Resilience & Social Inclusion Director at ACDI/vOCA

Since 1963, ACDI/vOCA has empowered people in 145 developing and transitional nations to succeed in the global economy. Based in Washington, D.C., ACDI/VOCA is a non profit international development organization that delivers technical and management assistance in agribusiness, financial services, enterprise development, community development and food security in order to promote broad-based economic growth and vibrant civil society.

Job Description

Overview

The USAID-funded Ghana Market Systems and Resilience Activity (MSR) is a five-year, $35.9M follow-on project to USAID/Ghana ADVANCE II. MSR will leverage over a decade of experience linking smallholders to markets, inputs, and services in Ghana. The project will strengthen commercial relationships between market actors, improve the rural entrepreneurship ecosystem to enable greater market participation, particularly for women and youth, expand the availability of agribusiness services, and link targeted policy initiatives to improved local economic governance. These activities will result in competitive, stronger, and more resilient markets, thus increasing inclusive agriculture-led economic growth in northern Ghana.

Pursuant to its mission, ACDI/VOCA is seeking experienced and talented professionals for the Resilience & Social Inclusion Director position. The position will be based in Tamale and reports to the Chief of Party. The Resilience & Social Inclusion Director will be responsible for working across program areas to ensure activities consider social dynamics as well as issues, constraints, and opportunities—particularly for women and youth—to promote resilience and inclusion at the production, market, and policy levels of interventions. The Resilience and Inclusion Director will support the collection and use of data and learning to ensure activities generate results. The position will play a key role in the promotion of collaboration, learning, and adaptation (CLA) approaches to support and enhance resilience and inclusion within the Activity. The position will provide oversight and coordination of gender, youth, and social inclusion experts as well as work closely with other technical and MEL staff across the Activity. The position will facilitate and supervise the design and implementation of the Gender and Social Inclusion Analysis and Implementation Strategy, ensuring that the Activity is achieving inclusion and resilience goals and that best practices are documented and shared.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

At the Project Management Level

• Lead the Resilience and Social Inclusion team to develop and implement the activity’s overall gender and social inclusion (GSI) and youth strategies, in coordination with the Chief of Party (COP), DCOP and MSR technical team.
• Lead the development and promotion of context-sensitive, culturally appropriate female empowerment, male engagement, youth engagement, and gender-transformative approaches.
• Lead or assist in the design and implementation of gender and social inclusion analyses, impact assessments and other learning studies.
• With the Gender and Youth Specialist, provide gender and social inclusion technical advice and trainings to activity staff, private sector partners and other stakeholders to build their capacity to integrate gender and youth considerations into intervention designs, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation.
• Review and provide input to activity work plans, with attention to GSI dimensions of technical activities and operations and discuss GSI issues and priorities with activity senior management and other technical specialists.
• Liaise with technical component leaders, private sector partners and other stakeholders to ensure that gender and youth considerations are identified and integrated across interventions.
• Coordinate with the CLA/MEL Director to plan the collection and analysis of relevant data and assist in the collection and analysis of sex- and age-disaggregated data. Work with MEL team to identify GSI learning questions and outcomes.
• Write project reports and prepare internal documentation as required.
• Work with the Communications Specialist to identify, document, and disseminate gender and youth lessons learned among the team, activity partners, USAID, and other external stakeholders.
• Ensure that MSR complies with ACDI/VOCA’s internal Gender Equality and Social Inclusion policy.
• Ensure that the gender and youth interventions supported by MSR comply with the regulations and standards established by USAID.

At the Administrative and Personnel Level

• Supervise and monitor the selection, performance and evaluation processes of the Social Inclusion and Innovation technical team, at the national and regional levels, ensuring that suitable personnel of high human and professional quality are involved in all positions.
• Define the equipment and logistical needs of the team’s personnel and ensure that team members make good use of them.
• Approve, in accordance with the needs of the Social Inclusion and Innovation team and the fulfillment of responsibilities related to the activity objectives, travel expenses of the team and duly identify and support, in coordination with the COP, the needs of short-term personnel, volunteers and advisers (both expatriates and locals) for the component. Coordinate with the areas of contracts, financial, human resources and administrative the provision of technical information required for the selection and contracting of projects, personnel, selection of operators, disbursements, others.

Required Skills or Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in agriculture, economics, business administration, sociology, gender, international development, or another relevant field from an accredited college or university. Master’s degree preferred.
• Minimum of 10 years prior work experience in international development, preferably in an agricultural or market systems context, including at least 6 – 8 years’ experience in gender, women’s empowerment, youth, social inclusion and/or resilience programming.
• Fluency in written and spoken English is essential.

Preferred Skills or Experience:

• Knowledge of proven approaches and best practices for integrating women, youth, ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged populations into agriculture and economic growth programs.
• In-depth knowledge of gender, youth, and other social inclusion considerations (constraints and opportunities) in agricultural sector in Ghana.
• Demonstrated success strengthening the resilience of vulnerable communities through improved livelihoods, climate change adaptation, social behavior change, social capital, preferably through an integrated approach.
• Experience in community mobilization, consensus building and grassroots advocacy regarding local issues such as land use, natural resource management, economic development and disaster risk reduction preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical assistance and advisory services to a range of financial service providers.
• Experience in training and facilitation.
• Demonstrated experience advising on gender- and youth-sensitive and/or resilience monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities.