The CEO of the Resilient Water Accelerator (RWA) will provide the leadership for the team and the programme through this next exciting and demanding phase of its delivery. The RWA is at a turning point in its development, as it secures long term funding and moves from a start-up phase into implementation. The RWA is also set to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of WaterAid, establishing its own governance and operations, while maintaining a strong relationship with WaterAid as its founder and incubator. This is a unique opportunity to join and lead the team as these decisions are made, setting the vision for the coming years and building on strong foundations to take the RWA into its successful establishment as its own organisation.
The CEO will be responsible for providing the vision for the RWA at both global and country levels, bringing these elements together and learning from the RWA’s experiences to date to strengthening its impact and clear value proposition. The CEO will need to oversee the team as a whole, currently 13 people spread across four continents, and set to grow to around 20 over the coming year; manage the budget (currently £11m over 4 years) and secure additional funding; lead the RWA to become a subsidiary of WaterAid, establishing a Board and governance arrangements; and lead the delivery of the RWA’s mission: to catalyse increased investment into improved water security and climate resilience in emerging economies.
The CEO will need to be an experienced leader, able to foster and build effective relationships with people and organisations around the world, from both the public and private sectors. They will need to have deep experience of development finance, and have a strong background in climate and/or water with a good understanding of the core issues and the main players in these areas in order to ensure that the RWA is able to deliver high impact and meaningful change in emerging economies. The CEO will need to have excellent strategic insight to spot opportunities; critical analytical skills to understand barriers to deployment and ways to address these; leadership to harness the team’s talents; and an entrepreneurial spirit to ensure that the RWA is at the vanguard of this critical and new area of work, testing and trying new things while having a rigorous approach to evaluation and learning.
We are a friendly, supportive, globally distributed team, bringing on-the-ground expertise and comprehensive perspectives, combining climate policy, water economics, private finance, measurement and evaluation, and governance. We are currently housed within WaterAid – the world’s largest NGO focused on providing water, sanitation, and hygiene outcomes for people in developing countries.
The RWA currently has 13 staff, based in 6 countries, and we have plans to build the team to around 20 over the next couple of years, to extend our delivery from 2 countries (currently Nigeria and Bangladesh) to 5 or 6, and to secure additional financing to complement the investment we have secured from the UK Government.
This is an exciting time to join the RWA as we move from our early inception phase to implementation and delivery.