Description

The Senior Technical Advisor, Financial Inclusion for Southern Africa will join a dynamic team that leads CARE’s expansion of access to financial services across the continent. The team is composed of specialists who provide holistic support services to CARE initiatives working with CARE’s trademark Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLA) model including supporting country office and regional scale-up strategy development; co-creating programs and project designs; contributing to and/or leading proposal and fundraising efforts; providing technical support to project start-up and implementation; and supporting CARE’s efforts to continually learn from and improve our initiatives; supporting connections between CARE’s work in communities and regional, national and international advocacy efforts.

As a leader in savings-led financial services, this position presents candidates with unparalleled opportunities to influence CARE’s work and the work of the broader financial inclusion sector. The role will have a particular emphasis on supporting the integration and expansion of CARE’s financial inclusion work with food and nutrition security and climate change resilience programming across Southern Africa as part of a dedicated regional effort. For the Technical Advisor, Financial Inclusion in Southern Africa, we are seeking experienced, high-energy and creative candidates who can support our efforts to build on the power of VSLA to improve the agriculture-based livelihoods of most VSLA members and their households. The candidate will work with technical specialists across disciplines to advance evidence-based interventions that deliver meaningful change for low income, food-insecure households.

The ideal candidate will have the following:

• Ability to summarise and synthesise learning into plain English for a wide range of audiences
• Experience working with colleagues from different cultures
• Experience leading or contributing to multi-disciplinary teams with substantial experience working to help households to improve food and nutrition security and/or resilience to climate change
• Deep personal commitment to CARE’s mission and the importance of advancing women’s empowerment and gender equity
• Self-starter who takes initiative and personal responsibility for problem-solving and delivering quality results.
• Effective communicator, able to keep key stakeholders informed and knows when to ask for help
• Highly-organized and able to prioritize among a wide array of competing pressures
• Flexible and able to adapt to changing environments with confidence

Responsibilities:

• Strategy and Programme Quality
• Regional Savings-led Financial Inclusion Learning Hub Coordination
• Technical Assistance to Specific Projects
• Resource Mobilization and New Business Development

Qualifications:

• MA in development or related subject, or MBA, or equivalent expertise.
• Native speaker of English high level of competency in written and oral communications
• In-depth understanding of key concepts in financial inclusion, experience applying these to development programmes.
• Deep, practical understanding of villages savings and loan associations or similar savings group modalities
• Strong negotiation, influencing and networking skills
• Strong project management and budgeting skills
• Understanding of principles of participation, gender equity and women’s empowerment
• Understanding of quality monitoring and evaluation, basic understanding of statistics
• Highly-effective in conceptualizing and communicating opportunities for new initiatives and leading new business development efforts to support them.
• Experience advising non-profit teams on and implementing financial inclusion interventions, particularly those that build on informal savings group models
• Experience managing major (USD $1-10M) development initiatives, including budget management experience
• Experience leading multi-national learning initiatives and familiarity with or experience designing effective learning strategies for professional adults
• Experience designing and leading research initiatives, monitoring and evaluating projects/programmes, and demonstrating impact