Social and Human Rights Project lead, Malaysia

Your Role

Step into a role where you will drive meaningful change across Sabah's palm sector. As Project Lead, you'll spearhead initiatives that improve labour and children-related practices, working closely with smallholders, plantations, mills, and communities through both fieldwork and re-mote engagement. You'll be at the heart of stakeholder collaboration, ensuring data collection, reporting, and impact measurement are carried out effectively, while also supporting the Social and Human Rights team in supply chain engagements. This is your chance to lead projects that make a tangible difference on the ground and shape a more responsible future for the industry.

Your day-to-day would be around

 Lead child-focused projects end-to-end: From design to implementation, ensuring alignment with child protection principles through risk assessments, policy development, training materials, and stakeholder workshops.

 Facilitate workshops and capacity-building

Deliver child protection and child labour dialogues with plantation schools, management teams, smallholders, educators, and community members.

Provide technical and coordination support: Organise meetings, monitor progress, prepare reports, and strengthen collaboration with project partners and stakeholders.

Drive evidence-based programme design: Conduct desk research, situation analyses, and contextual assessments to identify emerging child protection risks and inform interventions.

Support proposals, monitoring, and reporting: Contribute technical input to donor proposals, track project implementation, recommend adaptive measures, and prepare narrative/analytical reports for learning and accountability.

 Strengthen stakeholder relationships: Build partnerships with plantation companies, upstream supply chain actors, schools, and communities to reinforce child protection systems and collaboration.

Contribute to team and cross-programme efforts

 Enhance programme integration and knowledge management: Document field insights, share learning across teams, and support continuous improvement of child protection and labour-related programming. Provide technical input and contextual expertise to labour-focused initiatives, while coordinating closely with the Sabah Landscape and Social & Human Rights teams to align priorities, maintain knowledge of laws and policies, and contribute to communications, documentation, and translation needs.

Your Profile

You're a passionate individual with knowledge in child protection, migration, and abour rights issues who loves working in the business and human rights space to drive transformation across connected supply chains. Someone that is interested in a career with a dynamic non-profit that builds relationships with companies, governments and civil society organisations to bring re-sponsible products to the market.

An individual who is proactive and collaborative team player with good leadership ability. One that can participate in a collaborative and organized manner, and thrive in fast-paced, deadline-driven environments, demonstrating impeccable verbal and written communication skills on top of strong critical thinking skill. You'll need a solid understanding of Malaysian labour and children laws, as well as international frameworks on human rights, child rights, and labour standards.

Equally important is your awareness of the social challenges linked to the palm oil industry, as this knowledge will allow you to engage meaningfully with communities, companies, and stakeholders. Your ability to in-terpret these issues and translate them into actionable strategies will be central to your success in this role. You'll also be expected to drive capacity building in supply chain child protection--developing training content, delivering workshops, producing reports, and engaging stakeholders to strengthen protections across the sector. Strong leadership and project management skills are essential as you'll be expected to guide teams, plan effectively, and manage budgets with confidence. Communication is another corner-stone: excellent written and verbal skills in English are required, and fluency in additional lan-guages such as Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin, or Tamil will be a distinct advantage.

We're looking for someone who can connect across cultures and contexts, ensuring clarity and collaboration at every stage. Finally, we want someone who thrives on problem-solving, embraces change with a growth mindset, and pays close attention to detail. Above all, you'll be driven by passion whether for conservation, social justice, community empowerment, or environmental sustainability and you'll share in Earthworm Foundation's mission to create lasting, positive change

Workings Conditions

• Education: Preferable Bachelors in Social sciences, human rights, sociolo-gy, international development or other related field
• Experience: 4 years minimum
• Language(s): Bahasa & English
• Employment: Full-time
• Location: Sabah, Malaysia

Joining Us

If you are in search of having a meaningful impact, with a desire to innovate and act for the environment, this offer is for you! The team you would join is truly committed to and passionate about finding concrete solutions to improve relationship between People and Nature.