Associate Program Officer – Nigeria at Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa - AGRA

• The Associate Program Officer (APO) will be responsible for supporting implementation of country strategy through grant-making and stakeholder convening, relevant country government relations and policy development and relevant country business development and resource mobilization.
• S/He will support AGRA’s engagement with national government, donors, and other system actors in the design and implementation of appropriate interventions and policies with the aim of catalyzing the growth of sustainable food systems in the country and creating an enabling environment for investment by smallholder farmers and agribusinesses

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

• Identifies, develops, and maintains strong relationships with other partners who are working to improve food and agricultural systems.
• Supports the team in identifying Clusters in key agricultural production areas.
• Identifies, supports, and guides efforts that enable smallholder farmers to sell their products and capture value from downstream activities.
• Leads efforts to facilitate economic transactions between value chain players and smallholder farmers.
• Facilitate data and information pipeline to monitor programs across themes – contributing to dashboard development, program standardization, and quality control in collaboration with the country team Africa.
• Promotes the agricultural transformation agenda with AGRA technical experts to develop appropriate partnerships.
• Collaborates across AGRA to identify and overcome policy-related constraints on technology development, dissemination, and uptake.
• Networks with broad stakeholders: financial institutions, grantees, universities, other funders, international organizations, beneficiaries.
• Identify potential grantees and work with them to develop impactful interventions.
• Oversees and supervises consortiums.
• Devises ways to strengthen national capacities for policy design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.
• Work with cross-functional teams in making critical decisions during challenging situations.
• Reviews grant portfolio to ensure grantees are implementing programs in accordance with the contractual agreement.
• Oversees the grantee actual implementation process and provides relevant backstopping as may be required.
• Creates regular periodic reports as may be required by the Country Director/ Programs Lead.
• Implements the specified program activities in accordance with approved annual work plans jointly formulated with the beneficiaries.

Key Qualifications and Experience required:

• A bachelor’s degree in agriculture, Agricultural Economics, Public Finance, Public Administration, or related disciplines, master’s degree is added advantage.
• Professional experience in agri-business and development efforts in Africa
• Experience in grant making and in leading policy-related development initiatives.
• Experience designing and implementing projects/programs in public/private sectors with systems thinking will be added advantage.