Project Officer (or Project Manager)

Description du poste

COLEAD is a capacity-building non-profit private sector association supporting all actors across agricultural value chains in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. COLEAD has over 20 years of experience in designing and delivering technical assistance and training programmes, with a strong footprint in horticulture and agrifood systems.

COLEAD’s mission is to enable inclusive, sustainable, and resilient food systems through practical support and cooperation, building on a network of 500+ organisations from 49 countries.

To address a major development constraint expressed by its partner beneficiaries, COLEAD created the Access to Finance (A2F) department to structure and deliver services to improve agri-MSMEs’ access to external funding.

Its activities are built around three pillars:

Training Material: developing and implementing scalable business and finance-related training and tools Technical Assistance (TA): coordinating and delivering targeted support projects related to A2F Network Building: creating an enabling ecosystem of financing partners, advisors, donors, and experts The department’s positioning focuses primarily on the “capability gap” – strengthening the capacity of agri-MSMEs to access capital – with an emphasis on practical, borrower-side support.

About the Role

We are recruiting a Project Officer (or Project Manager depending on experience) to strengthen our Access to Finance department. The successful candidate will coordinate technical support activities, manage relationships with external experts and internal TA team, and contribute to structuring and improving our support offer and operations.

This position is based in our Lomé office (mandatory presence). You will work directly with the Access to Finance Manager and collaborate closely with the rest of the A2F team (currently two team members + interns).

Responsibilities:

Technical Assistance pillar

Review and assess Applications for Support submitted by agri-MSMEs, under various programmes Provide feedback to those agri-MSMEs, identifying and scoping relevant interventions in the form of training to be followed or TA missions to conduct Coordinate TA missions with external experts from start to finish, partnering with our TA department (providing technical A2F-related input) Monitor and evaluate project results and pilots, for reporting and improvement purposes Design & optimize operational processes (e.g. on collecting & monitoring applications) Ad hoc support on the department

General Contributions

Participate in the development of training presentations, working documents and operational processes Work closely with the rest of the A2F team and other departments involved in TA and capacity building Support in mentoring and supervision of interns working on A2F-related activities