Program Officer, East Africa

Tags: Human Rights Law English Environment
  • Added Date: Thursday, 16 January 2025
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The application deadline is February 23, 2025. Please submit both a resume and a cover letter to be considered.

ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY

The Ford Foundationโ€™s Nairobi office seeks a dynamic, innovative Program Officer to be

a part of a team that is driving and shaping the foundationโ€™s ongoing social justice work in East Africa. With six decades in the East African region, the Nairobi officeโ€™s current strategy focuses on civic engagement and governance in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Under this strategy we invest in the threads that hold democracies together: basic freedoms, both in the digital domain and our daily lives; supporting an autonomous civil society and open government and building the resilience of social justice actors. We sustain a commitment to gender and disability justice and acknowledge the need to support new generations of leadership in a youthful continent. Our investments span institutions, individuals and ideas-resourcing a diverse set of actors committed to ending inequality through advancing social justice.

Reporting to the Regional Director, the Program Officer will develop and manage a grantmaking portfolio that helps advance the impact of Fordโ€™s work in the region and includes a mix of grantees reflective of the needs of the change ecosystem. They will lead on the design of learning and convening for their grantees in partnership with the office team and broader Foundation. They will also contribute to thought leadership and strengthening resources for the work through engagement with other donors. The role involves collaborative interaction with colleagues across the Foundation including peer Program Officers and contributing to other Ford programming and strategic thinking.

HOW YOU WILL CONTRIBUTE

The Program Officer is responsible for the development and implementation of a grant portfolio and ensuring all related activities (grant making, convenings, thought leadership, capacity strengthening, external relations) are designed to deliver on the East African officeโ€™s goals and strategies, the objectives of International Programs, and the broader Ford Foundation. This will be developed and implemented with oversight from the Regional Director, and in collaboration with colleagues across the Foundationโ€™s regional and New York offices. In particular, the Program Officer will work in close collaboration with the Civic Engagement and Governance-International team and will sync strategies with the Tech and Society team.

The Program Officer will assess and analyze the landscape of actors and ideas as well as existing strategies and grantmaking and identify how to shape a portfolio that adds value, advances catalytic interventions, encourages creativity, and engages the potential to scale for greater influence. This portfolio will complement peer program officerโ€™s grantmaking in East Africa and in Civic Engagement and Governance-International teams and strategies by other grantmaking teams in the foundation where relevant.

More specifically as part of a multi-disciplinary team, the Program Officer will:

  • Work independently and collaboratively across the program to further develop grantmaking strategies and to manage, monitor and coordinate a grants portfolio. This includes long-term grant planning, engaging in annual planning and working to agreed grantmaking schedules, identifying prospective grantees, reviewing and responding to proposals and developing strategic rationales for funding, conducting organizational assessments including financial and narrative reviews, undertaking periodic reviews of progress with grantees and actively engaging in learning, monitoring and evaluation.

  • Design and support convening, collaboration, networking and knowledge production to enable cohort learning with grantees in their portfolio, the office and other actors in the Ford Foundation and broader ecosystems.

  • Contribute to the ongoing development and implementation of team strategies, working to fulfill the Foundationโ€™s East Africa Office and the international program goals.

  • Develop program activities in a team-oriented way, that are aligned with global and regional strategy goals and designed to achieve significant and scalable impact.

  • Pro-actively scan emerging analysis from research, policy, community and popular knowledge production and action, and draw on these to ensure that grantmaking and other programmatic approaches are relevant and meet evolving strategic questions and needs.

  • Build relationships with other donors to increase philanthropic coordination and contributions to the field.

  • Represent the Foundation and its work to external audiences including sector leaders, governments, media, academia, private sector, philanthropic and civic leaders through meetings, updates, speeches, briefings and interviews, with guidance from the Regional Director.

  • Promote and participate in maintaining an open and collaborative work environment, team building and team effectiveness, modeling these skills for the team.

  • Serve as a mentor to Program Associate and/or Program Assistant, with possible line management of the Program Assistant.

    WHAT YOU WILL BRING

    The ideal candidate will be well-versed in social justice questions as applies to democracy, human rights and the advancement of civic space in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania), with an interest in how this connects to broader Africa regional, South-South and/or global questions of justice and transformation. They will have knowledge and experience of the evolving issues around digital governance and growing an ecosystem of technology in the public interest. They will have experience in collaborating across sectors - in particular civil society, government and/or the private sector, to address inequality. They will understand broadly the roles that technical expertise, policy advocacy, litigation, community mobilizing, research, narrative shifts, and philanthropy play in advancing equity and justice, and effective ways of engaging government in this work. They will have insight into contemporary questions around gender and disability justice, and the dynamics of age, and how these are integrated into effective strategy. They will be an agile thinker, open to new ideas, rigorous in their analysis and collaborative in their approach. They will also have the capacity to build and sustain generative, effective relationships both internally and in an external ecosystem of influence and ideas with highly diverse players and significant complexity.

    The following additional qualifications are essential:

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