Nutrition Manager Nigeria at Palladium Group

You and Your Career:

•  If you are a problem-solver, collaborator, and doer, and you have expertise managing Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM Programs). You also have excellent program management, we are interested in hearing from you. We are a learning organization and provide growth opportunities from the start.  We pride ourselves on giving you the freedom, resources, and guidance to chart a fulfilling career!

Reporting and Supervision:

•  The role reports directly to the Deputy Chief of Party in Abuja.  
• The position also works closely with the Director, Child Health and Nutrition in Washington, the Technical Child Health Lead in Abuja and the other programmatic teams outlined above.

USAID Integrated Health Program (IHP) in Nigeria:

• Nigeria Integrated Health Program is an integrated health program with an expanded effort with the Government of Nigeria (GON) to identify and support rapid scale-up of proven interventions through improvement of service delivery and strengthening of health systems. It will focus its support for service delivery in six intervention areas: family planning, malaria, routine immunization, nutrition, maternal/newborn health, and treatment of childhood pneumonia/diarrhea. It has a strong emphasis on monitoring, evaluation, and learning.
• This program will work closely with state-level government officials to support state-level Strategic Health Development Plans, Annual Operating Plans and budgets, capacity building, and promote local ownership of interventions, systems, and results. Specific interventions will need to be tailored to local contexts and will be fully developed at state, Local Government Area (LGA) and ward levels.

 Primary Duties and Responsibilities: 

Project Management

• Ensure quality and timely field-level implementation of the Nutrition program against set objectives, targets, and work plans.
• Oversee quality implementation of a Master Trainer of Trainer and Continuous on Site mentoring strategies focused on Community Based Management of Acute Malnutrition Protocols using Nigeria endorsed Guidelines.
• Oversee and troubleshoot execution of mentoring guidelines to ensure quality delivery of Outpatient treatments for SAM and MAM in children under five years of age
• Liaise with grantees and State IHP offices to mentor and train the nutrition teams in treatment protocols and support them.
• Conduct mentoring visits to identify and troubleshoot bottlenecks in service delivery, gaps in implementation, and identify quality improvement plans to strengthen underperforming CMAM sites.Troubleshooting guidance may include: linkages to community mobilization, on-site improvements to defaulter tracing, data collection, case management and treatment modalities from screening, enrollment, tracking, counseling, delivery of child health services (e.g. IMCI) and data collection.
• Supervision and provide refresher training on CMAM.
• Coordinate with the IHP State embedded field offices and the grantees to establish a mechanism for tracking two-way referrals, and to ensure seamless referral from community to PHC and General Hospitals for continuous care
• Enhance integration of nutrition activities with child health (IMCI) programs and coordinate Breakthrough Action Nigeria and the CHIPS programs to
• Provide regular input and review of grantee milestone report review, final reports, and regular (weekly) check-ins for program status with grantees and state field technical monitors. This includes making proactive suggestions on how to improve the quality of reporting.
• Provide technical content for regular reporting on the CMAM and GH therapeutic nutrition services to USAID during quarterly reporting periods and during adhoc meetings with the USAID and other implementing partner meetings.
• Coordinate with the Monitoring and Evaluation Manager to review nutrition reporting indicators and reporting tools
• Coordinate with the Logistics Manager to improve supply chain management and accountability for nutrition supplies
• On an adhoc basis, develop technical job aides to enhance ad convey standards and approaches, core competencies, and learning. These will be in the form of technical briefs, technical guidelines, case studies, to promote high-quality programming and strategic partnerships.
• Present nutrition program information and lessons learned to USAID, State teams, and stakeholders through virtual and in-person formats.
• Nigerian nationals are strongly encouraged to apply.

Required Qualifications:

• Experience managing Community Management of Acute Malnutrition Programs with emphasis on Outpatient Therapeutic Feeding skills Required
• Nurse or Pediatrician Preferred.
• Clinical nutrition expertise, particularly related to mentoring and quality assurance for large scale, fast past, nutrition projects.
• Proven experience operating in a humanitarian clinical surge capacity
• Proven project management experience including: logistics, administration, management.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Sound problem solving and decision-making skills
• Ability to travel to field sites in Sokoto and potentially 1-2 other IHP targeted States (e.g. FCT or Bauchi)
• Ability to critically review and analyze data collected from CMAM sites and improve upon and troubleshoot data collection barriers.
• Gravitas to convene and lead (as necessary) stakeholders forums with grantees, project and state stakeholders
• English and Hausa language skills.
• Extremely flexible and have the ability to cope with stressful situations.
• Able to motivate staff effectively.
• Proficient in Microsoft Office, particularly One Drive, outlook, MS Word and MS Excel. Adobe suite preferred.
• Equity, Diversity & Inclusion - We welcome applications from all sections of society and actively encourage diversity to drive innovation, creativity, success and good practice. We positively welcome and seek to ensure we achieve diversity in our workforce; and that all job applicants and employees receive equal and fair treatment regardless of their background or personal characteristics.
• These include: (but are not limited to) socio-economic background, age, race, gender identity, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, nationality, veteran, marital or Indigenous status.  
• Should you require any adjustments or accommodations to be made due to a disability or you are a neurodivergent individual or any other circumstance, please email our team at accessibility@thepalladiumgroup.com
• Safeguarding - We define Safeguarding as “the preventative action taken by Palladium to protect our people, clients and the communities we work with from harm”. We are committed to ensuring that all children and adults who come into contact with Palladium are treated with respect and are free from abuse.  All successful candidates will be subject to an enhanced selection process including safeguarding-focused interviews and a rigorous due diligence process.