This is an exciting opportunity to join Alert’s largest country programme – the Democratic Republic of Congo team – as the Grants Manager for the programme. The Grants Manager will support the DRC programme to design, secure and deliver high quality peacebuilding programmes. The postholder is in in regular contact with the Country Director, Director of Programmes (DoP), Deputy Director of Programmes and project managers and plays a coordination role to ensure effective grants management including, compliance requirements, reporting, timely and quality proposal development.

Key areas of focus for the Grants Manager include:

• Grants management and compliance;
• Project development and fundraising;
• Reporting;
• Contribute to activities of the Africa programme and the wider organisation.

Essential qualifications include: strong experience securing new funding for peacebuilding or development programmes, including developing project concepts and donor relationships; writing proposals and budgets, and negotiating contracts, understanding of conflict transformation and peacebuilding, and experience working in this or related field, experience of working with a range of donors (institutional, multilateral, trusts and foundations), understanding of diverse donor requirements, and experience of identify funding opportunities and tracking donor trends, good understanding of project design, including developing theories of change, clear and realistic objectives and effective monitoring and evaluation plans and experience managing projects, including project start up, implementation management and project closure.

It is essential that the candidate is able to work fluently in both English and French.

For this role, the skills, qualifications and experience listed below are important, but we believe that to be great in this job you are likely, first and foremost, to have a talent for writing, communicating impact, and proposal development.

We are looking for someone well organized, results and detail-oriented with a proven experience in peacebuilding/ conflict transformation and familiarity with gender- and conflict-sensitive approaches.

Role duties and responsibilities

Grants management and compliance

• Lead due diligence assessment when and as required by an existing or new donor/new partner;
• In coordination with the Director of Programme and Director of Operations, draft Partner Agreements/MoUs with relevant Annexes and take through signing processes;
• Review donor contracts, flag any points that might challenge Alert’s procedures, and support contract negotiations;
• Work closely with the finance team to ensure legal and financial compliance with Alert and donor standards and approaches;
• Coordinate with respective budget holders and finance in order to ensure budgets are correctly allocated and aligned;
• Coordinate start-up and close out of projects when required;

Project development and fundraising

• Provide strategic support to country-led fundraising, including proactive mapping of new donors/opportunities, research, identifying and engaging directly with donors and in close coordination with the Global Fundraising Team;
• In collaboration with country team members, coordinate project proposal development process taking the lead on writing project proposals including support to the development of the budget and logframe, and coordinate submission to the donor;
• Facilitate and ensure strong coordination between DRC team and support teams in HQ (Advocacy, Comms, HR, Peacebuilding Advisory Unit, Resource Development), whenever necessary in the proposal development process;
• Support communications with donors when required;

Reporting

• Manage and update the DRC reporting calendar and send reminders for inputs of all those concerned by the preparation of these reports;
• Coordinate Donor Reporting Processes and ensure timely submission of high; quality reports that meet donor requirements in coordination with the Project Managers/COPs and the Programme Direction team;
• Coordinate responses to address donors’ requests for clarifications and ensure consistency of information and analysis provided in relation to the reports mentioned in the bullet point above;
• Coordinate quarterly and annual internal reports;
• Verify the consistency of information provided in narrative and financial reports in coordination with PMs, DMEAL and Finance colleagues;
• In close coordination with the DMEAL team, develop learning products that allow the findings and relevant feedbacks from narrative, financial and audits reports to be shared with the wider programme team;
• Support the programme team in ensuring orderly and complete archiving of all project and internal reports; makes them easily available to the team;
• Develop a capacity building plan for the DRC team to strengthen capacity for quality reporting and learning;

Contribute to wider organizational goals within Alert

• Keep abreast of and participate in wider organisational discussions and processes, for example by attending open days, strategic thinking, developing and pursuing thematic programming, representation and communication – at the national, regional and global levels;
• Contribute to advocacy, communication and networking activities as required;
• Undertake any other tasks commensurate with the role, as required;

Please note that the above are just some of the role requirements. For the full requirements, please click here to view the job description.