State Team Lead at DAI

Responsibilities:

The State Team Lead serves as the principal point of contact in the state for technical and operational matters, serving as the key staff for facilitating interventions at the state level, and develops and maintains positive relationships with key stakeholders. This role oversees a state-based team that will manage outreach, support engagements, and handle the development and monitoring of grants. This role spearheads state work plans and interventions ensuring timely and appropriate state interventions – all of which align with the State2State goal, objective, sub purpose(s) and respective indicator(s) and provides task oversight to ensure high quality implementation within the state. More specifically, the STL will:

• Work closely with relevant staff members to ensure that reports, concept, and briefing notes from the state are of acceptable quality and ‘speak to’ the State2State goal, objective, sub purpose(s) and indicator(s).
• Work closely with the Deputy Chief of Party (DCOP) to ensure timely and proper technical resourcing of state interventions.
• Ensure that interventions identified for implementation in the state are implemented and reported on time and on schedule.
• Work closely with the DCOP and other states’ STLs to ensure there is ongoing integration of learnings from one intervention to another and across all target states.
• Work closely with the State Transformation Committee (STC) and other key government officials, including at the local, state, and federal/national levels, as appropriate, to ensure that state counterparts (and stakeholders) are undertaking appropriate sector-based reforms that support the achievement of the overall goal of State2State Activity.
• Work closely with the DCOP and Technical Team Leads (TTLs) to ensure that sub purposes and crosscutting issues like Conflict, Capacity Building, GESI, Monitoring, Evaluation and learning are incorporated into interventions implemented by State2State and or the state counterpart(s).
• Work closely with the DCOP, the technical team, Grants and MEL teams to ensure that grantees working in the state are provided adequate and ongoing technical supervision.
• Work closely with senior management to ensure that the state team members maintain the right work ethic and culture and in engaging with stakeholders, counterparts, et al.
• Work closely with the Project Security Manager to ensure that security issues and breaches involving staff, counterparts, or of concern within the state, are escalated appropriately including within a timely manner.
• Work closely with the Operations Manager to ensure that the state team and office(s) receive the needed operational and logistics support, etc. to function effectively.
• Other responsibilities of a reasonable nature as assigned by the DCOP or Chief of Party.

Reporting: The State Team Lead will report to the Deputy Chief of Party.

Line Management:

• State2State operates the matrix management system, and the State Team Lead has administrative and joint technical supervision of their respective state-based teams, including Public Financial Management (PFM) Specialist, Citizen Engagement/Capacity Building Specialist, GESI Specialist, MEL Specialist, Local Government Area (LGA) Manager, and Finance and Accounting Specialist (FAS), Administrative Officer (AO) and others associated with the state office, including STTA consultants working within the state in support of State2State Activity.

Minimum Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field such as international development, social sciences, law, development studies, etc. Master’s degree preferred.
• At least twelve (12) years of relevant professional experience. At least nine (9) years of demonstrated experience in the successful implementation of international development activities, with preference given to democracy and governance activities under a USG instrument – three (3) years of which must be in senior program management, including direct supervision of professional and support staff.
• Experience working in the democracy and governance sector in Nigeria.
• Prior experience in overseeing the awarding and managing grants to local organizations to promote democracy and governance goals preferred.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills