29 June 2015

Water and Governance internships with development consulting company

Who are NIRAS?
NIRAS International Consulting (NIC), a business unit of NIRAS A/S, is one of Europe’s leading private devel-opment consulting companies with over 40 years of experience managing donor funded projects within green economy, water, agriculture, forestry, governance, land and rural development. Annually, we under-take over 250 assignments in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America many of which are large long-term projects. Read more here.

For the fall semester 2015, we are looking for two interns to be part of our Water and Governance teams at our office in Copenhagen where 35 staff members work across various disciplines. The work place is charac-terized by independence and flexibility, but also by strict deadlines, high quality, close team work and col-laboration with our offices in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Governance activities:
We have on-going projects on civil society organizational development and partici-pation in democratic dialogue, on development of free media and on development of legal services to local communities. We manage several funds for CSO capacity development in Africa and Asia, and conduct evaluations on international dialogue and reform processes in fragile environments.

We continuously strive to improve our competence and to include state-of-the art methods and approach-es. We currently work in particular with Theory of Change, outcome monitoring, and Human Rights Based approaches.

Water activities:
With the increased occurrence of water stress/scarcity and flooding (evidence of the im-pacts of climate change) as well as deteriorated water quality, there is an obvious demand for innovative approaches and solutions towards managing water from a broad perspective whether at local or regional level. In Africa and Asia, we work with water supply, waste water management, sanitation and hygiene projects of all sizes, institutional development and capacity building of public water sector, integrated wa-ter resources management and trans-boundary water management.

Water must be managed in an integrated and holistic manner, and it must be administrated wisely and treated as an economic good. Hence, in water management assignments, we ensure that expertise and experience from other fields such as institutional development, health provision, financial and economic assessment, environmental and social assessment etc. are taken into account.

The Internship

We offer a 5 months full-time internship from September 2015 to January 2016. The interns will during the 5 months work primarily with their team, but collaboration with other teams can be expected in peak peri-ods. The work will, among others, include:

  • Support to the technical team in the project acquisition processes
  • Support to the management and implementation of projects
  • A field trip of approx. 1 week to a relevant project
  • A specific assignment on a subject relevant to the intern and relating to one of NIC’s projects/core are-as. The topic will be agreed upon at the beginning of the internship.
  • Every intern will work under the guidance of a mentor from the team

The internship is unpaid. However, costs relating to the field trip (flights, visa, accommodation, food etc) will be covered by NIRAS.

Qualifications Required

General:

  • Passion for development and working in an international environment
  • The ability and interest to work with management as well as with technical disciplines
  • Excellent spoken and written English is a requirement
  • Working knowledge in French, Spanish or Portuguese is an advantage
  • For non-Danish citizens, work and residence permits covering the full internship period are required


Water:

  • An on-going master degree in Engineering, Geology, Geography or similar discipline
  • Profound knowledge of GIS
  • Solid analytical skills


Governance:

  • An on-going master degree within the social sciences
  • An interest in outcome monitoring, theory of change, HRBA, civil society development and/or democ-ratization
  • Knowledge of recent methodological developments within the above thematic areas is an advantage


How to apply?

Interested candidates should register and submit their CVs and a motivational letter in English through http://www.niras.com/jobs/job-vacancies.aspx

The application deadline is 31th July 2015, but applications will be assessed on a rolling basis. Interviews will follow immediately after. Please contact Jane Hansen (jph@niras.dk) if you have any questions.