Purpose of the role

The Portfolio Manager Africa provides strategic leadership to ensure the coherence, quality, and impact of Hivos’ project portfolio, strengthening program design, implementation, and performance while fostering continuous improvement, accountability, and evidence-informed decision-making across assigned countries and initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

• Ensure strategic coherence and alignment across the project portfolio.
• Project design ensuring thematically solid propositions in line with Hivos’ strategy
• Generate interesting ideas for proposal development in line with Hivos’s strategy.
• Provide strategic advice for developing new programs and projects.
• Analyze and provide strategic recommendations on the political, social, and economic context of countries in the assigned project portfolio.
• Contribute to overseeing the implementation of improvement processes resulting from audits of the assigned project portfolio and provide support for consolidating good practices.
• Responsible for designing, implementing, and evaluating advocacy strategies.
• Initiate, facilitate, and manage or co-manage relevant and impactful advocacy activities and events.
• Draft project reports and presentations, summarizing progress and insights.
• Develop workstream and project plans aligned with frameworks.
• Support risk, issue, and dependency tracking and mitigation.
• Coordinate stakeholder engagement activities.
• Supervise closeout processes of the assigned project portfolio.
• Support the development of funding proposals.
• Analyze project data and prepare insights reports.
• Support process improvement initiatives and horizon scanning.
• Supervise local and regional project managers, allocate work, and contribute to appraisals.
• Identify and report noncompliance with organizational policies.

Person Specifications

• Master’s degree in business, law, development, public administration, or an equivalent discipline
• A seasoned professional with at least 10 years of regional and or international programme management experience, possessing a proven track record in strategic thinking within complex operations, alongside extensive expertise in team leadership and staff supervision.
• Demonstrable project and financial management skills including resource mobilisation and the development of large and small funding proposals.
• Project planning, reporting, and prioritization.
• Support and coordinate requirements, gathering and change management processes.
• Experience in developing effective advocacy strategies.
• Strategic thinking and ability to create, identify and make use of advocacy opportunities, and link results and lessons to wider program outcomes.
• Understanding of the contexts of the Southern, Eastern, Western and Central African countries and territories.
• Data analysis and insight generation.
• Stakeholder engagement and expectation management.
• Ability to manage resistance and handle issues effectively.
• Tech-savvy with modern project tools.
• Strong organizational and problem-solving abilities.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills are important.
• Language skills: Fluent in English. French is an asset.