Financial Inclusion Specialist at Federal Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development

Job Type: Contract (1 year)
Reporting and Location: VCDP National Office, Abuja

Summary

• The FGN/IFAD VCDP is desirous of engaging the services of Technical specialist and staff to facilitate VCDP and other IFAD Assisted programs implementation at the VCDP National Office.

Main Responsibilities

• The Financial Inclusion specialist will coordinate all efforts to expand financial inclusion across project locations.
• S/he will provide technical leadership and guidance to project staff and partners on financial services to rural communities, the unbanked and underserved populations, smaliholder farmers and other agricultural value chain actors within the anticipated I FAD-Funded projects.
• The Financial Inclusion specialist will lead Rural Resilience’s efforts to leverage innovative and technology-led solutions to achieve the programmes goals on financial inclusion.

Specific Job Responsibilities

• Identify best practices and trends, including role of technology, within the programme areas as an innovative financial services business riodeIs serving the poor in various sectors such as saving and lending schemes, Agri-finance and SME finance;
• Development of a programme financial inclusion strategy and upscaling of affordable low-cost financial solution for services to beneficiaries;
• Participate in the building of partnerships to facilitate access to finance and collaborate with commercial and non-commercial partners that seek to deliver appropriate and affordable non-financial or financial services to smallholder farmers;
• Facilitate development of a capacity building plan with financial institutions, to create an efficient platform for the provision of financial services to underserved groups in the project areas;
• Develop new ideas/concepts that increase uptake of credit by rural communities;
• Facilitate the linkage of beneficiaries to financial institutions for sustainable access to credit
• Identify and/or develop required financial tools and methodological approaches, and provide technical assistance and training/capacity building to ensure programme interventions achieve or surpass established objectives;
• Provide indicators to track financial inclusion activities;
• Track data monitoring and management systems to ensure quality in implementation and reporting;
• Report to NPC-VCDP

Qualifications and Skills

• At least a Master’s degree in Finance, Business Administration, Economics or other relevant field.
• At least 5 years work experience working in the area of financial inclusion in Donor funded projects at managerial and advisory levels in developing country context.
• Mastering of current standards in the rural financial industry, and practices in developing rural financial markets, particularly in financing agricultural value chain development.
• Sound understanding of the Nigerian financial sector.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English.
• Strong computer literacy with a full knowledge of office applications.