Project Background

Through the Malawi Governance for Solutions (GfS) Activity, USAID seeks to build on the incremental gains in decentralization and associated service delivery improvements, with the understanding that to make the significant leaps now required for Malawi to meet its own development goals—in the face of a fast-growing, young population—a bold, adaptive, and sustainable approach is required. To successfully remove critical bottlenecks and diffuse effective governance practices, DAI will deploy a locally driven approach—Facilitate, Catalyze, and Scale—drawing on Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) as a core methodology.

Through the Facilitate, Catalyze, and Scale approach, DAI will help local stakeholders to tackle the root causes of service delivery failures through best-fit solutions and offer demonstrative models based on positive deviance. Through both process-oriented facilitation and the provisions of technical support and grants, GfS will foster stable, resilient, and more self-reliant partnerships that best position local communities to address their own challenges and contribute to the trajectory of Malawi Vision 2063.

Objectives of the assignment

Reporting to the Liaison Officer Coordinator, the Urban Liaison Officer (ULO) will work closely with Liaison Officer Coordinator (LOC), Senior PDIA Advisor and Deputy Chief of Party(DCoP) to lead the work of GfS in their respective urban council (city, town or munipality) in designing and delivering innovative GfS Enabling Interventions, and Problem-Driven Interventions that best suit the urban contexts. This will be in the key GfS Result Areas of Human Resource Management, Public Finance Management, and Policy Implementation. S/he will collaborate with other USAID Implementing Partiners (Ips) in assigned urban centres to support joint work planning, evaluation of results, and leveraging of resources to accelerate development impact across USAID implementers in Malawi.

Tasks & Responsibilities

• Build strategic relationships with key urban council counterparts to build momentum and an enabling environment for GfS implementation at urban council level. These are likely to include business leaders, civil society, and political actors that drive change in urban spaces.
• Facilitate coalition formation that can deliver transparency and accountability in public service delivery, ensuring coalitions provide open and inclusive spaces for constructive dialogue for driving transformative change.
• Creatively come up with coalitions of actors in fitting with the urban setting, facilitating a combination of individual and coalition meetings in creative ways, from a mindset of Thinking and Working Politically.
• Identify partnerships for integration including between GfS and other activities as well as between other USAID IPs and urban governments
• Contribute to the establishment of an online integration platform to capture lessons of urban-rural district integration to serve as a virtual learning lab for sharing evidence, best practice, work plans, M&E data, and other key information across projects
• Mainstreaming of Gender and Social Inclusion (GESI) in all processes and outcomes of EIs and PBIs.
• Work in collaboration with GfS Result Area Leads to ensure GfS Interventions are properly supported with requisite expertise within GfS and beyond.
• Create and foster municipal partnerships with government institutions, NGOs, private Sector actors, civil society organizations and academia for specific area-based service delivery, urban socio-economic development initiatives, researches, outreach and capacity development;
• Contribute to ensuring that products and services that individual consultants and organizations produce in supporting GfS add maximum value towards more and better GfS results.
• Engage in reporting (especially in relation to the MEL framework) and communications activities, ensuring timely and accurate delivery of communications products for submission to Country office
• Work closely with the grants team in ensuring compliance with USAID systems and monitoring of sub grantees activities
• Other duties as assigned by supervisor

Qualifications

This role is contingent on donor funding.

• Bachelor’s Degree in Public Administration, Management, Urban Planning, , development studies. A Master’s degree is preferred;
• Minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in a governmental, or non-governmental organization in a multi-cultural setting, preferably in the context of decentralisation and urban governance;
• Experience in monitoring and evaluation of policy reform or capacity development, with demonstrated capabilities in methodologies appropriate to complex change processes preferred.
• Previous experience implementing projects related to urban planning public spaces and urban sustainable development across several sectors is an asset.
• Knowledge of urban governance and development, and local authorities in Malawi is an asset
• Experience in Political Economy Analysis tools, especially skills in Thinking and Working Politically is an advantage
• Experience in working with powerful business leaders, politicians and civil society activists will be an added advantage
• Prior USAID experience preferred.
• Proficiency with MS Office software.
• Demonstratable analytical skills
• Excellent English writing, speaking, and reading skills