Alight
Country Director
Reports to Chief Operating & Experience Officer | Full time |
Hello Hello! Alight is recruiting a Country Director for our program in Uganda. So you’re interested in joining us? Welcome, we’re happy you’re here.
When you Join us, you’ll find…
A team with deep experience in co-designing solutions that create new value around the world. We know we need to always be better, and we believe in the power and abundance of everyday people, everywhere, to change the world with us.
A culture of radical accountability to our customers –as we help build a meaningful life for and with the displaced, we ask them what they want and then deliver on it.
An organization that refuses to settle for anything less than delivering human-worthy services.
If you believe in an abundant world full of amazing people who want to help; in the simple human justice to build a life; and in doing a better thing, then read on!**
Candidates in Uganda will be given priority for this role, but we are open to candidates from all over the world!
Our Purpose and Work in Uganda
Our purpose in Uganda is to support refugees. With support from the government of Uganda, UNHCR, BPRM and other donors, Alight currently provides critical protection services across Uganda’s refugee settlements. Alight has consistently operated in Uganda since 1994, and today has a strong and committed team of over four hundred personnel who include full time staff and incentive workers, and hundreds of community volunteers
As Alight evolves, so does the purpose of the Uganda program. The success of the Uganda program in being responsive to customers and designing customer-centered programs is core to its future success. With support and partnership from the Alight global team, Alight partner organization Kuja Kuja, and the refugees we serve, the Uganda program will emerge, alongside the Rwanda program, as a model of customer responsiveness and co-creation. By listening to customers and providing exemplary services, the program will become a beacon inside Alight.
About the Role
The Alight Uganda Country Director is expected to be ambitious and brave in their commitment to better serve both staff and refugees. As the Country Director, you will lead and manage a successful country program serving refugees and their neighbors across Uganda. And you must do so by being human-centered towards both staff and the people we serve.
Country Directors serve as enterprise managers responsible for the impact, financial health, and timely delivery of services. They are Alight leaders ensuring the purpose and values of the organization live inside all the work. The Country Directors and programs are surrounded by support from the global team and colleagues in other country programs. They have the opportunity of partnering with the Alight family of organizations (including Questscope, Kuja Kuja, Eastern Congo Initiative, and ORAM).
This is a shared journey; continuous communication with all stakeholders will be key. As a leader inside Alight, the Director must embrace the potential of all people to help – every staff and community member, donor, UNHCR, local and national government. The Uganda government is the host and it’s critical to not only maintain strong relationships but also align program strategy to national strategy. Promoting and making space for belonging and co-creation inside the team is required.
A key objective of the position will be to restart and scale Alight’s Kuja Kuja customer feedback service and tools across all services and locations. The future Alight program in Uganda will bravely be better by 1) being radically accountable by consistently collecting (refugee) customer satisfaction data in all locations 2) using that data to manage services in responsive way and 3) using customer insights to design and co-create better programming.
Openness to partnership, co-creation, and customer-driven response has been and will continue to be a hallmark of the Uganda program. This position is responsible to work with an internal and external team to determine a desirable, viable, and feasible model for delivering customer-centered and co-created services in and around Uganda refugee settlements. The Uganda leader will also need to dedicate time to structural concerns like budgeting and staffing for quality service delivery and equitable compensation. And will need to partner with the global team to raise the funds to fully cover the cost of delivering existing programming and respond to customer needs.
As this is a shared journey and has meaning and consequence globally, the Director must share and nurture a vision of change and inspire staff at every level of the organization to participate in building customer-centered and co-created programs. The Director must also work with all stakeholders to share the vision and invite co-creation. Sharing ownership is not only important philosophically to Alight, it’s often the key to successful and lasting innovation. This role not only requires an openness to people and ideas, but also a commitment to spending the time necessary to communicate and harmonize with all stakeholders. Regular communication with the team in Uganda, the global team, and to audiences outside Alight is required.
Essential Responsibilities and Duties:
Country Program Leadership
- Serve as the enterprise leader of the Uganda Program, responsible for the quality programming, employee belonging and well-being, financial health, compliance, and timely delivery of services, reports, and other critical deliverables.
- Ensure that the Uganda enterprise is Alight and the mission and values of the organization are alive inside the team and the work.
- Create a place of belonging for staff, volunteers, and partners – ensure there is dignified space, employees are seen and heard, and that there are growth opportunities. Follow policies and contribute to organizational goals to ensure diversity, inclusion and equity in the workplace and services.
- Fully participate as a member of the global leadership team, responsible for driving refugee-led service improvement across the whole of Alight and beyond. Support and guide the Uganda and global team to be refugee-centered and co-creative in their work
- Strategically lead the Uganda team to provide exemplary refugee-led service and become a beacon inside Alight and beyond.
- Lead a stellar Uganda-based senior management team to meet and exceed expectations of customers, donors, and partners.
- Harmonize with diverse stakeholders who make Alight possible. Work in a measurable and accountable way towards shared purpose and goals.
Leading Equity and Belonging
The Uganda Country Director is responsible to understand the barriers and frictions to belonging in their programming. With this understanding, they must design new structures, communications, budgets, policies, and recommendations to evolve the country program. The Country Director must work to create a service-based culture and collaborative decision-making structure. Compensation and growth opportunities must be addressed across the country program. And management training prioritized to ensure supportive supervision exists.
Customer Accountability and Co-creation
Customer accountability is core to the emergent Uganda program and to the work of Alight. In this role, you will be expected to lead a team to evolve core refugee settlement services through managing to customer satisfaction and implementing customer ideas.
Alight and Kuja Kuja co-designed and developed a customer feedback service and tool. Alight Uganda needs to restart data collection across sites to better understand not only how to improve Alight programming, but also how to co-create customer-driven programming. Uganda has the potential to lead the way on co-designing and co-implementing customer ideas to transform both lives and the places where we work. To succeed, the Uganda program will need to work closely with fundraisers on the global team to support emergent ideas.
The Uganda team is responsible to make space to identify and grapple with hard questions and to raise them inside Alight and beyond. A customer-led approach will raise big questions about not just our services but also how we think about ourselves, our organization, our mission and our industry. It will be your responsibility to make space for these discussions, refine important questions, and share them for others to join the conversation. It’s likely that this questioning will lead to new partnerships and design.
Qualities top candidates will possess
To be successful in this role, you must have the humility to truly listen to and trust refugee customers with decision making and design. This role requires leadership experience, deep empathy and connection to service provision, desire for equity and opportunity for teammates, and a strong orientation to transformation. The right person will be focused but also know that lasting change requires going wide and working right alongside colleagues, partners, service providers and customers. Great patience and kindness is expected – especially when leading teams to embrace new ways of working. The mandate is ambitious and will only be advanced by someone willing to believe transformation is both possible and necessary.
Skills and experience we’re seeking
- Deep industry experience – leadership, program design and management, and front-line direct service provision desired
- Meaningful experience in serving marginalized communities and demonstrated success at improving the status quo
- Belief in the Alight mission and values and a desire to activate these to unleash our own teams and the people we serve
- Strong commitment to building culture and policies of belonging. Passion and experience in making INGOs equitable and empowering places to work.
- Proven ability to work with diverse partners to make great things happen – most important is experience designing with customers but the ability to harmonize and co-create with national governments, bi-lateral and multi-lateral donors, private donors, host communities, local businesses, and global teams is also critical to success
- Patience, curiosity, and openness to try new things and to iterate and refine solutions
- Ability to build and lead a strong team who fully contribute to success
- Experience leading transformation and innovation inside an organization
- Ability to communicate powerfully about your work to both small and large groups
- Fluent English is required; Luganda, Swahili, or any Ugandan or customer language a plus
Benefits
Borderless Team of 2,500 staff worldwide that sees possibility, celebrates moments of abundance, shares new ideas, and strives to do a better thing every day.
Learning & Development – Access thousands of free online learning courses to take at your own pace and tailor to your professional goals.
Generous Leave Time – Between vacation days, personal leave days, and holidays, you have ample opportunity to take time off when you need it.
Who We Are
We are on a journey to build Alight, a new platform of amazing people and organizations providing lifesaving services and creating breakthrough solutions for and with the displaced. WeAreAlight.org
Alight is an Equal Opportunity Employer offering employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, sexual expression, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, citizenship, physical or mental disability, or protected veteran status. Alight complies with all applicable laws governing nondiscrimination in employment.