Summary

The Technical Specialist, School Feeding provides overall technical leadership for school feeding activities in program schools and communities, will be a national thought leader, and help strengthen the government’s school feeding system The TSSF represents the organisation in school feeding technical conferences and meetings and provides oversight for the planning, implementation, monitoring, innovation, and evaluation for school feeding-related activities. The TSSF will be responsible for developing clear implementation models and to standardize school operations enabling replication. The TSSF will develop digital procedure manuals, tools and training materials to equip schools, local government, and communities to manage and sustain school feeding.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Develops clear Digital Operations Manuals, tools and training for the Community-led school feeding Model
• Administers trainings on school feeding programs to diverse stakeholders including school administrators, teachers, communities, GPTAs and the local government to enable them replicate models.
• Attends national technical working groups and conferences on School Feeding
• Leads the process of schools, local government, and communities to identify bottlenecks to the sustainability of school feeding and collaboratively identifies solutions
• Liaises with other stakeholders including the GoT to roll out cost-effective and scalable models that enhance the quality of school feeding programs
• Develops and implements private sector engagement strategy to enable contributions for school feeding

Innovation & Program Quality

• Identifies opportunities to improve program approaches
• Explores new ways to use digital technology to reduce costs, increase scalability and make replication easier.
• Strengthens capacity of Dodoma and Mara region administrations and the ward education officers extension systems to implement School Feeding approaches and technologies.
• Develops and nurtures a system to monitor adherence to quality indicators for community-led school feeding model implementation.

Project Management

• Tracks and reports on the amount of food stored, cooked and served at schools.
• Oversees the development and monitoring of annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly work plans for the School Feeding sector.
• Supervises the implementation of an expanded extension system that involves Government education officers
• Ensures close coordination with MEL to ensure the appropriate data is being collected
• Develops and monitors the sector budget, ensuring spending is within the approved budget
• Proactively coordinates planning and implementation with the other technical sectors to ensure smooth and cost effectiveness implementation.
• Lead in preparing school-feeding related reports and success stories.

Technical Capacity Building:

• Participates in the recruitment and training of school feeding officers and community mobilizers
• Mentors, coaches and trains staff and partners to build their capacity
• Nurtures an enabling environment, linking annual performance objectives to key performance indicators

Representation

• Consistently develops high quality presentations and other materials. Reviews and approves presentations prior to dissemination
• Collaborates with sector leads to identify operations and technical services support required from the Headquarters (HQ), schedule and follow up with the HQ on provision of support needed.
• Supports DCoP in building and maintaining relationships with donors, local partners, local government officials in Dodoma Region and beyond.
• Coordinates donor and partner visits to activities and ensures close collaboration and relationship with Government of Tanzania and local partners.
• Represents the organisation in other external meetings, as assigned by the DCoP.

Monitoring and Evaluation

• Support MEL in developing MIS for School Feeding activities: collecting, cleaning and compilation, analysis and utilization.
• Develop systems to identify and report on program progress and quality of the activities
• Ensure the School Feeding team is fully competent in the data management system, focusing on u
• Lead the development of tools for indicators’ measurements against project objectives, outputs and activities as per the project design
• Monitor the established linkages between schools, communities and local government to monitor and nurture their sustainable engagement.
• Guide cluster-level staff for effective support during preparations and execution of school-specific Annual School Action plans (ASAPs) in collaboration with Commodities and School Feeding team
• Contributes to the preparations, reviews and dissemination of Pamoja Tuwalishe program results via documentaries, quarterly reports, semi-annual progress reports (SAPR) and success stories.

Education and Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Social Sciencies, Economics, Social Work, Gender Studies, Public Administration or related Field.

Requirements

• Minimum five (5) years of verifiable experience in all of the following:
  • Implementing School Feeding Activities in Tanzania
  • Developing manuals, tools and training materials
  • Designing and delivering training for staff and partners
  • Providing technical advice to field personnel to increase project performance impact.
• Excellent interpersonal, communication, problem solving and negotiation skills; project management skills; ability to work with a multidisciplinary team
• Knowledge of the areas of intervention as well as relevant government development priorities and policies
• Availability to travel 30-40% of the time
• In-depth experience in coordinating with government structures and representatives
• Experience in collaborating and doing business the private sector
• Preferred, completion of a Leadership program in the past 3 years.

Characteristics

• Ability to develop implementation models that can be replicated and scaled by using
• Ability to coordinate work across different programmatic areas
• Proven success as trainer
• Strong understanding of and commitment to expanding village savings and loan programs
• Good communication Skills and ability to speak, read and write in both English and Kiswahili.
• Proficient Microsoft skills including the use of Microsoft 365 suite of applications
• Expert planner and overseer of work for geographical disperse teams
• Demonstrates Adaptability to ever-changing scenarios and challenges
• A problem solver, teacher, mentor, and innovator.
• Availability to travel 30-40% of the time to project sites

Reporting To