Grants Support Officer

Overall Purpose of the Job

The Regional Scholarship and Innovation Fund (Rsif) is the flagship program of the African Government led Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology (PASET) that aims to address the human resource gap in the fields of applied sciences, engineering, and technology (ASET) by training high quality PhD and post-doctoral scholars and building research and innovation capacities in those fields in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA ). The program is designed in three complementary windows which provide scholarships for PhD training (Window1) and competitive grants for research (Window 2) and innovation (Window 3).

The post holder will play a key role in supporting the implementation of the program's Research and Innovation Grants component. The role will coordinate administrative and technical aspects to facilitate successful implementation of the funded research and innovation projects

Specific duties

• The successful candidate will undertake tasks that include but are not limited to the following:
• Assist the competitive selection process and onboarding of new grantees.
• Support the review of narrative technical reports from grantees, analysing key issues and providing feedback loops to inform program implementation.
• Track grantee project contract deliverables and timelines, sending regular reminders to grants project teams to ensure that they are on track to complete on time and alerting teams of possible challenges.
• Support planning and implementation of key activities in annual workplans under the Research & Innovation component
• Liaise with finance teams to facilitate payments to grantees
• Update the Grants Monitoring & Evaluation Indicator Tracker based on the grantees project technical reports
• Update the Grants Management Information System (MIS) Database with relevant information forall grant projects
• Support the filing of relevant grant documents for grantees projects and overall grant close-out of projects
• Support development of knowledge dissemination products to share results of the research & innovation grant projects
• Participate in relevant meetings with grantees and other team members
• Perform any other tasks as assigned.

Requirements/ qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in social sciences, international development, education, project management, or related field.
• Certification in Project Management.
• At least four years’ experience in Grants or project management for a non-profit organization.
• Experience in coordinating development programs.
• Ability to identify procedural inefficiencies and make recommendations for improvements to systems and tools.
• Ability to develop, organize and present information to small groups.
• Advanced organizational and planning skills, project planning and management skills.
• Proven ability to set priorities, meet deadlines and multi-task with minimal supervision.