Chief Programs Officer

Follow us@ngobox

About the Organization

We aim to solve the problem of lack of aspiration, career awareness, job readiness skills, and opportunities for youth in the poorest districts of Bihar. Our current work focuses on:

• Mobilising, counseling, and connecting youth to upwardly mobile opportunities.
• Nurturing local youth leaders who create an enabling enviroment for change
• Running eArthshala, our rural R&D campus for sustainable development ideas

Job Description

Potential means that your birth should not determine where you end up in life; yet, in much of rural Bihar, birth is destiny; there are not only dangerous levels of poverty, but also virtually no social mobility, with the poorest going from small landholding peasant farmers in one generation to even poorer, more precarious mazdoors in the next generation. Your role is to design and oversee programs which can change this situation.

To do so, you will be responsible for:

• End-to-end program management, from strategy to proposals to overseeing operations and ensuring high quality monitoring, evaluation, and learning
• Aligning program designs with Project Potential’s vision and mission
• Building systems and processes to improve the functioning of program and project teams, and to align initiatives across teams

Job Responsibilities

Strategic prioritization and goal setting

• Work with program heads to set clear goals and prioritize sub-goals within programs
• Ensure all teammates within program teams are clear on those goals

Planning and risk mitigation

• Work with program heads to create clear plans to achieve goals
• Identify key risks and support teams to put in place mitigation strategies

Reportee management and development

• Hold regular 1-on-1s on a weekly, quarterly, and annual basis to set development goals
• Conduct performance management sessions with reportees

Partnerships

• Holding high level partner relationships
• Building team capacity to facilitate and hold high value programmatic partnerships

Cross team alignment and sharing

• Facilitate sessions across program teams for teammates to share best practices and identify possibilities for collaboration

Cross team systems and process building

• Identify best practices across team and move to build systems and processes which are replicable in programs

Support programmatic innovation

• Create criteria which help us identify which ideas to experiment with and pilot
• Ensure new innovations initiatives are shared across teams

Financial projections and fundraising

• Work with teammates leading programs to create financial projections and identify fundraising requirements
• Support in programmatic proposal creation and donor conversations where required

Programmatic Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning

• Support MEL lead to work across teams to put in place MEL plan
• Check-in with MEL lead to ensure teams are able to execute on plans and learn from programmatic data

Responsibilities as a part of the Leadership Team

Strategic Direction & Goal Setting

• Shape and align organizational priorities across long- and short-term horizons, ensuring programs and support functions move in sync.

Finance & Fundraising

• Contribute programmatic and functional inputs into financial projections, budgeting, and donor conversations.

Communications & Learning

• Ensure programs and functions feed into strong communications, learning, and evaluation systems to improve impact and visibility.

Leadership & Talent

• Support recruitment, development, and retention of senior leadership teammates; serve as a role model and mentor across the organization.

Policy & Culture

• Raise and help craft policies that strengthen teammate development, equity, safety, and organizational culture; model high ethical standards.

Education Qualification/Required Skills & Experience

• A seasoned leader of programs with 10–12 years of experience in program design, management, and evaluation, with at least 3 years experience in rural contexts. Deeply aligned with the values of dignity, equity, curiosity, and service.
• A strong strategist and operator, able to design big-picture program frameworks while ensuring high-quality on-ground execution and learning.
• Experience in grassroots organizations, social enterprises, or startups where resourcefulness, innovation, and alignment across teams are critical. Comfortable navigating ambiguity, scale, and diverse stakeholder perspectives.
• Familiarity with monitoring and evaluation frameworks, fundraising processes, and digital tools for program and project management (e.g., Asana, Google Workspace).
• Formal education in development studies, management, public policy, or related fields (optional).

For more information please check the Link

Tags Jobs in Bihar Jobs in Kishanganj Jobs in Finance