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