CARE International works around the globe to save lives, defeat poverty, and achieve social justice. We seek a world of hope, tolerance, and social justice, where poverty has been overcome and all people live with dignity and security. We put women and girls at the centre because we know that we cannot overcome poverty until all people have equal rights and opportunities.
Project Yield is a four-year, four-country partnership between CARE, AGRA, and the African Guarantee Fund (AGF) that systematizes the graduation of women smallholder farmers and Agripreneurs from informal savings groups into commercial finance. The partnership begins with a proof-of-concept pilot in Zambia and scales across Malawi, Rwanda, and Nigeria, with a target of reaching more than 10,000 women. It combines CARE's community-level pipeline, enterprise readiness, and digitization strengths; AGRA's VALUE4HER brand, financial service provider (FSP) relationships, and institutional credibility with African governments; and AGF's partial credit guarantee, which absorbs the residual risk that financial institutions cannot otherwise price. The architecture runs as a single integrated three-stage pipeline: identification and assessment, enterprise development, and catalytic capital deployment, underpinned by a rigorous learning agenda that generates evidence to inform scale-up and policy influence.
CARE Zambia, an International Non-Governmental relief and development organization with various projects in Eastern, North-western, Luapula, Lusaka, and Southern provinces of Zambia, is looking for an experienced, innovative and motivated individual to fill the following position;
Job Title: Chief of Party
Reports to: CARE Zambia Country Director
Location: Lusaka, Zambia (Pilot base), with Regional Oversight
Type of Contract: Fixed Term
Job Summary
The Chief of Party (CoP) provides overall vision, leadership, and management of Project Yield, holding end-to-end accountability for technical quality, delivery against targets, financial and operational integrity, and the health of the three-way partnership between CARE, AGRA, and AGF. The CoP is the principal point of accountability to the Joint Steering Committee for pilot performance in Zambia and for readiness to scale across Malawi, Rwanda, and Nigeria. The role requires a leader who can hold a complex, multi-institutional architecture together in practice — translating the theory of change and three-stage pipeline into disciplined field execution, while building the alliances, resources, and evidence base the partnership needs to grow.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
1. Strategy and Program Quality (30%)
· Provide overall strategic and technical leadership for Project Yield, ensuring the pilot and scale-up remain grounded in the partnership's theory of change and the five underlying assumptions it is designed to test.
· Own the annual workplan and budget for Zambia and, as scale-up proceeds, oversee country workplans for Malawi, Rwanda, and Nigeria, ensuring consistency of design while allowing for context-specific adaptation.
· Ensure disciplined execution of the three-stage architecture — Stage 1 identification and assessment, Stage 2 VALUE4HER enterprise development, and Stage 3 capital deployment under the AGF guarantee — so that each stage feeds the next without bottlenecks.
· Monitor delivery against catalytic proof points (women onboarded, capital deployed, non-performing loan rates, secondary pipeline uptake) and course-correct quickly when performance diverges from target.
· Uphold quality standards across the two-stage gating scorecards, the nine-month enterprise development cycle, and the capital readiness assessment, ensuring consistent, well-documented application across cohorts and countries.
· Lead risk management for the pilot and scale-up, actively tracking the risks identified in the concept note (documentation bottlenecks, FSP product design lag, pipeline attrition, macro and climate shocks) and driving mitigation.
· Prepare and present quarterly progress reports, annual workplans, and budget performance to the Joint Steering Committee and to donors.
2. Fundraising and Resource Mobilization (20%)
· Lead resource mobilization for scale-up, working with CARE, AGRA, and AGF to secure the grant-funded technical assistance and delivery budget required across Malawi, Rwanda, and Nigeria.
· Develop and maintain a capital mobilization narrative that clearly articulates direct, secondary pipeline, and effective leverage, cost per woman onboarded, and other unit-economics metrics to donors and prospective funders.
· Identify and cultivate relationships with donors, impact investors, and development finance institutions whose priorities align with women's economic empowerment, agricultural finance, and de-risked commercial lending.
· Support the design and costing of scale-up proposals, ensuring budgets reflect the true cost of the three-role country team model, BDS provider contracting, and guarantee facility co-funding commitments.
· Coordinate with AGF on the resourcing pathway for guarantee facility capitalization beyond the pilot, and with AGRA on resourcing for the V4HConnect platform and continental brand activities that support the partnership.
· Track and report against fundraising targets, ensuring the partnership's grant pipeline is sufficient to sustain the four-year scale-up trajectory.
3. Drive Learning and Program Quality through Integration of Key Components (20%)
· Champion Project Yield as a learning partnership, ensuring the two-pipeline comparison study, FSP behaviour-change measurement, and secondary research and policy outputs are resourced, on schedule, and rigorously executed.
· Drive tight integration across the three Stage 2 components — enterprise skills and business development, formalisation and documentation support, and market linkage and enterprise resilience — so that women experience a coherent pathway rather than three disconnected work-streams.
· Ensure the alternative credit profile generated through CARE's digitisation platforms (Chomoka, DreamSave, Exuus) is captured, quality-assured, and made usable by FSPs and, progressively, integrated with V4HConnect.
· Use the learning agenda's evidence — cohort performance briefs, mid-term and end-term evaluations, and FSP organic uptake data — to refine the two-stage gate, the enterprise development curriculum, and the guarantee structure as the partnership scales.
· Institutionalize a culture of adaptive management, ensuring lessons from the Zambia pilot are systematically applied to the design of Malawi, Rwanda, and Nigeria scale-up rather than each country starting afresh.
· Oversee the Monitoring and Evaluation function, ensuring data quality across the capital readiness scorecards, portfolio performance reporting, and job-creation and economic-impact indicators.
4. Staff Management and Leadership (20%)
· Recruit, lead, and develop the CARE country team (Project Coordinator, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, Outreach and Partnerships Officer) and oversee the technical performance of Community-Based Trainers (CBTs) and contracted BDS providers.
· Set clear performance expectations and provide regular coaching, ensuring the CBT-to-woman coaching ratio and quality of coaching outputs are maintained as cohorts scale.
· Build a high-performing, values-driven team culture that reflects CARE's commitments to gender equity and women's economic empowerment, and that models the same standards the partnership expects of its FSP and BDS partners.
· Lead workforce planning for scale-up, ensuring each new country stands up its country team, BDS contracting, and FSP partnerships on schedule and within budget.
· Ensure staff safety, wellbeing, and compliance with CARE's HR, safeguarding, and code-of-conduct policies across the pilot and scale-up countries.
5. Alliances, Partnership and Representation (10%)
· Serve as CARE's principal representative to the Project Yield Joint Steering Committee and to the three-institution working group, coordinating pipeline flow, FSP engagement, documentation pipelines, and shared monitoring and learning with AGRA and AGF counterparts.
· Build and steward country-level FSP partnerships, supporting loan product co-design and ensuring FSPs experience the pre-vetted, pre-aggregated pipeline and guarantee-backed structure as a genuine reduction in transaction cost and risk.
· Cultivate relationships with national regulators (business registration, tax, standards, agriculture, and trade authorities) to sustain the Documentation Clinics model and support policy engagement on alternative credit data and movable collateral.
· Represent Project Yield with government counterparts, development partners, and industry forums, positioning the partnership's evidence base within the broader African women's agri-finance agenda.
· Maintain a strong, trust-based working relationship with AGRA and AGF counterparts, ensuring the partnership operates as three equal institutions each contributing the capability it is best positioned to deliver, with no duplication or misalignment.
· Represent the partnership at continental platforms and events (e.g., Africa Food Systems Forum, trade expos) to profile results and cultivate future FSP, donor, and policy relationships.
Qualifications and experience:
· Master's degree in international development, agricultural economics, business administration, finance, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
· At least 10 years of progressively senior experience managing complex, multi-partner development programs, including at least 5 years in a Chief of Party, Team Leader, or equivalent senior program leadership role.
· Demonstrated experience with women's economic empowerment, agricultural value chains, financial inclusion, or SME/agribusiness finance programming in Africa.
· Experience managing donor-funded partnerships involving multiple institutional partners, including alignment of governance, reporting, and financial architecture across organizations.
· Track record of successful resource mobilisation, including proposal development and donor relationship management.
· Familiarity with blended finance instruments, particularly partial credit guarantees, and with financial institution partnership models, is a strong advantage.
· Prior experience in Zambia or other Southern/East African markets preferred; experience across multiple African countries is an asset given the scale-up trajectory.
· Fluency in English required; French is an advantage given potential future scale-up markets.
Working conditions:
The role is based in Lusaka, Zambia, with regular travel to project sites within Zambia and, as scale-up proceeds, to Malawi, Rwanda, and Nigeria. The Chief of Party will also be expected to travel periodically for donor meetings, Joint Steering Committee sessions, and continental representation events.
Suitably qualified and interested members of the public are invited to submit their applications through the Thornsoft Recruitment Portal by logging in here. Or https://royalty.thorn-soft.com/recruitment/job-details.php?job=247
Closing Date: 6th October 2026
Kindly ensure that, all academic qualifications are verified by the Zambia Qualifications Authority (ZAQA).
CARE is an Equal Opportunity Employer promoting equity and diversity. Female candidates are encouraged to apply.
As part of CARE’s commitment to preventing sexual harassment, exploitation, and abuse and child abuse, we conduct reference checks on all final-stage candidates in line with the Inter-Agency Misconduct Disclosure Scheme. By applying for this role, you are giving us consent to contact your previous employers to seek information in line with this scheme.
