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ABOUT SPARK MICROGRANTS

Spark MicroGrants believes in a world where everyone lives with dignity and determines their own positive future. Spark has worked in 800+ villages in 6 countries and has pioneered a community-driven development model in sub-Saharan Africa. Spark works with NGO and Government partners to scale the model's adoption and impact on rural communities - on their own terms. Our model combines facilitated community meetings with a small, discretionary grant to catalyse local action and institution building. Read more about our Approach, Impact and Values on our website.

Spark seeks a strategic and seasoned leader with a significant experience of leading systems change in partnership with national and local governments to lead Spark expansion strategy. This role requires working with our Country Directors and other key colleagues to scale our programs in partnership with governments while maintaining program quality and compliance with organizational and donor policies.

OUR WORK

The foundation of our approach is the Facilitated Collective Action Process (FCAP), where rural communities are led through regular facilitated meetings to organize, conceptualize and implement local development projects, which are supported by a microgrant to fund them. The FCAP has been designed to improve local livelihoods, enhance social cohesion, and improve citizen engagement.

Our operating model is based on an international team of functional advisers (e.g. finance team, training team, design team) who support country teams. Country teams co-design the FCAP with local partners and government, train partners, and support quality monitoring and oversight. The size and scope of country teams depend on the needs of our partners. In Rwanda, for example, Spark is partnering with the Government of Rwanda to implement the Advancing Citizen Engagement (ACE) Project, supported by the Japanese Social Development Fund, the World Bank and Comic Relief. The midline results for external evaluations show encouraging positive change on multiple dimensions of economic development and social inclusion.

WHO YOU ARE

You are a seasoned professional with significant expertise in policy influencing, partnership management and program implementation. You are excited to join us at a crucial juncture in our growth when we are investing in swift expansion, growing our program and in-country partnerships, and focused on maintaining sector-leading quality as we scale. You will lead our teams in supporting our partners to incorporate technology into the program delivery while maintaining quality approaches to facilitation and training design. The right candidate will not want to do ‘development as usual’ but question how aid works and ensure that Spark is ultimately accountable to the villages we serve.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Reporting to the CEO, the Chief Program Officer (CPO) is a key leadership role responsible for overseeing the programmatic strategy and execution of Spark MicroGrants. A successful CPO will enable two flagship national programs to progress, in Rwanda and Malawi as well as growth in Uganda and Ghana programs, and possible expansion to countries requesting technical support for national programs. The CPO will manage senior staff such as the Country Directors, the Program Design Director, and others to ensure success across domains. This role will focus on enhancing program quality, scalability, and impact. The CPO will be a strategic thinker, an effective manager, and a collaborative leader dedicated to ensuring communities have agency and control over their own futures.

1. Responsibility: Programmatic strategy

Year one goal: pass national village grants and planning framework in Malawi, advance Rwanda program toward financing requests to x-lateral donors to finance the national framework, launch 300+ villages across countries, and streamline advanced inclusion facilitation practices across countries.

Duties:

1. Progress national scale programs via policy adoption, financing, and program roll out across Rwanda and Malawi.
2. Maintain and cultivate top level national government relationships in support of the national program adoption, financing and execution.
3. Establish in-country financing via Government, the World Bank, bilateral partners and co-financing.
4. Develop and implement programmatic strategy in alignment with Spark MicroGrants’ mission and goals.
5. Oversee the design and execution of all programmatic activities to ensure high quality, impactful, and scalable initiatives.
6. Provide strategic direction and support to Country Directors to enhance country-specific strategies and operations.

2. Responsibility: Leadership management

Year one goal: Build relationships with existing leadership, ensure prioritization and execution of country and program design work. Assess capacity needs and hire key roles to fill leadership gaps.

Duties:

1. Direct line management of and support to Country Directors, DesignDirector and additional senior staff to lead their teams successfully.
2. Overall responsibility for program expansion, timelines and budget management in line with annual and multi-year organizational strategies while maintaining quality.
3. Recruit, mentor and support senior program staff, promoting professional growth and development.

3. Responsibility: Monitoring and Evaluation oversight

Year one goal: Strengthen the contextualization and application of monitoring and evaluation findings to program activities.

Duties:

1. Direct line management of M&E team.
2. Support M&E and program teams in distilling, communicating, and applying findings from learning and evaluation initiatives.
3. Ensure the monitoring and evaluation team is structured to support robust program learnings and improvements for each country’s context and needs.
4. Support the integration of monitoring and evaluation learnings back into program design, implementation, and country teams.

4. Responsibility: Program design and innovation

Year one goal: Ensure integration of learnings into design and innovation tests.

Duties:

1. Support the design team to test and streamline program innovations.
2. Facilitate the integration of learnings into design conversations.
3. Establish base guides for national program design and policies.

5. Financial Oversight:

Year one goal: ensure sound management of country budgets by country directors and 100% clean audits.

1. Manage the overall program budget to ensure consistency with strategic priorities, donor commitments and available funding.
2. Ensure the program team makes cost-effective use of resources and adheres to financial policies and procedures.
3. Review program expenditure with an eye towards streamlined costing across programs and optimizing for program ROI.

REQUIREMENTS:

Qualifications, experience & skills:

• 10+ years experience in Africa of scaling evidence-based programs, growing government-led, NGO supported programming, with 5+ years in senior leadership.
• Experience with community-driven development programs.
• Demonstrated success in running complex government partnerships in multiple countries.
• Expertise in managing relationships with large multilateral agencies, specifically the World Bank.
• Fluency in impact evaluations and data-driven decision-making.
• Understanding of government financial systems and history of clean audits on programs managed previously.
• Excellent track record in designing and managing rural development programs.
• Strong project management skills and attention to detail are required.
• Excellent English written and oral communication.

Safeguarding

Our safeguarding follows a do-no-harm principle. All Spark staff are expected to respect and uphold the safeguarding procedures and principles to minimize harm to stakeholders, program participants, and the environment in compliance with the World Bank Environmental and Social Framework and national legislation in the countries where we operate.

OTHER INFORMATION

Job Location: Flexible. Preference is for this position to be based in Rwanda, Malawi or Uganda

How to Apply: Spark Microgrants has partnered with HomecomingEx Executive Search for this recruitment. Interested candidates may email their CV and cover letter to Gia Kalk, gia@homecomingex.com

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

Spark Microgrants provides equal employment and advancement opportunities to all individuals. Employment decisions at Spark are based on merit, qualifications, and abilities. Spark does not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, gender identity, age, disability, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by the law. Spark will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities unless doing so would result in undue hardship to daily operations.