing information flow and feedback loops from field-level coordination structures to national platforms within CU protocols.

Specific responsibilities:

1. Programmatic Coordination & Strategic Alignment

• Support the CU management to facilitate the coordination in the R1/Nuba Mountains ensuring regular coordination meetings are inclusive, neutral, and solutions oriented.
• Participate in the A-ICCG meetings to ensure alignment with sector strategies, especially in relation to technical standards, referral pathways, and cross-cutting concerns.
• Support CU to ensure alignment with existing coordination structures in the R1/ Nuba Mountains (e.g., clusters, INGO Forum, OCHA)
• Supporting CU to ensure joint planning and prioritization among humanitarian actors across sectors,
• Collaborate closely with INGO field focal points and ensure coordination of first line and second line response strategies.
• Under the leadership of CU, support coordination with relevant secretariates and other local networks.
• Identify key response gaps and facilitate joint resource planning or referrals to address them in coordination with the A-ICCG and relevant clusters.

2. Information Management & Interoperability

• Support CU to maintain a live, up to date existing service mapping platform capturing who is doing what, where, and with what capacity based on CU systems.
• In consultation with CU facilitate the rollout of shared tools, including multi-sectoral enrolment formats, referral trackers, and dashboards.
• Contribute to the development of localized response strategies and area plans based on needs analysis and data from active stakeholders, and cluster partners.
• Support CU to ensure that service mapping, referral tracking, and other data outputs are integrated into OCHA and cluster IM systems, contributing to national dashboards and Situation Reports as appropriate.

3. Access

• Under the guidance of CU management and protocols support coordination with OCHA, INGOs, NNGO support the engagement with local authorities to discuss and advocate on access-related issues.

4. Learning, Peer Exchange, and Capacity Strengthening

• Support learning exchanges between actors on best practices in integrated, area-based programming.
• Identify local capacity gaps and collaborate with OCHA and relevant clusters to organize training or mentoring not limited to technical gaps.
• Capture lessons learned, support after-action reviews, and contribute to adaptive management in coordination with OCHA.
• Encourage equitable participation of local actors through co-chairing opportunities, rotating facilitation, and adapted meeting modalities that consider access and resourcing constraints.

What you will bring:

Generic professional competencies:

• Bachelor’s degree in humanitarian affairs, development studies, or social sciences (master’s preferred).
• Minimum 5 years of experience in humanitarian response, coordination, or multisectoral programming.
• Experience engaging with INGOs, NNGOs, UN agencies, and coordination mechanisms
• Proven facilitation, negotiation, and coordination skills, especially in conflict-affected or access-constrained contexts.
• Fluency in English required; Arabic added advantage.
• Knowledge of the South Kordofan, Nuba Mountains context and local actor landscape is a significant asset.
• What we offer