Business Development Senior Advisor, Climate Finance

The Climate Finance Support Unit (CFSU) is a new unit that works with country programs, regions and headquarters colleagues to develop CRS’ strategic approach toward climate finance, assess funding opportunities, and developing and sharing guidance to advance CRS’ climate adaptation programming in ways that achieve CRS’ strategic goals while managing risks. The CFSU is tasked with articulating CRS' programmatic, ethical and financial strategy for climate finance including carbon finance opportunities. 

This role is for someone who can straddle strategic high-level thinking and deliver specific technical outputs, guidance, and support to country program and business development (BD) and programming staff. The Senior Advisor will primarily be responsible for leading the BD processes for multilateral climate funding streams, including the Green Climate Fund. They will also carry out research on new donors and potential partners in climate finance, building relationships with these entities. They will aid country programs in go/no go decisions, proposal design and development, and support CRS regions/ countries and key partners in their growth objectives around climate adaptation. They will play a critical knowledge management role across the agency leveraging learning and past performance to facilitate strategic, informed and streamlined business development processes.   

 

This position would be ideal for someone with high level BD skillsets who has worked closely with multilateral climate finance instruments in the past. Candidates with a technical climate change background in key areas of interest to CRS would be preferable. These include but are not limited to: environmental safeguarding and compliance requirements; climate change risk and vulnerability analysis; climate resilience, nature based solutions, carbon projects particularly in the landscape restoration sector, alignment with NDCs; NAPs; NBSAPs; frequently used indicators measuring climate adaptation and/or mitigation objectives; and/or GHG emissions accounting for nature-based programming. 

The BD Senior Advisor will cultivate relationships with climate specific donors and ideally come with an existing understanding and network of these donors. Ultimately, it is a role for someone passionate about climate change, who wants to see more climate adaptation funding reaching vulnerable communities.

Specific responsibilities of the role: 

This role will support business development functions across the business development cycle and will remain flexible to the needs of the country programs and regions.

Strategy development and implementation:

• Lead the finalization of CRS’ climate finance strategy and develop a roadmap for implementation.
• Provide analysis on funding trends and validate existing analysis on priority donors.
• Map funding mechanisms and identify alignment with CRS’ climate portfolio. 
• Lead the internal committee working on stage 2 of the accreditation process of the Green Climate Fund.

Capture and Positioning

• Lead the process of selecting which projects should be prioritized for co-design investment to put forward for the Green Climate Fund.
• Co-develop competitive capture and positioning strategies and work with CFSU, IDEA, regional and CP leadership to facilitate improved positioning practices to secure climate financing from priority donors. Where engagements are already supported by colleagues (eg donor engagement leads), work collaboratively to determined how best to support and build on the existing strategies (leveraging existing networks, geographies and cyclical nature of these opportunities).
• Cultivate relationships with priority donors (in collaboration with relevant technical leads) and define preferred partner models. 
• Strengthen country program teams in strategically positioning for climate finance opportunities.
• Provide support to key partners (eg local partners and government actors) where appropriate and where CP is supporting these actors in accessing climate finance opportunities.

Opportunity alignment 

• Build BD understanding and capacity across the agency on institutional climate finance mechanisms, and recommend enhancements to current ways of doing business development to align with these mechanisms. 
• Lead opportunity tracking for climate specific funding streams to ensure that CPs are aware of the opportunities.
• Provide written and oral guidance and accompaniment to country programs and regions to support their go/no go decisions. 

Proposal development:

• Lead and support design processes for multilateral instruments like the Green Climate Fund and other institutional multilateral and bilateral instruments helping to identify appropriate climate technical