State Team Lead at FHI 360

Job ID: 17655
Location: Kano

Job Description

• Alive & Thrive is an initiative to save lives, prevent illness, and ensure healthy growth and development through improved breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices. In its first five years (2009 to 2014), A&T demonstrated that innovative approaches to improving feeding practices could be delivered with impact and at scale in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Viet Nam.
• Alive & Thrive continues its work there and is supporting others to scale up nutrition by applying and adapting tested, proven approaches and tools in Burkina Faso, India, Southeast Asia, and Nigeria.
• Alive & Thrive is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the governments of Canada and Ireland.

Job Summary / Responsibilities
The State Team Lead /Lagos is based at the FHI 360 office in Lagos, Nigeria. This position has a four-fold purpose:

• To provide coordination of the technical and program components and general oversight for A&T activities in the State, including managerial oversight of the Lagos A&T team and monitoring work-plans to ensure timely delivery of results.
• To ensure technical excellence in process monitoring. S/he will work with the M&E Advisor in Abuja to ensure adequate monitoring activities are being conducted in a timely and appropriate manner.
• To support information exchange and foster links with appropriate NGOs, international, bilateral and governmental agencies, academic institutions, and private/commercial sector companies and organizations in the state of Lagos and in Nigeria.
• To coordinate all capacity building activities for A&T partners at the State level.

Program Summary

• The Nigeria A&T IYCF social and behavior change program focuses on improving rates of early initiation of breastfeeding, exclusive breastfeeding, timely introduction of complementary feeding, and minimum dietary diversity for infants over 6 months old.
• A&T will work across the public, commercial/private, and NGO sectors to improve infant and young child feeding (IYCF) through A&T’s four components: advocacy, interpersonal communication and community mobilization, mass communication, and strategic use of data.
• At the national level, A&T will predominantly work with its public, private/commercial, and NGO sector partners (Scaling Up Nutrition and other national IYCF initiatives) to improve the implementation, monitoring, and enforcement of key IYCF policies (i.e., National Strategic Plan of Action for Nutrition, maternity entitlements, Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes; IYCF-friendly health systems strengthening).
• A&T will work at scale in metropolitan Lagos, a dense urban environment comprising 16 of the state’s 20 local government authorities (LGAs) to apply the four components to reach households, communities, and facilities with targeted, age-appropriate social and behavior change communication (SBCC) messaging on IYCF practices.
• Lagos is Nigeria’s largest city, with arguably the most ethnically and religiously diverse population in the country (though predominantly Yoruba, Igbo, and Christian), and with thriving media and commercial sectors. Lagos also has some of the worst IYCF practices in Nigeria. Improving IYCF practices there would not only yield large-scale change but could offer a model for other large urban areas (e.g., Kano, Ibadan).
• Specifically, in metropolitan Lagos A&T will link up with the initiative’s public and private sector partners (especially the maternity hospitals, and private clinics licensed traditional birth attendants (TBAs), Private Patent Medicine Vendors (PPMVs), pharmacists, midwives, private provider networks (social franchises)) to strengthen frontline health workers’ knowledge and counseling skills to promote IYCF.
• We will work through the public and private healthcare system to integrate materials and delivery of messaging at opportune times and places, including ANC visits, maternity facilities, and through child welfare services’ immunization campaigns and routine provision of vaccines. Additionally, A&T will use advocacy; interpersonal communication (IPC) (i.e., counseling and other IPC approaches), and community mobilization efforts to reach pregnant women and new mothers; and use mass communication (through broadcast, Nollywood, mobile phone, and signage) to further extend the reach of IYCF messages and improve the social norms around IYCF practices.
• Formative research will be conducted to further understand target populations and audiences (stakeholders, providers, beneficiaries), and monitoring systems will be established to ensure that program inputs, outputs, and outcomes are tracked and fed back into improving the program.

Essential Job Functions
Under the guidance of the A&T Nigeria Project Director:

• Work with the relevant A&T technical specialists to establish and execute effective program planning, implementation and monitoring assistance to all A&T public, NGO, and private sector local partners. This will include providing technical oversight to strengthen all the components of A&T’s approach and existing activities of scaling up IYCF in Lagos state such as:
• representing A&T at advocacy events in Lagos state,
• supervising and reviewing interpersonal communication and community mobilization sessions,
• brokering stronger ties between public and private health sectors,
• supporting mass communication efforts,
• conducting data quality audits to assure the quality of program data, and
• supervising and reviewing capacity strengthening sessions.
• Oversee implementation of A&T’s workplan and budget in Lagos State, ensuring technical excellence and fiscal integrity.
• Act as a key link between Lagos government, NGO and private sector stakeholders and the A&T Abuja and HQ teams. Maintain close coordination and dialogue with key stakeholders at the state level and implementers at the local government area (LGA) in all locations of the state.
• Provide overall supervision for A&T Lagos staff and ensure compliance with technical, programmatic, contractual and financial requirements set by A&T and its donors.
• Coordinate all capacity building activities for A&T partners at the state level.
• Review periodic reports (programmatic and financial) submitted by all collaborating public and private sector partners at the state office level and forward same to the A&T Abuja office.
• Ensure that all A&T assets and other resources are effectively managed.
• Actively participate in, contribute to, and in some cases conduct or help facilitate major A&T program development and implementation activities (strategic planning, program presentations, advocacy and policy meetings, workshops), as appropriate.
• Work closely with A&T Technical Advisors and Program and Project Director to leverage other international donor and private sector resources to complement and extend project reach.
• Present/disseminate program results, based on program experience to State Ministry of Health, projects and partners, and other professional colleagues and organizations at state and national level.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in public health, nutrition, behavioral sciences, mass communication, monitoring & evaluation or equivalent degree in medical sciences
• A minimum of 8 years of experience managing public health/ development projects.
• A minimum of 3 years’ experience supervising direct reports.
• Demonstrated experience in successfully working across A&T components of advocacy, IPC and community mobilization, mass communication, and strategic use of data in the context of social and behavior change, with a specialty in at least one of these.
• Demonstrated experience and high acceptability in working with government, NGOs, private sector companies, academia, professional organizations, and donors in Lagos/other states.