The Civil Society Specialist will provide technical and scientific leadership in designing, implementing and evaluating the project’s civil society engagement and capacity building strategy of USAID Clean Air. The Civil Society Specialist will also work with USAID Clean Air implementing partners to identify key characteristics for a knowledge exchange portal among civil society organizations (CSO) and determine system specifications and primary outputs.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership in the design, development, execution and evaluation of a civil society engagement and capacity building strategy, ensuring the project’s activities use a systematic planning process that is evidence-based and reinforced through a coordinated, shared vision among partners, key stakeholders, and the Government of Nepal.
• Lead development and preparation of annual workplans and routine donor reporting for the civil society engagement and capacity building components of the project.
• Oversee coordination of community forums in year one to gain insight into community and CSO priorities, define shared objectives and develop and monitor shared action plans.
• Develop and implement an advocacy and accountability accelerator training and mentoring program, with a goal to help CSOs become more effective for holding local government officials accountable for reducing air pollution.
• Work with project stakeholders to develop CSO tools and implementation frameworks, including air quality impact checklists, standard operating procedures (SOP) for open and interactive public hearings/forums, and citizen report cards to provide feedback to government officials.
• Provide support to CSO network as required through one-on-one mentoring, on-demand technical assistance (TA), learning-by-doing activities, group trainings, and relationship building with local government.
• Work with the project’s monitoring and evaluation specialist to track whether program civil society engagement and capacity building activities are achieving the project’s indicators.
• Oversee development of civil society-led online knowledge sharing platform by program partners, with an emphasis on sharing cross-border knowledge across the region.
• Ensure that new knowledge and best practices in civil society engagement and capacity building for air pollution reduction are shared and contribute to the knowledge base through participation in local, regional and global partner and technical networks, scientific forums and other knowledge-sharing platforms.
• Oversee planning and implementation of other specific civil society activities, as needed.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in business administration, education, law, political science, public administration or another related field with three to five years of experience or a bachelor's degree with over five years of experience as mentioned above.
• Experience in management of and technical direction to civil society engagement and capacity building projects and/or programs, preferably in countering air pollution, climate change, environment or related development areas.
• Experience in training, mentoring, and providing technical assistance to local CSOs and local governments
• Ability to manage projects and consultants, and to set realistic priorities, and plan for the successful implementation of activities required.
• Flexibility and ability to adapt implementation based on data or information from monitoring of activities
• Proactive in managing multiple tasks, managing and working in virtual work environment, and flexible and open for managing time for working with different teams in different time zones as needed. 
• Excellent interpersonal, organizational, communication, team building and management, and problem-solving skills. 
• Excellent oral and written English and Nepali including documentation skills.