Summary
Date Posted: Tuesday, April 09 2024, Base Salary: Not Disclosed

JOB DETAILS:

Direct Reports: N/A
Reporting to Head of Grants
Budget Responsibility Yes

About MSI Reproductive Choices
For over 20 years, Marie Stopes has been working in Uganda to provide voluntary contraceptive services to thousands of men and women country-wide. Marie Stopes remains the largest, most specialised non-government Family Planning and reproductive health organisation working in every district of Uganda to provide high-quality FP/SRH services and contributing over 40% of Uganda’s Couple Year of Protection from the provision of modern contraceptives.

MSUG seeks seasoned Project Managers to oversee performance and delivery across a growing portfolio of projects implemented countrywide. The role will be based at the MSUG head offices, in Kampala.

At MSUG, our teams, provide high-quality, safe services to women and men, when and where they need them. MSUG is committed to ensuring diversity, and equality for all and expects all staff and post-holders to share our values and commitments.

The Department/Team
The Grants Department develops and stewards MSUG’s relationships with its donors, ensuring effective oversight of donor funds, building, and maintaining excellent relationships with funders, driving programmatic excellence in line with strategic priorities, donor deliverables and supporting across all service delivery and support functions to meet donor priorities. The grants team is responsible for overseeing the technical design and execution of projects, safeguarding and advancing MSUG relationships with the donor and implementing partners. This is achieved through providing leadership and guidance across the organisation to ensure policy, systems and capacities are responsive to donor priorities and investments with a focus on provision of high-quality sexual and reproductive health services.

The role
The Project Manager will be responsible for managing a project portfolio from a single major donor or small aggregated donors across MSUG’s service delivery and implementation footprint. Working closely with the respective channel leads, Clinical quality, and technical support teams (finance, procurement and logistics, admin, Data and RME team), the Project Manager will lead the project management of designated sub-projects within the overall Grants Directorate ensuring timely and rapid project set-up, monitoring, supporting efficient implementation, and ensuring that donor priorities are reflected in programming. The Project Manager will play a critical role in donor relationship management including effective and timely reporting and serve as a ‘donor champion’ for the designated grants.
This is an exciting role bridging finance and implementation teams. The role requires excellent financial analysis skills, strong communication and facilitation skills, analytical and problem-solving skills, excellent ability to work across teams to deliver results, and great attention to detail.
The post holder must demonstrate a high level of technical and programmatic expertise in the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), experience in project management and in-country experience working with major/large donors.

Key Responsibilities
Manage and Support key projects funded by large donors or aggregated donors.
• Drive forward key donor priority areas to fit within the MSUG strategy through effective cross-team facilitation and liaison with programmes and support teams.
• Monitors, analyzes and drives progress against deliverables and major activities: Develop or adapt systems for tracking progress against deliverables and major activities within their project portfolio and develop project-specific action plans to drive acceleration and turnaround performance. Develop an Early Warning System for tracking project performance including (but not limited to0 a monthly performance dashboard of the project’s technical and financial Key performance metrics and logframe indicators. Will proactively identify key project implementation risks early, manage by coordinating with relevant teams to develop solutions, follow up on progress, and if necessary, escalate to the Head of Grants and work with him/her to update the donor.
• Provide guidance on financial management and spending strategy: Oversee respective projects spend and guide implementing teams on project financial management, approve spend to align with donor priorities, ensuring compliance with local policy, and that spend and programmatic deliverables are aligned. Critical oversight that donor funds are efficiently utilized and spent on allowable costs.
• Support monthly finance reviews of spend against budgets: coordinate with the finance team and respective project accountants to review expenditure postings, ensure correct charging of financial expenditure and strategic reallocation of funds.
• Ensure compliance: Be familiar with relevant donor rules and requirements, as well as MSUG policies and procedures and ensure project implementation is compliant through clear communication to field implementation and support teams. Manage projects in compliance with MSI’s Project Cycle Management manual.
• Donor engagement: Represent MSUG with the donor and other potential donors as required; support in preparation for donor calls, pitches for follow-on funding and stakeholder engagement discussions, work with the implementing teams to proactively communicate key learnings, successes, and progress to the donor.
• Identify and mitigate project risks: Work with relevant stakeholders to identify risks to project implementation and in coordination with relevant stakeholders, develop risk mitigation strategies for each project. Timely inform the Head of Grants of any significant risks that will have an impact on MSUG ability to achieve project deliverables. Schedule regular (at least quarterly) monitoring and supervision field visits to all implementing teams to ensure technical and financial compliance. Where necessary flag for internal audits to be conducted.
• Ensure high-quality narrative and financial reports for the donor: Lead project reporting by identifying and linking key successes, lessons, and emerging themes across the project portfolio, and working with teams to compile and edit reports. Critical presentation of program data and information both visually and numerically in an easy-to-understand donor language and format to showcase the work to the donor and external forums. Will immerse in the implementation work, coordinate with implementing teams to respond to donor queries on reports.
• Build strong internal and external relationships: Proactively build relationships with key internal stakeholders within MSUG to facilitate effective cross-team working. This includes working with support/operation teams and technical teams (such as Service Deliver Channel Leads, Data, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation (RME), Clinical Quality, Finance, and others).
• Ensure clear communication: Convene regular review meetings with project staff (and sub-grantees if any) for project coordination; provide written and other guidance as necessary to disseminate vital information. Follow-up to ensure grant performance guidance is followed and implemented.

Lead project specific External Engagements
• Spearhead collection and dissemination of best practice on donor priorities: Work collaboratively with communication and advocacy teams to lead and facilitate feedback and information sharing across departments, implementing teams relating to donor priorities, share across MSUG channels and support follow-up actions.
• Fundraising: work with the Head of Grants to position MSUG for future funding with the donor through identification and communication of compelling learning and successes which can influence donor thinking and future support. Contribute to the design and proposals write-up for future funding.
• Government engagement: Proactively plug into spaces for engagement with government and line ministries/departments at national and implementation level by participating at Technical Working Groups, presenting project-specific performance and showcasing best practices. Guide technical teams on areas to showcase individual donor contributions at these forums and utilization of data to showcase MSUG work/respective donor work.
• Any other duties: reasonable additional ad-hoc duties, as requested by the line manager.

Qualifications and Experience
Qualifications
• Masters degree in any of the following fields: Public Health, Demography, Business Administration, Project Planning and Management, Development Management, or Finance-related field.
• Strong background and experience in Data Analysis, Management of Large donor projects, fundraising, and diverse stakeholder management.
• Exceptional report writing skills and self-drive.
• 8 or more years experience managing SRH/Family planning or Health projects.

Knowledge and Skills
• Excellent organisational skills and high attention to detail
• Demonstrated ability to balance multiple tasks and priorities.
• Strong interpersonal skills that include an ability to work in team environment.
• Good interpersonal/communication (both oral and written) and time management skills.
• Excellent usage of Microsoft Office applications (MS Word, Excel, and others)

Work Hours: 8

Experience in Months: 96

Level of Education: Postgraduate Degree

Job application procedure

To apply for the position, Applicants have to send their applications to the Email: jobs@mariestopes.or.ug . (They must attach their CVs) and indicate the position they are applying for in the Subject line.

All Jobs

QUICK ALERT SUBSCRIPTION