Team Lead - Business and Program Development at African Development Solutions (Adeso)

Reporting To: Director of Strategic Partnerships

Working With (Remotely): Country Programme Teams, Finance/Human Resources/Logistics, Communications and Advocacy Manager

Program / Duty Station: London, UK

Starting Date: As Soon As Possible – Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until position is filled.

Gross Salary Range: GBP 40,000 – 45,000 Annually.

Position Summary: The Team Lead – Business and Program Development will provide leadership to the agency’s positioning for and pursuit of institutional and private sector donor resources, with an emphasis on various competitive funding mechanisms.

S/he will provide business development expertise to cross-discipline and cross functional teams in the development of proposals to ensure the highest quality standards and competitiveness.

S/he will contribute to and support internal learning processes that improve business development practices to ensure funding opportunities align with organization’s mission and objectives, enhance the agency’s value propositions, and leverage innovative, evidence-based results into new revenue and programming.

S/he will research and track upcoming opportunities through the capture planning stages and into final proposal production and negotiation.

S/he will strengthen the capacity of country program staff and the technical units as appropriate, in capture planning and proposal development and the introduction of new tools and best practices in coordination with agency-wide efforts from the Business Development community of practice.

Position Purpose

1. Pre-Positioning (focus on Capture Planning)
2. Pursuit of Opportunities
3. Award Administration
4. Agency Learning

Specific Roles and Responsibilities

1. Pre-Positioning (Focus on Capture Planning)

• 1.1. Stay abreast of trends in new business development in priority Adeso sectors and share those with country program teams. Strengthen intelligence and market research to identify opportunities for diversified funding and inform positioning efforts.
• 1.2. Actively gather intelligence about new funding opportunities, analyze them, and share with headquarters, regional, and country program staff as appropriate.
• 1.3. Champion the use of Adeso’s online relationship management system (Salesforce) by staff and ensure the accuracy and completeness of all opportunity records in the system.
• 1.4. Support country programs to improve capture planning capacities and practices, including identification of proposal development teams and expected proposal development support needs.

2. Pursuit of Opportunities

• 2.1. Support country management to perform due diligence in go/no-go analyses and decisions.
• 2.2. As determined with the Director of Partnership and Strategy, deploy to provide hands-on proposal development support to country programs. As appropriate, serve in lead or support role in proposal teams. Write or edit technical narratives, produce budgets and other proposal pieces as required depending on capacities of proposal development team.
• 2.3. Assist proposal development teams to improve proposal competitiveness through cross-sector engagement and integration of industry tools and best practices.
• 2.4. Provide BD strategic oversight and input for proposal teams; review proposals from a growth perspective as needed, including overall responsiveness to donor requirements, incorporation of cost-effectiveness considerations, and other aspects that may affect Adeso’ competitiveness.
• 2.5. Ensure accurate, complete and timely submission of proposals to donors, including compliance review of all proposal components, upload into donor systems as required. Follow through with negotiations including support to oral defense, issues letter response and proposal revision through to award signature and award modification as appropriate.
• 2.6. Assist teams to conduct after-action reviews for key funding opportunities to promote continuous learning and improvement in capture planning and proposal development.

3. Award Administration

• 3.1. Ensure effective award management for a select portfolio of centrally-issued awards such that: high risk issues are quickly surfaced and handled effectively with donors; reports meet deadlines and quality expectations; agreement terms and compliance requirements are commonly understood and respected; and problems and trends are fed back to project management.
• 3.2. Work with colleagues across the agency to track, document and build upon donor hot buttons, trends in implementation issues, successes and challenges, and related understanding of donor expectations. Build award implementation experience into proposal development.

4. Agency Learning

• 4.1. Share relevant learning with the BD community of practice.
• 4.2. Build country program capacity in BD-related skills through training and ongoing accompaniment.
• 4.3. Support development and roll-out of BD-related competencies and training programs.
• 4.4. Work with Country Program teams to develop and maintain capacity statements, past performance tables, and evidence-based results for priority areas; work with HQ to maintain global past performance and corporate capacity statements.

Skills and Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Development, International Relations, or relevant field preferred; equivalent experience acceptable
• 7-8 years of international development experience, including at least 3 years working with an NGO in a developing country
• Demonstrated experience leading and producing competitive proposals in programming contexts similar to Adeso required. Comprehensive familiarity with technical and cost application requirements of main institutional donors required
• Demonstrated experience managing people and processes; leading teams to produce deliverables under tight deadlines and at exceptional quality
• Familiarity with relevant regulations and with the institutional agency-specific policies, procedures and priorities
• Experience with staff and local partner capacity development and mentoring
• Experience with implementation and management of awards
• Must be eligible to work in the UK