Chief of Party - Kenya Irrigation Project at Land O Lakes

Project Description:

Kenya Irrigation Project is a 5-year $14M-$18M project funded by the USDA Food for Progress Program. The project will work closely with the National Irrigation Board and act as a steward of USDA funds to design and construct small and medium sized irrigation projects that demonstrate a strong potential for expanding agricultural production and trade.

Position Summary and Primary Responsibilities:

The Chief of Party (COP) will provide strategic vision, overall leadership and technical direction to the project. The COP will ensure the project is planned and executed with quality, accountability and measurable impact. The COP will be the primary liaison with USDA and other donor partners, as necessary, and will manage project staff and implementing partners to ensure proper reporting, financial management, and compliance. The COP is expected to coordinate with government and other stakeholders to ensure that activities complement ongoing initiatives and adhere to country and global standards. The position will be based in Nairobi, Kenya with frequent travel to other field sites.

Primary responsibilities of the position include but are not limited to the following:

• Provide strategic leadership to the design and implementation of the project activities and oversees program planning, monitoring, reporting evaluation and overall learning
• Oversee project finances, planning, administration, compliance, reporting, and monitoring and evaluation;
• Ensure successful project implementation and achievement of results on time and within budget;
• Manage relationship with implementing partners.
• Ensure optimal use of human, financial, and physical resources to successfully meet project milestones, objectives, deliverables and targets.
• Oversee and coordinate the successful completion of planning and budgeting requirements of the project.
• Ensure mechanisms are in place to monitor the implementation of projects, including progress toward achieving objectives and targets with high-quality and on-time performance;
• Ensure timely, high-quality and complete submission of work plans, quarterly and annual reports, financial reports, and any other reports required by the donor;
• Ensure that all activities are undertaken in full compliance with Land O’Lakes’ standard operating procedures, and USDA policies and regulations, and national policies and laws;
• Ensure documentation and dissemination of findings, impact, innovations, and lessons learned;
• Represent project both internally and externally to other donors, stakeholders, implementing partners and government counterparts.
• Ensure gender equality approaches are integrated into programming; implement an engendered design, identifying learnings on a regular basis, refining the design as needed to improve gender equality across project activities.
• Promote sustainability of project activities with effective networking, linkages to other programs, capacity building of project staff, and institutional strengthening of implementing partners and community-based organizations.
• Create a collaborative organizational culture and facilitate exchange of knowledge for cross-organizational learning.
• Encourage learning and knowledge sharing as an essential part of doing business and ensure employees own their own learning;
• Ensure important decisions are recorded, and easily available for retrieval thus making it employees’ responsibility to share the learning; and
• Ensure tools for learning, such as blogs, articles, social media, brochures, coaching, training, etc. are in place. Encourage employees’ enrollment in relevant social networks and communities of practice.

Reporting & Supervision:

The Chief of Party reports to the Program Director – Africa and supervises, mentors and develops technical leads.

Required Skills and Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in international development, business administration, economics, social sciences, agriculture, or a closely related field is required.
• 10 + years’ experience designing, implementing and managing large, complex projects involving multiple partners, in/for developing countries, of which at least five years has been spent in the position of CoP, Deputy CoP or a similar role of a large development program of equivalent size and scope.
• Strong leadership, communication and interpersonal skills, including proven ability to develop and communicate a common vision among diverse partners and lead a multi-disciplinary team.
• Strong leadership qualities and depth and breadth of technical and management expertise in agriculture programming.
• Experience in systems strengthening, capacity building, service delivery, and quality improvement is highly desirable.
• At least two years of experience living or working in a developing country required;
• Demonstrated ability to create and maintain effective working relations with host country government personnel, stakeholders, NGO partners, and international donor agencies.
• Strong interpersonal, writing and oral presentation skills in English.
• Ability to work independently and manage a high volume work flow
• Relevant computer software skills (including, at a minimum, the standard applications in MS Office).

Desired Skills and Qualifications:

• Experience living and working in Kenya is preferred;
• Management experience of a USG contract or cooperative agreement is preferred;