Call for Applications: Southern Africa Regional Office (SARO) Director
To achieve its goals, United Cities and Local Governments of Africa-UCLG Africa is recruiting its Southern Africa Regional Office (SARO) Director.
The Southern Africa Regional Office (SARO) Director will have to fulfill the following responsibilities:
- Manage the team of the Regional Office and make sure that it maintain a functional delivery capacity to the constituency.
- Develop and update a database of national associations of local governments and their constitutive members in the region.
- Ensure a political and strategic watch on decentralization and local governments’ issues in the region, in order to elaborate tailor-made responses to the identified problems and challenges.
- Inform UCLG Africa Secretariat on the needs assessment of local governments and their associations to feed into the 3-year priority program of the organization.
- Disseminate UCLG Africa the long-term strategic perspective of UCLG Africa as well as its 3-year priority program in the region and assist local governments and their associations in their implementation.
- Support national associations of local governments of the region in their dialogue with national governments and development partners.
- Develop regional capacity building programs, including through peer review and mentoring programs, for the benefit of the national associations of local governments and their members.
- Promote and support decentralized and trans-border cooperation partnerships between local governments and their associations in the region.
- Provide technical support to the leadership of the UCLG Africa in the region (members of the Pan African Council, REFELA Bureau members, Executive Committee members, Vice President) for the collection of membership dues in the region.
- Maintain ongoing dialogue with the Regional Economic Community with the setting up within the REC of an institution representing local authorities.
- Develop and implement fundraising and financial resource mobilization strategy to comfort the financial sustainability of the regional office.
- Present an annual report on the activities, outputs and outcomes of the Regional office.
The aptitudes, skills and knowledge required for this position are:
- •Administration and management skills
- •Foresight and visioning capacity
- •Project management capacity
- •Mentoring capacity
- •Ability to organize and supervise team work, and to prioritize and work under pressure and multicultural environment
- •High sensitivity to the work with political leaders
- •Sense of initiative and responsibility
- •Computer literate in main current software applications
- •Readiness to travel frequently
- •Excellent oral and written presentations capacities
- •Mastering of digital communication tools
The position is open to African candidates holding at least a master degree or equivalent from a renowned university, in the following areas: Urban and Regional Planning, Economy, Geography, Law, Public administration. Women candidatures are particularly encouraged. Candidates must justify at least 10 years of experience in leading position in the private or public sectors.
The deadline for submitting the application is 29 April 2016. All the elements that the application file must include in addition to the addresses where to send it are available in the Terms of Reference attached here.
