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:
• Progress national scale programs via policy adoption, financing, and program roll out across Rwanda and Malawi.
• Maintain and cultivate top level national government relationships in support of the national program adoption, financing and execution.
• Establish in-country financing via Government, the World Bank, bilateral partners and co-financing.
• Develop and implement programmatic strategy in alignment with Spark MicroGrants’ mission and goals.
• Oversee the design and execution of all programmatic activities to ensure high quality, impactful, and scalable initiatives.
• 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:
• Direct line management of and support to Country Directors, DesignDirector and additional senior staff to lead their teams successfully.
• Overall responsibility for program expansion, timelines and budget management in line with annual and multi-year organizational strategies while maintaining quality.
• 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:
• Direct line management of M&E team.
• Support M&E and program teams in distilling, communicating, and applying findings from learning and evaluation initiatives.
• Ensure the monitoring and evaluation team is structured to support robust program learnings and improvements for each country’s context and needs.

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:
• Support the design team to test and streamline program innovations.
• Facilitate the integration of learnings into design conversations.
• 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.
• Manage the overall program budget to ensure consistency with strategic priorities, donor commitments and available funding.
• Ensure the program team makes cost-effective use of resources and adheres to financial policies and procedures.
• 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.