Africa - Programme Associate at Tony Blair Institute for Global Change

Key Responsibilities

The key responsibilities of this role will include:

Programme management support in oversight of TBI’s portfolio of Africa projects

• Support regular country project budget, planning and strategy exercises, by providing quality assurance and conducting first reviews
• Provide direct inputs into dashboards to ensure timely management of the regional portfolio
• Review management accounts to track expenditure against budget
• Anticipate, identify and elevate challenges/roadblocks to Africa ExCo and internal stakeholders (e.g. Country Heads), proposing courses of action for consideration
• Input to strategic projects (including new initiatives and regional collaborations between country projects)
• Contribute to the development and iteration of the Africa-wide systems and processes and guide teams in their adoption

Delivery support to country projects on priority initiatives

• Support Country Heads and their teams in the completion of project design analyses from initial scoping through to project start-up, including support to work-planning
• Play a hands on role in facilitating opportunity scoping and relationship building to enable the expansion of TBI to new geographies in Africa, including developing presentations for new country clients and senior government officials
• Support new projects in their inception phase and gap-fill to support implementation as in-country teams are put in place

Support country project resource mobilisation through fundraising and people processes

• Review and contribute to country project fundraising and partnership proposals and track regional funding opportunities and progress
• Review recruitment proposals and ensure recruitment notices reach appropriate global networks
• Support the induction process of new joiners arriving in the region

Develop analyses and written inputs to briefs and presentations

• Provide political-economic monitoring and analysis of regional trends and events
• Contribute to and develop written briefs—including written briefing for Tony Blair—ahead of trips to the region or as part of regular project updates

Person Specification

The successful candidate should demonstrate the majority of the following:

• At least four years’ experience as an advisor or project manager in a consulting firm, foundation/NGO, or private sector organization supervising and executing across multiple workstreams simultaneously
• Experience with international development, public sector, and technology for development programming is highly desired
• Demonstrable strength in project management, structured problem solving, top-down communication, and portfolio thinking
• Excellent communication skills, from executive office level through to technical level, and who is adept at speaking to senior leadership, knows how to navigate ambiguous environments and is comfortable at managing up and beyond hierarchy
• Experience developing executive and senior level briefings for internal and external audiences
• Experience in maintaining dashboards to facilitate nimble performance tracking and coordination
• Insatiable curiosity; great taste in data, with a proven ability to process and triangulate it; attention to detail
• Direct experience working in LMICs is highly desired
• Experience in working in entrepreneurial and matrixed environments and comfort working in ambiguity while closely collaborating with global functional and geographic teams
• Commitment to business objectives and pulling out the stops to make sure they are always met
• Relevant language skills for the region highly desired