Economic Strengthening Advisor
CVPeople Tanzania | Full time
Dar es salaam , Tanzania | Posted on 06/18/2021
Position Purpose:
The Economic Strengthening Advisor will be responsible for the design, implementation and technical quality of strategies and activities to improve the economic stability of young people and households caring for OVC. The Economic Strengthening Advisor plays a pivotal role in planning for all aspects of livelihoods and economic opportunities activities for ACHIEVE Tanzania Project. She/he will facilitate a team of staff in the development of social protection linkages and provision, savings group (VSLG) activities and the integration of enterprise expertise and market access and relationships for securing the economic wellbeing of targeted households. The Advisor will be involved in project implementation and organizing and delivering training programs that address a wide variety of issues, including social protection and livelihoods; savings and financial access; agriculture and food security; economic and market development; ensuring delivery of specific training, coordination and execution of activities, and overall backstopping and troubleshooting. Proficiency in dealing with math, bookkeeping, and monitoring systems is essential, as is familiarity with the way Tanzanian women think and work at the grassroots, whether in rural or urban settings. The Economic strengthening advisor position requires a high degree of integrity, professionalism, flexibility, and perseverance, as well as the ability to anticipate, identify and resolve problems in the field quickly.
Key Responsibilities:
- The Economic strengthening advisor must develop a close working relationship with the Project Officer- Economic Strengthening. She/he needs to be a committed listener who not only is eager to know not only what is happening in all aspects of the targeted households’ economic wellbeing but also can give constructive feedback and support to those she/he supervises. The Advisor is responsible to:
- Technically supervise ES program activities including the design, development, and implementation of technical guidance as it relates to ES, ensuring all ES activities are in line with state-of-the-art, globally recognized best practices for addressing needs of OVC, young people, and their caregivers.
- In collaboration with Technical Advisor - Youth Interventions, assess and identify appropriate, USG-approved ES curricula for use with adolescent girls and young women and collaborating with sources of technical expertise as needed for adapting approved curriculum, designing interventions, and monitoring implementation.
- Exercising a supportive supervision approach, train, and mentor technical staff, and subgrantees responsible for child wellbeing.
- Build awareness of key ES concepts and principles among subgrantees and institutions. This includes assisting families in earning and saving income, managing money, and allocating household resources to improving children and youth’s wellness outcomes.
- Develop and instruct Project Officer-Youth Economic Strengthening towards effective methodologies for identifying appropriate ES interventions for specific households, depending on the needs and resources of those households (i.e. credit and market opportunities, group savings, income generation, micro-enterprise development training, farming-as-a-business, extensionist, other vocational training opportunities, youth employability, etc.); train/mentor in principles and standards for good implementation of or linkages to these interventions.
- Develop and ensure the implementation of strategies and interventions that promote the economic empowerment of young people.
- Ensure the documentation and dissemination of best practices and lessons learned, capture timely, high quality information, and utilize data to inform decisions and foster learning and innovation.
- Monitor and maintain relevant manuals, training materials, and reports for economic strengthening.
- Ensure all economic strengthening strategies are gender-sensitive and promote equitable programming.
- Create and implement a plan to engage the private sector in economic strengthening activities for greater and sustainable impacts.
- Lead the monthly, quarterly, and annual planning, monitoring, and reporting for all Economic Strengthening (ES) related activities.
- Oversee pilot or demonstration projects to test and adopt specific ES activities which align with PEPFAR priorities.
- Ensure global best practices shape project activities.
- Ensuring that books and materials used in the zones, by either staff or groups, are delivered in time to meet program deadlines and in a manner, that maintains internal controls on inventory.
- Providing substantial input to orientation and implementation training and training-of-trainers packages, including but not limited to training workshops for savings groups Management Committees, bi-monthly workshops run by Empowerment Workers, and MIS/positive deviance case study training.
- Training the zones-level Project Officer-Youth Economic Strengthening to use these training materials so that they can conduct training for Empowerment Workers (EWs) in order to maximize their impact on the activities and behavior of women and their groups.
- Overseeing the training carried out by the Project Officer-Youth Economic Strengthening, sometimes serving as a co-trainer, to ensure that they are consistently delivering project training effectively and conveying information and new ideas accurately and in a participatory manner that is appropriate for adult learners.
- Work with consortium partner responsible for gender mainstreaming and the Technical Director and ensure all economic strengthening activities are gender sensitive
- Ongoing engagement with the Project Officer-Youth Economic Strengthening to ensure there is a smooth relationship between them and the Empowerment Workers and that the EWs’ support and capacity building with the groups is sufficient to result in their independence and self-management.
- Regularly visiting groups to provide appreciative support and to ensure that a spirit of motivated teamwork and open communication is maintained throughout the project sites.
- Identifying emerging areas of challenge and participating in the modification of program materials to meet those needs.
- Ensuring that program information is accurately and promptly communicated from and to the field.
Minimum Requirements:
- Master's Degree or higher in economics, international development or a related field preferred; gender studies or experience an advantage.
- 5+ years’ experience designing, implementing and monitoring household economic strengthening activities working on multifaceted and complex international development programs.
- Expertise /familiarity with ES approaches for adolescent girls and young women, including entrepreneurship and employability
- At least 3 years of technical management experience, including direct supervision of technical teams and implementing partners.
- Solid knowledge of social protection, household economic strengthening, and microenterprise and market development instruments and frameworks.
- Experience in leveraging private sector partnerships and resources for creation of business opportunities, business mentorship and skills training, market access, strategies to strengthen household resilience, etc.
- Demonstrated leadership qualities, depth and breadth of technical and management expertise and experience, and strong interpersonal, writing, and oral presentation skills including such skills in English.
- Experience with a USG cooperative agreement and PEPFAR programming strongly preferred.