Regional Director, East And Southern Africa

Job title: Regional Director, East and Southern Africa
Principal Location: Nairobi (other strategic locations in East Africa negotiable)

Role Purpose:

Street Child is a rapidly growing, child-focused, humanitarian and development organisation. In 2023, Street Child celebrated reaching over one million children across 25 countries over its fifteen years of existence. This was accomplished with and through a growing network of more than 200 national and local actors. The Regional Director will be a standard bearer of this ambition in East and Southern Africa, providing leadership across all countries where Street Child is operational while monitoring and pursuing growth opportunities across the region. As Street Child’s most senior representative in the region, the Regional Director will guide and drive the organisation to deliver on the objective of ensuring all children are safe, in school, and learning.

As Street Child actively seeks opportunities to expand its support for the most marginalized girls and boys, the Regional Director will be responsible for providing outstanding leadership and for resourcing and delivering high impact programming across East and Southern Africa. The Regional Director will work to identify and advance partnerships with regional, national, and local actors, as well as donors. This will require bringing a strong network to the role along with energy to represent Street Child in organisational, regional, and global forums. As Street Child country teams drive delivery for girls and boys, the Regional Director will work with country directors to develop high-functioning teams to deliver and resource ambitious regional and country strategies.

The Regional Director will manage one regional programme coordinator and will progressively assume responsibility for line management of country directors in East and Southern Africa.

Key Responsibilities:

• The Regional Director will act as chief motivator, working collaboratively with country, regional, and head office teams to:
• Cultivate enthusiastic and high-performing teams through outstanding leadership:
• Build, lead and motivate an ambitious and enthusiastic team of Street Child Country Directors and Strategic Leadership Teams.
• Oversee and support the recruitment and development of passionate, motivated, and technically excellent Street Child staff.
• Strengthen Street Child’s culture of learning, for both staff and local partners, by identifying professional and organisational development opportunities that respond to self-identified capacity gaps.
• Build a supportive network of learning and information exchange between regional county teams.
• Be a frequent in-person presence in operational countries, sometimes spending extended periods to support leadership at the country level, including in insecure contexts.
• Oversee the management of partnerships in countries in East and Southern Africa where Street Child does not maintain a direct presence.
• Drive resource mobilization across the East and Southern Africa region, for country programmes, regional strategy, and partners:
• In close collaboration with country leadership, identify country-level needs, seek out opportunities, and support in the development of winning proposals for country programmes.
• Across the region, identify needs and gaps, and drive new potential expansion opportunities in line with Street Child’s global strategy.
• Guide programmatic excellence across the region through robust strategy development and high-quality programme delivery:
• Develop a technically robust and evidence-based regional strategy that identifies Street Child’s comparative value and strategic goals in the region, across humanitarian, development and refugee contexts.
• Continuously consult with Country Directors, programme managers and local partners to ensure programme design and delivery is iterative, adaptive and quality-assured and impact is clearly measured.
• Provide support to local partners to develop organisational development plans and their own high-functioning leadership structures.
• Oversee and work closely with the regional finance team in their development and delivery of accurate, value for money budgets and robust operational processes.
• Ensure that operations and programmes in East and Southern Africa are conducted in line with Street Child’s policies and standards, including in the areas of safeguarding, safety and security, HR, finance.

1) Be a passionate representative of Street Child and our partners, across the organisation and in external forums:

• Represent Street Child at the highest level in East and Southern Africa, including pro-active participation in relevant coordination mechanisms at national and regional level.
• Represent Street Child and the needs of children in East and Southern Africa in global for a as required.

2) Advance and diversify partnerships with the local actors who respond to the needs of girls and boys in their communities, and with donors who can resource the work:

• Lead the development of strategic partnerships with relevant actors including donors, INGOs and local/national government, including at the regional level.
• Oversee the development of a resource mobilisation strategy for the region based on Street Child’s expertise and donor priorities.
• Lead and/or support Country Directors in the development of high-quality and highly competitive institutional funding proposals.
• Proactive engagement with Street Child UK head office and programmes team on strategic, networking and fundraising activities.
• The Key Responsibilities provide a high-level view of the Regional Director role. These responsibilities will evolve as the Regional Director expands Street Child’s reach across East and Southern Africa. Street Child operates with an entrepreneurial spirit that may require staff to step-up and step-in to reasonable tasks beyond the initial description of their role. The Regional Director may occasionally be called upon to provide surge or scoping support to other parts of Street Child Programmes as delegated by the Director of Global Programmes.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Significant senior management experience, leading high-functioning programme regional or county teams in the humanitarian and development sector. Previous experience as a country or Regional Director is preferred.
• Strong strategic thinker, with demonstrated expertise developing, resourcing, and delivering strategic plans at the regional or country level.
• Demonstrable experience of proposal development and/or winning funding; Experience in both humanitarian and development contexts.
• Strong command of the localisation agenda, and commitment to local level leadership and decision-making.
• Strong experience delivering high quality education and/or child protection programming.
• Excellent written and spoken communications in English.
• Experience working in the East and Southern Africa region.
• Demonstrated experience working closely with and in support of a multitude of partners including those from local civil society, government, and the private sector.
• Excellent relationship building skills, with an ability to skillfully navigate both national and international stakeholders.
• Willingness to actively engage in program development with country teams including extended missions to support at country level (significant travel expected).
• Additional language skills with a preference for Swahili, Portuguese, French, Somali, or other regional language