Senior Program Officer – Compliance & Quality Assurance – YEFFA Program

Overview

Senior Program Officer – Compliance & Quality Assurance – YEFFA Program Jobs in Nairobi County, Kenya at AGRA

Title: Senior Program Officer – Compliance & Quality Assurance – YEFFA Program

Company: AGRA

Location: Nairobi County, Kenya

AGRA and its Work

AGRA is an African-led institution that actively supports the drive towards inclusive agricultural transformation and sustainable food systems. We do this by empowering the continent’s 33 million small-farming households to transform their agriculture from a struggle to survive to profitable businesses. The continent’s farmers regularly face challenges, and we aspire to provide uniquely African solutions that respond to their agricultural and environmental challenges, leading to increased harvests for reduced hunger and more income.

Working in alignment with the development priorities of our focus countries, we enable farmers to access improved and high-yielding seeds, gain knowledge on sustainable farming, and link to profitable markets.

In our work, we aspire to build the alliances, partnerships, and networks required to drive an inclusive agricultural transformation. We work with our partners to create an equitable youth-friendly environment that harnesses the youth dividend on the continent to drive growth and facilitate open employment opportunities for young women and men. We achieve our key objectives through a focus on the following five areas of intervention:

1. Policy and state capability – We support governments in creating an enabling environment for private sector involvement in agricultural transformation.
2. Seed systems – We trigger higher productivity by increasing the availability and access to improved seeds by farmers, allowing them to increase their harvests for food security and better incomes.
3. Sustainable farming – We support farmers in building resilient farming systems for sustained high yields through interventions such as mechanization and irrigation.
4. Inclusive markets trade and finance – We work to increase the linkages between farmers and other market actors for a positive, sustained cycle of commercialization and reinvestment.
5. Youth, Gender, and Inclusiveness – We enable women and youth to contribute to and benefit from agriculture for their economic empowerment.

The Position

The Senior Program Officer – Compliance & Quality Assurance, Youth Entrepreneurship for the Future of Food and Agriculture (YEFFA) will lead and manage AGRA’s and the YEFFA Program Management Unit's (PMU) internal compliance and quality assurance function, ensuring that all programmatic submissions to the Mastercard Foundation meet the highest standards of accuracy, completeness, and alignment with charitable purpose and private benefit requirements.

This role serves as the critical quality check point in the YEFFA program’s internal compliance and quality assurance function, acting as the first line of quality control to ensure all workplans, pre-approvals, budgets, and supporting documentation submitted to the Mastercard Foundation are accurate, complete, decision-ready, and aligned with charitable purpose and private benefit requirements. The role strengthens submission readiness by establishing review processes, conducting private benefit and risk analyses, coordinating inputs across country/HQ, finance, and grants teams, and building staff capacity through guidance and training. Success is measured through faster approvals, fewer donor legal queries, improved turnaround time, and consistently high-quality, compliant submissions.

Key Duties and Responsibilities

Program Compliance & Pre-Approval Management

• Lead internal compliance reviews of YEFFA country and continental pillar workplans, pre-approval concept notes, program budgets, and activity justifications.
• Ensure all submissions align with the Mastercard Foundation private benefit rules and charitable purpose requirements.
• Serve as the focal point for YEFFA pre-approval submissions and internal documentation.
• Maintain an updated tracker for pre-approvals.
• Support the YEFFA PMU in reporting program compliance wins and gaps to AGRA executive leadership and Foundation program teams.
• Train teams on YEFFA compliance requirements, documentation standards, and private benefit rules.
• Conduct compliance reviews and provide ongoing advisory support to country and HQ teams.

Quality Assurance of Program Deliverables

• Review submissions for logical coherence, clarity, and completeness, and confirm alignment with YEFFA objectives.
• Ensure that all documents are structured consistently and are ready for decision-making.
• Lead the YEFFA PMU and Technical teams to conduct private benefit & risk analysis/assessments for the program.
• Identify and flag compliance risks early and provide mitigation recommendations.
• Ensure documentation is defensible and ready for legal review.

Stakeholder Relations and Coordination

• Coordinate cross-departmental inputs to workplan reviews, ensuring compliance, strategic coherence, and alignment with YEFFA programmatic.
• Ensure that compliance communications uphold AGRA’s brand integrity and compliance standards.
• Interface with the Foundation legal and program teams, as well as AGRA Finance and Grants.
• Coordinate the resolution of compliance queries in a timely and well-documented manner with AGRA technical and country teams

Workplan Readiness & Submission Management

• Establish pre-submission review processes for YEFFA workplans and related program submissions.
• Coordinate with country, business lines, finance, and grants teams to consolidate inputs and address gaps before submission.
• Ensure submissions meet quality and compliance standards before engagement with the donor.
• Develop templates, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and checklists to strengthen compliance systems and processes.
• Support institutionalizing 100% compliance culture across the YEFFA program.

Qualifications and Experience Required

• Bachelor’s degree in business administration, Legal, Management, International Development, Project Management, Public Policy, or a related field.
• Minimum of 8 years’ experience in program coordination, strategy, compliance, or administration within international development organizations or donor-funded programs.
• Demonstrated experience in coordinating governance, strategy alignment, and compliance.
• Experience working with donor-funded institutions such as the Mastercard Foundation, World Bank, or bilateral agencies.
• Experience coordinating institutional accountability and operational compliance.
• Strong understanding of donor compliance and legal frameworks with exceptional attention to detail.
• Must possess strong writing and analytical skills.
• High proficiency in Microsoft Office tools (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and digital collaboration platforms (Teams, SharePoint).
• Demonstrate a strong understanding of program compliance structures, decision-making processes, and activity tracking.

If you believe you are a fit for this position, please submit your application with a detailed CV (including your email and telephone contact information) through LinkedIn or via email to [email protected]. Please quote the job reference number SPO/PMU/04/2026 on the subject line of the application email.

Due to the usual large volumes of applications, only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

For more information on AGRA, visit www.agra.org.

AGRA is an Equal Opportunity Employer.