Early Warning and Early Response Coordinator-EU

Early Warning and Early Response Coordinator - A Community-Centred Approach to Transforming Criminality and Violence in the Niger Delta

Location : Bayelsa, Nigeria.

Search for Common Ground (Search) is an international non-profit organization that promotes the peaceful transformation of conflict. With headquarters in Washington, DC and Brussels, Belgium, Search’s mission is to transform how individuals, organizations, and governments deal with conflict—moving away from destructive approaches and towards cooperative solutions. With more than 700 staff worldwide, Search implements projects in more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and North America.

Position Summary

Search is seeking an experienced Early Warning and Early Response Coordinator for a 6-months project for a No Cost Extension funded by the European Union. The project will be implemented in consortium with co-applicants with the overall goal of fostering inclusive community security approaches to address the systemic drivers of violence and criminality in Bayelsa, Delta, and Rivers States. The role is expected to lead the implementation of early warning and early response activities in Bayelsa State. S/he will be based in Bayelsa state and coordinate the early warning and early response component of the project.

She/He will be expected to coordinate early warning observers in Bayelsa state, confirm and analyze reports and prepare monthly reports. S/he will work closely with the community EWER structures in the implementation of early warning and Conflict prevention activities. The position will report to the Consortium Coordinator and will work closely with the Head of Programme Implementation, Project team and other country-level support staff. He shall have a dotted line reporting channel to the National Conflict and Policy Analyst, EWER Consultant in Abuja to feed data into the Centralised EWER Database. The position holder will be based in Bayalsa State.

The EWER Coordinator is expected to bring to the role proven experience and skills in Early Warning and Early Response, conflict transformation, conflict resolution, conflict sensitivity and do no harm (DNH) principles. The candidate will have skills in coordinating efforts aimed at transforming criminality, mitigation of violence and criminality and supporting community-based Early Warning and Early Response (EWER) initiatives. The position holder will partner with civil society, security and government actors to institutionalize strategies and approaches that will build community capacity and skills to address social cohesion, lack of economic opportunity and environment degradation and foster sustainable peace. Additionally, the role will ensure that conflicts identified through the EWER mechanism supported by the Project feed into established Peace Architectures and multi-stakeholder forums for dispute resolution and higher-level policy change and create open and neutral spaces for stakeholders, community members and leaders to identify collective solutions.

The Project

The anticipated project will bring together four leading peacebuilding and development organisations in the Niger Delta, in a consortium aimed at providing a   holistic, community-centred approach to addressing core drivers of criminality, violence, and conflict in the region, with a specific focus on the empowerment and inclusion of youth in the security of their respective communities in the Niger Delta. The consortium partners will leverage existing relationships with the action’s diverse target groups, including at-risk youth, local communities impacted by oil production and oil bunkering, state security actors, the private sector, journalists and media actors, key civil society organisations, and policymakers at the state, regional, national, and international levels, to secure broad-based buy-in and participation in the action. Overall, the project will seek to initiate a shift in the way that relevant actors think about and approach issues of oil bunkering, criminality, and security in the Niger Delta in favour of more bottom-up, human-centred perspectives. This institutional and social shift is necessary in order to sustainably reduce the prevalence of oil bunkering and other forms of criminality and violence in the region in the long-term.

The design of the action centres around four activity streams, each addressing a systemic driver of division, violence, and criminality in Bayelsa, Rivers, and Delta States: 

Stream 1 will foster intra-community collaboration around issues of social exclusion, lack of economic opportunity, and environmental degradation.

Stream 2 will build trust and collaboration between communities and government and security actors for more participatory, community-centred security operations. 

Stream 3 will leverage arts- and culture-based approaches to foster social cohesion between divided communities both online and offline.

Stream 4 will facilitate policy change to institutionalise community-centred security approaches at the local, state, regional, national, and international levels. 

The position will be based in Bayelsa State.

To apply:

Interested candidates should send the following to our Career Portal.

Current resume

Cover Letter (which includes expectations of compensation and projected start date)

Please note that the system only has the functionality to upload two documents per application. Incomplete applications will not be accepted.

Only applicants invited for an interview will be contacted. No phone calls, please. Please see our website: www.sfcg.org ​for full details of our work.

Note: This position is only open to Nigerian nationals.