DRC Program Officer

About the Role

FGHR is seeking a consultant to support its DRC grantmaking and grantee partner engagement. FGHR supports grassroots activists and communities who respond to immediate needs, generate and use knowledge about the systems and power relations driving injustice, build solidarity, and organize while laying the groundwork for longer-term change, peace, justice, and accountability.

This twelve-month consultancy reports to the East Africa Program Director, who is based in Burundi. The consultant should be based in East Africa and available to communicate with partners across the DRC. The role is envisioned full-time. The work calls for someone who combines deep, trusted relationships within the DRC’s human rights movement with sound judgment about security and the discretion to handle sensitive information responsibly.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities

This is where you will make the most impact. Responsibilities fall across three connected areas of work.

Ecosystem engagement and partner relationships

• Build and maintain regular, trusted relationships across the wider human rights ecosystem in the DRC, including current and prospective grantee partners, community-led and Indigenous organizations, movements, networks, collaborative structures, and other relevant actors.
• Assess security risks facing partners and their communities and help the team understand how those risks are evolving.
• Provide advice and accompaniment to partners on security and risk management, drawing on established relationships and contextual knowledge.
• Help identify and engage new partners as the DRC portfolio evolves, drawing on knowledge of civil society, community-led and Indigenous organizing, and collaborative structures to match ecosystem needs with diverse positions, knowledge, skills, and capacities.
• Identify and engage emerging or underrepresented actors, perspectives and areas of expertise that could contribute to a more diverse and strategically complementary portfolio, while strengthening FGHR's understanding of the ecosystem.
• Gather and verify information about the operating context, with attention to the safety of those who share it.

Political and Contextual Analysis

• Collect, process, and synthesize information from prospective and current grantees and other sources inside the DRC.
• Track sectors and dynamics of particular concern— such as mining and other natural-resource sectors, areas affected by land disputes and extractive projects, sites of civic mobilization and human rights violations, and territories affected by armed conflict, displacement and competing forms of authority. —and provide the team with regular, timely updates.
• Contribute analysis and on-the-ground insight to FGHR’s strategy and planning for the DRC and the wider region.

Grantmaking

• Conduct due diligence on prospective and current grantees.
• Write clear, well-reasoned grant recommendation memos.
• Monitor grantee performance and support partners throughout the life of their grants.

Qualifications

• Deep familiarity with the human rights movement in the DRC, including organized civil society and communities directly confronting injustice.
• Established trust across a broad cross-section of the DRC’s human rights movement, especially in ethnic areas.
• Demonstrated understanding of security and risk in the DRC context, and sound judgment in handling sensitive information.
• Fluency in French and English, with strong communication skills.
• Based in East Africa and able to work across the DRC and Burundi time zones.
• Experience with a donor agency or grantmaking is preferred.
• A proven commitment to human rights in all its dimensions.

• 20 days of annual leave in the first year, with incremental increases over time.
• Statutory bank holidays plus up to 14 personal leave days.
• “Refreshing Fridays”—non-working wellbeing days every other Friday from June through August.
• 12 paid sick days per year.
• 20 days of parental leave, where applicable.
• Up to three months of paid sabbatical after seven years of service.
• Retirement plan.
• A professional development plan with dedicated funding.

Fluency in French and English, with strong communication skills.