Community Engagement Officers at Search For Common Ground’s International

Position Summary

Search for Common Ground seeks four Community Engagement Officers that will work to ensure that all project activities in project intervention LGAs are implemented efficiently and timely and to high standard. The project will be implemented in Ethiope East LGA, Isoko North and Ndokwa West and Ughelli North LGA of Delta State, and each Engagement officer will be assigned one different LGA.

 The Engagement officer will act as main point of contact of Search for Common Ground in the LGA and will be in charge of implementing and /or preparing all project’s activities in the LGA. This includes building a strong network at the LGA level, maintaining cordial and respectful relationship with local authorities and stakeholders. This also includes preparing all logistics of activities and mobilizing for participation to the activities.

The role also entails effective internal coordination with all program and support and cross-cutting departments (such as media, design monitoring, evaluation and learning (DME&L), finance, logistics and administration teams) to ensure that all project activities are adequately supported by these technical departments as required.

Externally, the role ensures effective coordination with all relevant stakeholders at the LGA level. This includes program participants, community response networks, community observers, traditional and religious leaders, media, security services, state officials, National Human Rights Commission, local and international NGOs, United Nations (UN) agencies and others working in the LGA.

The role also includes active participation to monitoring and evaluation activities, such as the feedback mechanisms put in place at the LGA level, the participation to evaluation data collection and studies.  

About the Project

Search for Common Ground with support from USAID is starting a two-years project titled “Sharing the Green Grass: Cultivating a Locally-led Peace Architecture in the Niger Delta”. The Action aims to strengthen local capacities to peacefully manage conflict and prevent violence from escalating within a locally-led peace architecture in the Niger Delta. The project pursues two specific objectives: “Farmer and herder communities cultivate the skills and relationships to collaborate on peace and security issues” and “Farmer and herder communities develop effective, sustainable local mechanisms for early warning response, dispute management, and violence mitigation.”

The project will be implemented in Ethiope East LGA, Isoko North and Ndokwa West and Ughelli North LGA of Delta State. This “Peace Architecture,” will work to cultivate a culture of cohesion for communities to be at peace with themselves and equipped to build upon that foundation. Search and her partners will work with authorities first at the lowest level (local administration, authorities, the judiciary) and other higher levels (State, Federal) where necessary. This approach, as developed has successfully applied, in USAID-funded “Building Bridges Between Herders and Farmers in Plateau, Nasarawa, and Kaduna States” program in the Middle Belt, consists of conflict prevention, dispute resolution, and sustainability beginning from the local level and conflict-affected people themselves.

The project will support community-based Early Warning and Early Response (EWER) to identify risks and partner with civil society, security or government actions to institutionalize strategies and approaches that will build community capacity and skills for sustainable peace.

Additionally, the project seeks to ensure conflicts identified through the EWER feed into multi-stakeholder forums for dispute resolution and higher-level policy change and create open and neutral spaces for farmer and pastoralist community members and leaders to identify collective solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Working closely with and reporting to  the Project manager, the Community Engagement Officers will coordinate LGA level activities with stakeholders and partners in four local government areas of Delta state Nigeria to deliver strategies activities designed to promote peace and cohesion in challenging community environments. They will amongst others:

Activity planning and implementation

• Coordinate and lead SFCG’s strategic objectives at LGA level
• Coordinate interface meetings with community level stakeholders and partners aimed at promoting peace and cohesion
• Provide leadership in developing community based peace architecture and related strategies to equip communities with negotiation skills and capacity to work harmoniously in resolving complex intercultural, occupational and perceived ethnocentric challenges between farmers and herders.
• Identify and work with local influencers such as religious, tribal leaders and associations, to  ensure meaningful participation to all activities, including by most hard-to-reach communities and groups
• Coordinate capacity building plans and training activities for local organizations, implementing partners and stakeholders, including co-facilitating the trainings on Dispute Management, Mitigation, and Advocacy
• Conduct and facilitate project activities: local dialogues (inter and intra communities), mobile cinema discussions, solidarity events
• Input on media production: provide suggestions of interviews, topics to cover in the media program of the project, facilitate journalists field visits;
• Coordinate the Community Security Architecture Dialogues and community-level conflict resolution mechanism meetings, identify response actions and coordinate Search’s support to the response plans
• Organizes all logistics related to the implementation of project activities in his/her LGA (hall rental, catering, invitations, etc.)

Reporting

• Produce activity report after each activity implemented, including documenting lessons learnt, feedback from participants, pictures;
• Track attendance to each activity and document it with attendance lists

Coordination and representation

•  Serve as the face of the project and Search for Common Ground in the local communities
• Forge partnerships with government institution, citizens groups, community based organization at the LGA level to develop early warning signals
• Develop and maintains proactive, positive, and professional relationships with key government officials, local authorities, local leaders and civil society organizations, partner organization and other NGOS, and working on relevant issues to the project in the LGA;
• Act in a way that is conform to Search’s values, and be the representant of Search at the LGA level;
• Maintains regular written and oral reporting to the Project Manager on key project and security issues at the LGA level;
• Work collaboratively with local implementing partner ICG to effectively deliver on their mandate
• Monitoring and Evaluation, including context analysis
• Participate in project baselines and periodic assessments
• Participate in monitoring and evaluation activities through data collection
• Ensure close monitoring of the political, social and security environment in project target area.

Financial planning, management and compliance

• Prepares activity budgets and ensures that budgets are spent as per approved budget;
• Organises the payment to all local vendors, as well as transport reimbursements and perdiems;
• Documents all expenses
• Provides activity spending reconciliation reports as per Search for Common Ground’s guidelines
• Ensure effective implementation and compliance with the overall finance and guidance manual and compliance with procedures

As job descriptions cannot be exhaustive, the position holder may be required to undertake other duties that are broadly in line with the above key duties.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in peace building, conflict, security studies, political or social science, international studies, public administration, development studies and experience in a related area. In the absence of a Bachelor’s degree, 5 additional years of relevant experience in the sector may be deemed equivalent;
• Additional extensive training in at least one of the areas of SFCG thematic work- Peace building, conflict transformation and resolution is an added advantage.

Required Experience

• A minimum of 2 years experience in implementing social cohesion project with a special focus on conflict analysis, social cohesion, crisis prevention, early warning and early response and/or  farmer-herder engagement
• Experience working in in an NGO. Experience in an INGO is a plus;
• Experience implementing complex activities with limited supervision; 
• Experience in a delicate conflict context with difficult and hard-to-reach stakeholders;
• Experience working in large multicultural environment and in a diverse team; 

Other Requirements

• Good knowledge of the local languages will be an asset.
• Indigene of any these Delta State LGAs - Ethiope East, Isoko North, Ndokwa West and Ughelli North (Very essential)
• The ability and willingness to work across diverse cultural and religious line to foster peace (essential)
• Excellent knowledge of the local context and language (very essential)
• Good reputation as a wide promoter of peace and non-violence and attested by all community stakeholders (essential)

• Strong knowledge and understanding of conflict dynamics in Delta state;
• Existing contacts and relationships with local stakeholders a strong advantage;
• Experience working on Farmer-Herder dynamics is a strong added advantage; 

• A peace-builder of high morality. Sense of humor an added advantage;

• Strong connection to Search for Common Ground’s values: humanity, humility, audacity, empathy