The Organization
Since 1944, Heifer International has helped more than 36 million families lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.
Our goal is to help families achieve living incomes, which will allow them to feed their families daily, educate all their children; and have proper housing, water, hygiene, and other essential resource. When many families gain this new sustainable income, it brings new opportunities for building schools, creating agricultural cooperatives, forming community savings, and funding small businesses.
In Kenya Heifer International has been in operation since 1981. Our year 2030 Strategic focus is to assist 624,123 small holder farmers and pastoralist households to move from poverty and vulnerability to sustainability and resilience in a healthy environment through participation in the dairy, poultry, and beef value chains.
Are you excited to join the diverse, passionate team and help save lives and increase sustainable living Income for smallholder farmers?
The Role
Reporting to the Impact Investment Area Manager, the position holder will offer support and coordination between the Financial Institutions, Agribusiness, and Farmer Cooperatives of the TRANSFORM Project to improve deployment of bio-secure focused financing products in the project. S/he will coordinate with the financial institutions in developing biosecurity focused financial products for targeted participants of the project and promoting and tracking deployment and repayment of loan products associated to the project.
The Access to Finance Officer will work with the program to assess the gaps in adoption of biosecurity practices promoted by the project and that can be addressed through access to finance. S/he will communicate these needs and opportunities to the financial intermediaries identified by the project to facilitate development of specific financing products. S/he will work with the financial intermediary in training the farmer cooperatives and agribusinesses in these products and promote deployment of loan products in the project to adopt biosecurity practices. S/he will work with the financial intermediary and programs to ensure and track repayment of loans and monitor specific impact parameters identified by the project.
The Person
We are seeking for a bachelor’s degree holder in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Agribusiness, Agricultural Economics, Rural Development, Enterprise Development, or other related disciplines with a minimum of five (5) years of experience in banking / lending / financial analysis required. Experience working with FPOs (farmer producer organizations) and associated businesses is highly desirable coupled with prior experience in access to finance the international development / INGO context a plus.
RESPONSIBILIIES AND DELIVERABLES:
Financing pipeline development and technical Assistance
- Assess and identify financing opportunities for small holder farmers to adopt improved backyard poultry practices (and improved animal management practices) through financing.
- Support farmer cooperatives and agribusinesses to develop bankable business plans (both at start-up and growth stages) and connect with focused financing instruments as needed.
- Prepare strategies to identify credible financing opportunities to promote adoption of project promoted practices and roll out plans and tract progress periodically
- Identify and recommend the best suited financing strategies, pricing system for the business ventures,
- Identify new businesses ventures (medium and large-scale business ventures) in the selected value chains and coach/facilitate entrepreneurs who may access provided financing to scale business.
- Provide technical assistance through formal/informal training, coaching, exposure, and other interventions,
- Guide, coach and facilitate the Smallholder Farmer Organizations (SFOs)/other Value Chain (VC) actors in the process of branding the products.
- Document strategies and procedures for facilitation of branding Heifer farmers’ products
Support in due diligence of the loanees and lenders / portfolio management
- Work with borrowers to put together an investment package that will meet the requirements of the lenders.
- Act as linkage between potential loanees, investees and lenders to ensure regular updates on status of loans requested.
- Portfolio management to assess the repayment status of the loaned-out amount.
- Contribute to the biosecurity loan product development process.
- Support the business development and private/public sector engagement strategy for the project.
- Ensure systematic documentation of successes and lessons learnt for internal programmatic use and external sharing.
- Develop project implementation plans for biosecurity loan products with clear timeline and deliverables.
- Timely delivery of milestones relating to Biosecurity loan products.
- Produce periodic reports and knowledge documents
Build capacity of the project staff, partners, and Farmer Producer Organizations (FPO)
- Contribute towards alignment of organizational and business development to build capacity of the stakeholders in financing.
- Assist to prepare capacity building plan of project staff, partners in the field on market system development, enterprise, and value chain development.
- Orient FPO staff on financing, follow-up the job-related functions to achieve the target
- Build capacity of the partner staff and FPO staff through facilitating training, coaching and other capacity building initiatives on financing of farmers, track repayment of loans, value addition at FPO through
- Ensure stakeholders’ have good orientation on financing needs and biosecurity problems to be solved through financing
- Facilitate trainings and other capacity building initiatives as per the Implementation Plan.
- Ensure FPO staff and implementing partners are trained on the biosecurity financing tools customized by the financial intermediary.
- Assist project partner to support FPOs and value chain players to engage and leverage financing to do so.
Monitoring, learning and reporting
- Ensure that the partner and financial intermediary meet the identified monitoring and evaluation requirements and deadlines
- Reviewing the adoption of financing tools at the project level with partner staff on monthly basis
- Documentation and sharing of the best practices in terms of financing / adoption of biosecurity practices in the project.
- Work in collaboration and consultation with Country Program Office (CPO) team
- Activity based reports to be submitted to Area Investment Manager as per the schedule
- All financing in the project to be to assess implication on adoption of project promoted practices.
- Review and reporting/ forecasting of financing needs at the project level on monthly basis
- Participate in all trainings with financial intermediary, FPOs and workshops Guarantee Administrator regularly throughout the project
- Facilitate internal and external financing related field visits following the organizational protocol
ESSENTIAL COMPETENCIES:
- Clear understanding of the dairy and poultry value chains.
- Innovative, analytical, and solutions oriented.
- Knowledge of enterprise development and linkages to poverty alleviation.
- Strong interpersonal/people management skills and excellent oral and written communication skills a must.
- Experience working with farmer group programs in agriculture value chain.
- Transferable skills from the commercial sector with ability to develop and evaluate investment opportunities and promote such opportunities to financial institutions.
- Strong consumer marketing, financial analysis, and stakeholder/ relationship management skills.
- Experience in supporting and monitoring field-based programs in the country.
- Ability to generate innovative solutions in work situations
QUALIFICATION AND SKILLS
- 5 years of experience in banking / lending / financial analysis geared towards supporting the agribusiness sector.
- Exposure working with FPOs (farmer producer organizations) and associated businesses
- Exposure to access to finance in the international development / INGO context
- Demonstrated project and donor reporting experience.
- Comfortable learning new technologies including project management systems
- Excellent influence skills, active listening, negotiation, and presentation skills
- Competence to build and effectively manage interpersonal relationships at all levels of the organization