Grants Manager, BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative

The BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative (UPGI) seeks to hire a Grants Manager for a growing team that provides advisory services and technical assistance around the Graduation approach to various partners, ranging from governments, multilateral institutions, NGOs, and in-country technical team members.

Reporting to the Director of People and Operations, the Grants Manager will lead all aspects of grant management and reporting to deliver the UPGI scale-up strategy. This position will require close work with staff in Africa and Asia. As a result, this is a global position and there is a preference for the person to be based in one of BRAC International’s hubs in Asia and Africa.

This role supports the Director of People and Operations with strategic and operational stewardship over donor resources by applying relevant systems, policies, procedures, and tools to ensure that grants are donor compliant and best serve the organizational mission.

Primary Responsibilities:

Coordination

• Coordinates and negotiates the drafting process for financial and narrative reports among different teams, ensuring submission deadlines are met.
• Liaises with the donors and partners regarding any clarifications on reporting dates or changing donor requirements and informs teams accordingly; updates tracking systems.
• Participates in Global Grant Management community of practice calls and training on behalf of UPGI and applies relevant information and learning internally
• Lead and coordinate Due Diligence of Downstream partners during grant implementation as needed
• Serve as grant management point person for UPGI team, particularly donor compliance and reporting.

Compliance

• Supports adherence to BRAC Grant Management procedures and policies
• Promotes adherence to BRAC Sub-Grant Management procedures and policies
• Promotes adherence to complex donor compliance requirements
• Supports the Proposal Development SOP process by reviewing all calls for proposals with a compliance lens
• Supports the Donor Contract review process by reviewing contracts with a compliance lens;
• Ensure donor reports are of high quality through application of the Donor Report Quality Checklist before submission to donors; support with writing/editing
• Support teams across UPGI global units to ensure all opportunities, proposals, contracts, and amendments follow BRAC processes
• Draft sub-grant agreements using endorsed template packages and ensuring that all donor compliance requirements are passed down

Analysis/Portfolio Management

• Support review of proposal budgets to ensure correct budget template and identify questionable costs from a donor compliance perspective
• Support review of proposal budgets and ensure alignment with proposed activities
• Perform monitoring of grants, grant spending, and portfolio spending and perform further analysis to aid in the resolution of issues identified
• Maintain pipeline tracker for the UPGI
• Lead regular grant reviews and other monitoring across an allocated portfolio
• Identify issues in the active grant portfolio and apply problem-solving skills to resolve these.

Systems

• Maintain grant files in accordance with BRAC procedures
• Act as superuser and lead on the BRAC CRM and its reporting functions, and ensure adherence to system guidelines to promote data quality
• Develop expert knowledge of BRAC CRM & dashboard functionality, maintain up-to-date data, and use data for decision making

Safeguarding

• Ensure the safety of team members from any harm, abuse, neglect, harassment and exploitation to achieve the programme’s goals on safeguarding implementation. Act as a key source of support, guidance and expertise on safeguarding for establishing a safe working environment.
• Practice, promote and endorse the issues of safeguarding policy among team members and ensure the implementation of safeguarding standards in every course of action.
• Follow the safeguarding reporting procedure in case any reportable incident takes place, encourage others to do so.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent in finance or international development or related field
• 4+ years in development or related field;
• Experience in grants management;
• Knowledge of the requirements of major institutional donors, including budgeting, eligibility issues, compliance management, and reporting; experience in engaging with donors at a strategic level
• Possess an understanding of the full grant cycle, including the proposal development phase
• Strong attention to detail, problem-solving skills, and ability to analyze trends
• Excellent organizational skills and attention to detail
• Working experience in rapidly growing organizations will be an added advantage.

About the Organization

About BRAC

BRAC is one of the world’s largest development organizations dedicated to empowering people living in poverty. Working across 12 countries in South Asia and Africa, BRAC touches the lives of more than 120 million people worldwide. BRAC takes a holistic approach to alleviate poverty with microfinance, education, healthcare, food security programs, and more.

About the Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative

The Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative (“UPGI”) is a global unit of BRAC that was founded in 2016 to build off of the success of BRAC’s Ultra-Poor Graduation program in Bangladesh. BRAC UPGI aims to position the Graduation approach as a critical driver to eradicating extreme poverty worldwide. It does this by:

• Advocating for uptake of the Graduation approach by policymakers, national governments, multilateral institutions, and non-governmental organizations; and
• Effective adaptation and implementation of the Graduation approach in countries worldwide, supported through technical assistance and capacity strengthening for external stakeholders.

In 2002, BRAC pioneered the Ultra-Poor Graduation (“Graduation”) approach in Bangladesh – a holistic intervention to help people lift themselves from extreme poverty – after recognizing that existing poverty alleviation programs were not reaching the poorest. By providing livelihood assets, cash transfers, and continued mentoring and training, the Graduation approach addresses participants’ multidimensional needs within the local context and ‘graduates’ people from extreme poverty into sustainable livelihoods.

Graduation is an evidence-based, scalable intervention proven to break the poverty trap in the long term. So far, BRAC’s flagship Graduation program has impacted over 2 million Bangladeshi households—totaling over 9 million people. To help eradicate extreme poverty, BRAC UPGI is working to scale globally by integrating Graduation into existing government programs and helping 21 million more people lift themselves from extreme poverty by 2026.

But BRAC UPGI cannot do it alone. This is beyond the means and capacity of a single organization- no matter how ambitious or innovative. Sustainability and scale demands change at the systems level with active government engagement. BRAC UPGI is committed to creating effective solutions that leverage the available resources and existing programming to achieve the long-term benefits demonstrated by Graduation. The organization is partnering with governments, multilateral institutions, NGOs, and civil society, in countries where BRAC UPGI thinks it can have maximum impact and drive greater uptake for Graduation.