Project Officer

Position Overview:

Trickle Up has been enabling extremely poor people to build resilient livelihoods and emerge from the cycle of poverty adopting graduation approach. We target those who are most socioeconomically excluded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas- women, youth, people with disabilities, indigenous people, refugees, and other vulnerable groups who live beyond the reach of most social services and development programs. We drive large-scale change for these populations by partnering with governments, global institutions, and local organizations. In FY19, we reached 170,000 people across 19 countries. We have been registered and operating in India since 2005; our current footprint is focused on Jharkhand and Odisha States, where we reached 129,000 people in FY19. Reporting to the CEO, the Project Officer leads Trickle Up's efforts within a priority state to scale Trickle Up's evidence-based approach to graduating people out of ultra-poverty and contribute to Trickle Up's continuous programme innovation efforts. We are seeking a highly motivated development professional with significant expertise in livelihood development for vulnerable populations, government partnerships, and training and managing partners.

This is an excellent opportunity for the right individual, who is energetic, motivated and desires to expand his/ her skills and expertise in Program Management in the NGO sector working with the poorest of the poor. Trickle Up provides professional growth opportunities for qualified professionals who are seeking to develop and broaden their technical and management skills and who will be working with a highly dynamic, fast-paced and energetic team.

Principal functions

Program Implementation:

• Lead implementation of programs in the slums of Kolkata to scale Trickle Up's approach to graduating vulnerable populations out of ultra-poverty.
• Manage the successful execution of a multi-stakeholder projects in compliance with requirements, regulations, and good practices.
• Provide handholding support to women slum dwellers to come up with individual and group micro businesses.
• Ensure market linkage for the individual and group businesses.
• Contribute to the development of monitoring and evaluation systems.
• Regularly communicate program progress, results, and lessons learned to colleagues, partner organizations, and donors to support organizational learning and external representation.
• Convergence with government departments to facilitate working of the women enterprise and its sustainability.

Partnerships for quality programming:

• Explore possibilities of partnership with skill training institutions for skill building of women slum dwellers.
• Build the visibility of Trickle Up and identify new opportunities for partnership through representation in technical forums, working groups, and other forums.
• The program officer shall also be accountable for the IEC and Communication plan compliance for individual donors and Trickle Up in the intervention areas.
• Advise key stakeholders on good practices for graduating people out of ultra-poverty.
• Support the work of Trickle Up's alliance of grassroots partner organizations through training and ongoing coaching to build the capacity of partner employees to plan, manage, execute, and learn from programs.

Program Innovation:

• Contribute to the design of innovative, evidence-based programs that enable people to graduate out of ultra-poverty and contribute to the sector's knowledge base.
• Contribute to the development of research objectives and partnerships to produce rigorous, actionable research for Trickle Up and strategic partners.
• Utilize monitoring and evaluation data and lessons learned to inform adaptive management of programs.

Training and Capacity Building:

• Develop training modules and implement and lead the capacity-building of individual and group entrepreneurs.
• Build coaching models across programs and monitor the progress of project participants based on the coaching provided on all aspect including skills building.
• Support development of training and knowledge tools for improvising coaching in the intervention community with focus on areas of WaSH, functional literacy and other indicators followed by Trickle Up for well being of life.
• Building capacity of participants on mobile technology integration, accessing government schemes, and market information.

Market Assessment & Value Chain Analysis

• Organise and manage the market assessment & value chain analysis conducted by third party and providing necessary information to the consultant.
• Coordination & Communication between Trickle Up team and consultant in order to conduct the assessment and analysis.
• Organise meeting with SMT of Trickle Up to update the progress of the same.
• Implementation of recommendation provided by the consultant and accordingly identify the skills set needs to be developed by participants.

Budget Management

• Ensure effective and timely monitoring and appropriate expenditure of project budget.
• Ensure budgets cover costs, including M&E, admin, overhead, and communications.
• Ensure Budget is managed appropriately. Expenses are coded and spent on time and correctly.

Staff Management

• Ensure that all direct reports have clear roles and responsibilities and are held accountable for delivering results.
• Ensure direct reports have support and tools they need to effectively do their jobs well.
• Recruit, train and support staff.

M&E Management

• In coordination with the MERL Lead, ensure that projects properly collect and analyze data in a timely manner.

Reporting, donor compliance and Learning initiatives:

• The Project officer shall be the first node of data management and reporting as per the agreed Monitoring & Evaluation timeline of the program.
• The Project officer shall be responsible to support the rolling out of the learning initiatives agreed in the program and also provide feedback on the system at regular interval of time as agreed in the M & E timeline for the program.

Qualifications

Academic:

• Post-graduation or equivalent in Social Work/Sociology/Rural Development

Working Experience:

• Demonstrated 7 years Program Management experience at field level working with field-based staff to ensure timely and quality program facilitation for international NGO;
• Overall experience managing livelihood (Women lead micro enterprises) and/or gender focused programs working in partnership with local NGOs and/or CBOs.
• Experience working in partnership with government and state/national level entities (e.g. NRLM)
• Proven experience of handling projects involving linkages with market, industries, NGOs, National/State/ local organizations and government;

Others:

• Deep commitment to Trickle Up's core values and ability to model those values in relationships with colleagues and partners.
• Prior experience working in teams in a leadership role.
• Prior experience working in Odisha
• Experience with training highly desirable.
• Ability to travel frequently within the country.
• Ability to prioritize, organize and carry out multiple tasks efficiently under pressure and with little supervision; ability to accept supervision.

Knowledge and skills

• Strong writing and verbal skills in English, Bengali and exemplary communication skills.
• Skills in data analysis (quantitative and qualitative), and ensuring data quality, integrity and efficiency of collection.
• Skills in designing and implementing monitoring and evaluation systems, and distilling findings and learning for a range of audiences.
• Knowledge of digital approaches of program monitoring and evaluation.

Behavioral competencies

• Strong attention to detail
• Able to prioritize, manage multiple tasks, and consistently meet deadlines
• Works well both independently and as a member of a team
• Optimistic, creative, and solutions-oriented; tackles challenges with maturity and accountability
• Superb people skills and diplomatic demeanor
• Understands the challenges and opportunities of working in a small nonprofit setting
• Demonstrated commitment to mission-driven work

TRAVEL Requirements

Must be able to travel domestically at least 50% of the time to remote areas, at short notice.

Salary and Benefits:

• Commensurate with qualifications and experience

To Apply:

• To be considered, all candidates must fulfill the above prerequisites, provide a complete CV, covering letter referencing the required functions, skills and experience, and a writing sample, preferably a sole authored piece related to research or evaluation. Incomplete application will not be accepted.

Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until 31st Oct 2026. We are sorry that we are unable to entertain phone calls related to this posting. Trickle Up India Foundation is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value a diverse workforce and extend equal opportunity to all applicants and employees regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran status, disability, or any other status protected by law.