Website Renewable World
Assistant Technical Officer
Location: Kathmandu, with travel within Nepal
Reporting Line Manager: Technical Lead
Contract: 6 months initial fixed term contract
Salary: 42,000 NPR per month basic salary
About Renewable World
1.2 billion people are still living in poverty, inequality is rising, and the world is failing to decarbonise quickly enough to avoid climate disaster. The world’s poorest people contributed little to climate change, yet they are most impacted, and least able to adapt. This is not fair. And it is not sustainable. Renewable World (RW) is an ambitious International NGO headquartered in the UK, with branches in Nepal and Kenya. We envision a sustainable and fairer world where clean energy is accessible to all-because with clean energy, both people and planet can thrive. By 2030, we aim to enable over 500,000 people living in poverty to transform their lives by improving their access to clean energy, empowering them to develop
sustainable and resilient livelihoods, and mitigating the impact of climate change.
We have recently surpassed our 2022 goal of reaching 100,000 people by the end of 2022, and now have ambitious plans to scale our impact to 2030 and beyond. We focus on four key areas where we believe we can achieve the greatest impact in transforming lives through clean energy:
- Energy for Livelihoods: Improving incomes and welfare through using energy for productive purposes, with a focus on reaching the poorest and empowering women and the socially excluded.
- Energy for Climate Change: Helping people adapt to climate change and protect ecosystems through energy-enabled climate-smart agriculture and early warning systems and mitigating climate change through clean energy and carbon offsetting.
- Energy for Health and Education: Using renewable energy to supply clean water for drinking, health and sanitation, electrifying remote health centres and schools to improve health and education outcomes, and enabling cleaner cooking.
- Energy for Catalytic Impact: Developing systemic impact and activating demand through the productive use of energy, sustainable multi-stakeholder partnerships, and piloting scalable innovations.
We aim to live and breathe our ENERGY values which are: Excellence; Networked; Empathy; Resourceful; Gravitas; and Yes we can.
Detailed purpose
- Technical project support: Assist the Technical Lead to identify technical partners and support the RW team to deliver the technical components of RW’s clean energy projects, including leveraging funding, and all stages from procurement through to commissioning.
- Technical advice and input: Assist the Technical Lead in building technical understanding within the RW Nepal team and partner organisations to achieve sustainable impacts through piloting and scaling up clean energy services.
- Methodology: Assist the RW technical team to implement and adhere to the global programme protocols and standards for all projects, including RW’s Community Centred Model (CCM), market system approach, and risk management processes.
Main Duties and Responsibilities
1. Technical Project Support
- Assist the Technical Lead to build RW’s network of technical service providers, covering an extensive range of clean energy technologies, including water lifting, clean cooking, institutional electrification, value chain technologies, and to broaden this scope to include new technologies.
- Assist the Technical Lead to monitor the technical team’s delivery of all clean energy components of RW’s projects, from planning, feasibility studies, implementation, through to post construction phase.
- Offer technical assistance to the project team, collaborate with the team to identify problems (technical and business model/methodology) and efficiently support the team to resolve them to achieve improved outputs.
- Assist the Technical Lead to ensure the technical components of projects are delivered within the given budget, timeframe and agreed grant parameters, support quality assurance and risk management and support Project Managers to adhere to catch-up plans agreed between the Technical Lead with Project Managers where required.
- Assist the project team to ensure health and safety measures are implemented throughout the project period
2. Technical Assistance to Technical Lead
- Assist the Technical Lead to organize technical training for the technical staff and wider project team as relevant, according to needs and available project and operational budget, through direct delivery of training and engagement of relevant third part trainers.
- Assist the Technical Lead to hold regular technical team meetings to build the team cohesiveness and pre-plan the effective allocation of technical staff according to project need.
- Assist the Technical Lead to facilitate monthly technical team meetings to share knowledge and troubleshoot challenges, to encourage cross-project learning and best practice sharing.
- Document lessons learned and share these with the Nepal and global team through reports, website updates and presentations.
- Assist the RW technical team in providing technical advice and guidance to partners and communities regarding technical procurement for RW-managed projects to ensure quality and timeliness in procurement.
- Review project design documents prepared by technical team members, to be approved by the Technical Lead, to ensure that technical design, drawings, cost estimate and specifications are in line with RW’s technical standards, norms and guidelines.
- Maintain and update the technical database of all technologies implemented by RW and its partners.
3. Methodology
- Assist the team to deliver all project activities in line with Renewable World’s Community Centred Model Guidelines and Toolkit, Market Systems Approach Guidelines and Toolkit.
- In collaboration with Project Managers, conduct regular project risk assessments and health and safety audits, focusing on technical components of RW projects.
- Under the guidance of the Technical Lead, assist team to follow the RW standard technical procedures, policies and documentation requirements across project phases.
- Ensure technical resources are maintained, managed and used responsibly and appropriately.
- Work with the technical team to implement framework, policy and procedures to bring the level of service and maintenance of the installed RETs to the highest standard.
4. Cross-cutting duties
- Ensure all pilot and scale up projects are gender and socially inclusive.
- Adhere to RW’s Code of Conduct and follow Renewable World’s Safeguarding Policy at all times.
- Represent RW, our values, vision and mission in the regions where RW operates in a professional, honest, transparent and positive way to help build RW’s image and brand.
- Ensure efficient usage of resources.
- Be flexible and responsive, undertaking reasonable tasks and responsibilities as requested by your direct line manager.
- Keep accurate records and utilise the existing administrative forms, for food, travel and accommodation when visiting project sites, and timesheet management to enable financial administration.
- Attend regular supervision and take active steps in professional development.
Qualification, Experience and Attributes
Essential
- Minimum of bachelor’s degree in Energy Engineering, Electrical Engineering or Mechanical Engineering.
- Technical skills and background, preferably in small-scale renewable energy and/or clearly relevant related topic. Professional experience not required. Fresh Engineering graduates are encouraged to apply.
- Ability to manage multiple priorities.
- Experience of using AutoCAD to produce and review necessary technical drawings.
- Proven experience in the usage of computer and office software packages (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and able to write reports in English.
- Ability to interpret and convey technical information to a non-technical audience.
Desirable
- Knowledge of all the following small scale renewable energy technologies: hydro, wind, solar and biogas
Applying for the post:
Please send your CV (2 pages only) and a covering letter (1-page only) to jobs@renewable-world.org.
Closing date for applications: Wednesday 10th January 2024
Interview date: January 2024: date to be confirmed shortly.
Candidates those who applied for RW’s vacancy of Junior Technical Officer dated 9th November 2023 need not to apply.
This job description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. However, it is inevitable that responsibilities and tasks may be varied and unpredictable. It is expected of the staff to respond with a flexible approach when tasks arise which are not specifically covered in this job description. Should an additional responsibility or task become a regular part of an employee’s job, the job description will be amended in consultation with the employee.
Interested candidates (women and disadvantaged groups are highly encouraged to apply) meeting above criteria are requested to send an application. complete CV, not exceeding 2 pages, and a cover letter, not exceeding 1 page, stating salary expectation. Only short-listed candidates will be called for further selection process. The employer reserves all the rights to accept or reject any or all the applications without any reasons thereof. Undue influence will result in automatic rejection of application.