Title: Chief of Party (COP)

Team: USAID/Nigeria MEL Support Activity

Location: Federal Capital Territory – Abuja, Nigeria

Reporting to: Chief of Party (COP)

Employment Type: Full-Time Local Hire or Expatriate

Background:

Navanti has a requirement for a Chief of Party to oversee a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Support Activity program that assists USAID/Nigeria in advancing its broader organizational learning and development efforts. This program further strengthens the Mission’s capacity and performance in programmatic monitoring, evaluation, learning, collaborating, and adapting. The MEL Support Activity closely aligns with USAID/Nigeria’s Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) and provides a broad range of specialized technical assistance, training, data gathering and analysis, field-based monitoring, evaluations and assessments, facilitation of organizational learning and adaptation initiatives, and short-term technical assistance.

The COP will work with USAID/Nigeria staff, USAID implementing partners, and other key stakeholders including development partners in Nigeria, and USAID/Washington stakeholders. The main objective of the MEL Support Activity is to supplement and strengthen the Mission’s monitoring, evaluation, and learning capacity to enhance programmatic outcomes and comply with USAID policies and directives. The COP will manage a team to assist the Mission with strategy-, project-, and activity-level performance monitoring, evaluation, and learning including independent field-based monitoring, data quality assessments, data gathering and verification, impact and performance evaluations, assessments, collection of select country context indicators, organizational learning, and improving knowledge management. In addition, the activity supports short-term technical assistance for USAID programmatic objectives as needed where short-term technical assistance staff for learning are embedded in the Nigeria government systems that need the support. Navanti’s MEL Support team helps enable and ensure effective collection and use of relevant performance, context, and development-related data to inform the Mission on progress towards achieving USAID/Nigeria’s development objectives (DO) and enables proper oversight and adaptive management of USAID activities. This activity is expected to support the Agency's localization priority, helping to build a highly qualified domestic cadre of MEL Specialists, including USAID staff, its own staff, staff of other USAID implementing partners, contractors, government counterparts, and other partners.

Core Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage the overall Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Support activity. Work closely with USAID/Nigeria’s leadership team, the Program Office and with technical office team leads, and other Chief of Parties managing USAID projects/activities.
• Maintain complete managerial control and decision-making authority for the MEL activity, with oversight of all subcontractor staff.
• Ensure cost-effective use of Navanti and Mission resources as well as compliance with Navanti and USAID requirements, policies, and regulations.
• Represent the project to USAID, IP, and GoN partners.

Minimum Qualifications:

• A minimum of a Master’s degree in an interdisciplinary area such as applied international development, strategic planning, project design and implementation, or a related field.
• A minimum of 10 years of progressive experience managing high-performing interdisciplinary teams in international development settings (at least the last five must be as a COP), and experience working in non-permissive environments and leading third party monitoring platforms.
• Demonstrated leadership, strategic thinking/planning, management, and presentation skills.
• Strong multi-cultural, interpersonal and supervision skills. Experience working in settings similar background is required.
• Especially charismatic, collaborative, professional credentials to be able to establish close, trustful relations for pursuing earnest organizational learning with, particularly USAID/Nigeria’s American and Nigerian senior professional staff and leadership, including the Mission Director’s Office.
• Fluency in English, written and spoken.