Project Officer - YPA at Plan International

Location: FCT-Abuja, FC, NG

Role Purpose

• Support the project management and technical work of the Youth Peace Academy (YPA) project.

Dimensions of Role

• The Project Officer will provide relevant quality services to Plan International in the mobilisation, training, mentoring and supervision of young people of diverse ethnic and religious background in Plateau and Kaduna States to lead initiatives that build peace and tolerance in their communities.

Key Roles/Responsibilities

• Support the development and implementation of the project action plans including the review and update of training curricula.
• Support engagement with and mobilisation of young people in the project communities and other relevant young people organisations in the project states.
• Work with the Project Coordinator on the project’s advocacy and community mobilisation strategies, including development and deployment of engagement protocols, IEC materials and radio messages.
• Support the organisation of the training activities and refresher programmes for the cohorts of YPA and other young people’s platforms and groups relevant to the project.
• Participate actively in other capacity building exercises aimed at the cohorts of YPA using peace building history, skills, and concepts.
• Participate in program research processes in the project, including baseline and end line evaluations. Work to strengthen linkages between partners and community support structures.
• Support Gender Advisor in identifying, disseminate and address gender barriers to YPA programming outcomes.
• Provide regular updates to supervisor and other project team members to inform project programming decision making and advocacy efforts.
• Support periodic review of the YPA project design and activities, engagement with broad range of project stakeholders; and ensure M & E processes are implemented to capture quality project data for reporting and decision making by regularly collecting project level data, to track progress against planned service delivery outputs and outcomes, using RBM methodologies.
• Work with the Project Coordinator in the provision of support to partner activities to ensure consistency with project objectives.
• Work with community based structures for successful implementation of community outreach services.
• Support regular advocacies to local stakeholders to improve and sustain project buy-in and operations.
• Support the establishment and maintenance of good working relationship with the relevant State actors, local government authorities and other stakeholders.
• Assume any other responsibility as assigned by supervisor.

Qualifications and Experience

• Experience managing peacebuilding, youth leadership, or civil society strengthening projects in developing country contexts and preferably in Nigeria or ECOWAS states.
• University education and over 3 years of experience in peacebuilding, youth leadership, or civil society strengthening, or a related field and demonstrated experience in management of community-based projects.
• Experience of and commitment to policy influencing, networking and advocacy work.
• Demonstrated expertise in and commitment to developing the leadership of young people.
• Demonstrated knowledge and background in service providers and consultant relations management.
• Demonstrated problem solving skills, collaboration experience, creativity and willingness to innovate.
• Experience writing meetings and activities reports.

Skills & Knowledge:

• Basic financial and administrative skills.
• Communicates clearly and effectively appropriate to the audience
• Excellent research, analytical and writing skills.
• Excellent written and spoken English language skills
• Knowledge of Hausa language preferred but not required

Personal Qualities:

• A strong commitment to youth engagement, peace building, human rights and social justice.
• An appreciation of the need for innovative ways of learning and knowledge development.