The $41 million USAID Food for Peace Activity (Apolou) and the $5 million USAID Resilience Challenge Fund (RCF) Activity support agriculturalists, agro-pastoralists, and pastoralist households living across the districts of Amudat, Kotido, Kaabong, Karenga, and Moroto in Karamoja.
Apolou is implemented by a consortium of actors led by Mercy Corps, including Save the Children, Whave Solutions, four local partners (KAPDA, NARWOA and Riam Riam), TUNADO, FIDA Uganda, Strong Minds and Tufts University’s Feinstein International Centre (FIC). Apolou’s goal is to “improve the overall food and nutrition security of vulnerable households in Kaabong, Kotido, Moroto and Amudat districts within the Karamoja region,” and has major 4 objectives as follows:
1. Inclusive and effective governance contributes to food and nutrition security
2. Adolescent girls, Pregnant and Lactating Women, and Children under 5 are nutritionally secure
3. Reduced incidences of WASH related diseases
4. Improved livelihoods and income support household food security
The RCF program works in the districts of Kaabong and Amudat, with the goal to “Improve the veterinary governance and increase public and private investment in disease prevention, surveillance, control and response systems to strengthen productive assets for improved resilience in Karamoja.” RCF has the following objectives:
1. Increased domestic resource allocation into animal health services in Karamoja
2. Central and local government develop animal health services capacity-strengthening plan for the Karamoja region
3. Disease control plan for economically prioritized diseases (PPR and FMD) developed and implemented
4. Private sector animal health development strategy developed and rolled out .

General Position Summary
Financial Inclusion Officer will implement all aspects of the market systems development strategy in the Apolou Activity. This includes strengthening private sector interventions in livestock and agriculture value chains, as well as scaling up financial inclusion and other products/services as relevant. The Financial Inclusion Officer will work directly with the Financial Inclusion Team Leader to developing agent input/output and aggregator networks, increasing local partners’ access to market information and financial services. The Officer will ensure that private sector led, project-support development is tailored to the unique needs, opportunities and constraints of women and youth and that activities are integrated with all other consortium supported sectors.

Essential Job Responsibilities
STRATEGY & VISION
• Support the Financial Inclusion Team Leader to develop and implement team strategy
• Identify new opportunities for innovation and growth among private sector led interventions
PROGRAM MANAGEMENT
• Participate in market assessments in the target communities to determine capacity gaps, business opportunities and potential hindrances that could be mitigated through engagements with public and private sector actors. This will include but not be limited to rapid market assessments, value chain analysis and business support activities for the key stakeholders.
• Identify and engage private sector actors to effectively expand their business models in Karamoja Sub Region. This will include profiling businesses and conducting due diligence on potential partners, support the negotiation process to finalize teaming and partnership agreements, and providing ongoing business development support to key partners
• Foster ongoing positive cooperation with relevant stakeholders including SMEs and the public sector to identify, assess and develop networks for potential linkages between market actors, producers and final consumers etc.
• Identify capacity gaps of MSME partner actors in Karamoja, design and conduct tailor made trainings, mentorship and coaching to boost their competitiveness in the market and boost returns on investment,
Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning
• Establish procedures and guidelines to monitor and evaluate the progress and impact of economic development support work including setting and measuring benchmarks along results chains;
• Keenly analyze project implementation strategies to identify constraints to program success and provide timely recommendations to inform decision making processes.
• Provide data in support of the team’s submission of timely monthly and quarterly reports, strategic reviews, annual reports and midterm evaluations that will be indicative of program progress during implementation.
• Collect data about all groups working with the financial inclusion intervention and work with MEL team to update CommCare with up to date group data.
INFLUENCE & REPRESENTATION
• Ensure close coordination and sharing of information with relevant stakeholders such as local government authorities, financial service providers and NGOs as and when advised by the line manager.
• Liaise with local government officials, local NGOs and civil society organizations, and other key stakeholders to ensure support for and acceptance of Mercy Corps’ market based interventions.
Coordination with District Implementation Team
• Build the capacity of the members of the implementation team on their particular sector through orientations, one on one discussions and demonstrating in the field.
• The district implementation team after conducting a needs assessment will decide an intervention to be layered. The district implementation team will require support in developing a sector specific plan for a particular community. The member of the technical team will support the district team to plan the intervention that is related to the particular sector and purpose.
• The district implementation team member will mobilize the extension service agents which will go on to mobilize the community groups to provide the services to conduct the activity in the field. The member of the technical team will coordinate with the district implementation team to conduct the activities in the field.
• The technical team member will monitor the activities conducted in the field and provide feedback to the technical extension service agents to improve the quality of implementation of activities.
• The technical team member will meet quarterly with the district implementation team to review the activities conducted in the field and reflect with the team to understand how the quality of implementation of activities would be improved.
• Collaborate with the MEL team on the design and implementation of the Apolou CLA/Learning Agenda
Finance, Compliance AND Operations Management
• Ensure compliance with donor and Mercy Corps regulations related to financial inclusion
• Generate activity scopes of work for review by team leader
Ethics and Integrity
• All Mercy Corps staff are expected to behave ethically and demonstrate highest integrity in their professional and personal life. Mercy Corps has zero tolerance to any form of fraud, corruption, abuse, harassment or exploitation. Any breach of our policies or misconduct will lead to disciplinary action or may lead to termination
Security
• Ensure data protection policies are adhered to, establishing security controls for software, hardware and archive beneficiary databases
• Ensure compliance with security procedures and policies as determined by country leadership.
• Proactively ensure that team members operate in a secure environment and are aware of policies
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING
• As part of our commitment to organizational learning and in support of our understanding that learning organizations are more effective, efficient and relevant to the communities they serve, we expect all team members to commit 5% of their time to learning activities that benefit Mercy Corps as well as themselves.
ACCOUNTABILITY TO BENEFICIARIES
• Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically
• to our beneficiaries and to international standards guiding international relief and development work, while actively engaging beneficiary communities as equal partners in the design, monitoring and evaluation of our field projects.
• Work closely with CARM officer to collect constructive feedback from the participants and other stakeholders
Other:
• Conduct himself/herself both professionally and personally in such a manner as to bring credit to Mercy Corps and to not jeopardize its humanitarian mission
• Other duties assigned

Supervisory Responsibility
None
Accountability
Reports Directly To: Financial Inclusion Team Leader
Works Directly With: District Implementation Team, Technical Team, Field Agents/PSPs, Gender and Youth Team, MEL and other Mercy Corps program, finance and operations staff

Knowledge and Experience
• Bachelors in Business Administration, Agribusiness, or other related field
• Minimum 2 years work experience with the private sector or market facilitation approaches
• Familiarity with the Karamojong business environment will be an added advantage.
• Excellent English Language skills, with Nga’Karimojong language skills a plus
• Computer literate with dexterity with Microsoft Office

Success Factors
• The success of the Financial Inclusion Officer is measured by the ability to effectively implement a light touch market system strategy,
• The capacity of the officer to positively collaborate across teams, ensuring that MSD interventions are relevant, and gender and youth inclusive.
• The extent to which the MSD/ FI approaches are layered onto other Apolou interventions that are implementing through group strategies.