Program Officer – Business Development

PROGRAM OFFICER – BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Dorcas Aid International – Kenya is a Christian Relief and Development Organization working in areas of WASH, Social empowerment and protection, entrepreneurship and climate change. Dorcas is urgently recruiting for a position of a Program Officer – Business Development to support on-going value chains in honey, pasture, chicken, camel milk and dairy milk in Makueni, Kitui, Marsabit and Siaya counties, as well as working with other actors to co-create programs that generate employment for the youth.

Position Description: This position requires a motivated professional person with a business background and proven skills in working with grassroot growing value chains and cooperatives. The person must demonstrate that he or she has acquired hands-on experience on running value chains and capacity to include marginalized groups, particularly women, youth and people with disabilities. The person must have skills to engage different categories of youth in creation of employment and decent jobs.

Key Responsibilities

Provide high level technical support in designing and implementing grassroot inclusive value chains that combine market-based approaches to create decent employment and diversification of income streams for rural households. He or she must be able to promote and integrate climate resilient actions in values chains in order to mitigate and adapt to effects of climate change.

Support existing value chains in honey, pasture, milk and chicken to develop viable and sustainable business cases.

Map out and develop potential value chains in different contexts that have potential to support marginalized groups.

Lead Inclusive Value Chain Enterprises that aim for inclusion of marginalized groups especially women, youth and people with disabilities.

Support cooperative development to enhance their overall management skills, aggregation capacity and marketing systems.

Seek and develop linkages and synergies with other existing and potential value chain actors

Lead in resource mobilization to support existing and emerging value chains

Capture learnings and emerging lessons to facilitate scale up and adaptive programming.

Support and co-create programs that promote youth employment

Actively network and create sustainable relations with other agribusiness actors

Develop proposals that support initiation of new value chains

Undertake in preparation of program reports and program reviews.

Qualifications

A Masters degree in either Business Administration, entrepreneurship or related degree with a minimum experience of 5 years in managing value chains.