Audacious Project Director

Primary Responsibilities

Strategic and Project Results Leadership

• Provide project leadership for the Audacious investment, ensuring the strategic and organization-wide value to Ipas is maximized.
• Design, implement, and maintain Audacious governance structures, including project charters, decision‑rights, escalation pathways, and shared‑leadership practices that balance global stewardship with strong country ownership.
• Maintain a clear focus on driving Audacious project delivery and results, as a major contributor to organizational performance against the Ipas strategic plan.
• Establish and steward Audacious project management systems; working closely with Ipas teams to adapt and apply efficient and effective processes and documentation for delivery, monitoring, reporting, compliance and risk management.
• Work closely with the Business Development team to leverage the Audacious investment to secure additional funding.
• Strong collaboration with CSTO, TEX and MERLA teams to maintain alignment and leverage cross-learning for the network strategy and technical priorities.
• Lead and guide iterative redesign of projections, budgets, and implementation strategies as operational landscape, funding levels and donor requirements evolve.
• Build and positively manage excellent relationships across the Ipas Network and external sector.

Project Management, Risk Management and Safeguarding

• In consultation with the implementing countries, develop technically sound and operationally robust project workplan, develop scenario planning and trade-offs for the project.
• Ensure coherence across country strategies, workplans, budgets, logic models, results frameworks, and multiple funding scenarios in line with Ipas's strategic plan.
• Ensure each implementing country develops and maintains a contextualized Audacious logic model articulating intervention choices across all impact levers.
• Drive dynamic, results‑based management, integrating programmatic, financial, and evidence data to inform strategic decision‑making and adaptive course correction over time.
• Anticipate, mitigate and manage programmatic, financial, legal, political, and reputational risks and issues across country programs.
• Ensure timely access to high-quality progress, performance and compliance information for internal stakeholders across the organization, to support decision-making and accountability.
• Oversee preparation of donor-facing narrative and financial reports, and compliance documentation; ensuring accuracy and consistency.
• Ensure on time and quality assured completion of donor-specific deliverables tied to disbursement schedules.
• Champion safeguarding and ethical programming standards, including protection from sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA), and ensure consistent application across partners and implementing teams.

Financial Stewardship, Systems Integration & Value for Money

• Provide project-level financial stewardship, including multi‑year budget alignment, variance analysis, to support resource reallocation decisions linked to results.
• Oversee results‑based financial analysis, cost‑per‑outcome tracking, and value‑for‑money reporting.
• Ensure timely access to high-quality performance and compliance data for internal stakeholders to support decision-making, and mutual accountability.
• Support MERLA team in ensuring Audacious reporting credibly demonstrates efficiency, cost‑effectiveness, and strategic use of resources across service delivery, policy engagement, and movement‑building investments.

Evidence, Learning & Results Architecture

• Responsible for strong internal communication and knowledge management across the Audacious lifecycle.
• In partnership with Program Evidence (PE) team, ensure alignment of the Audacious Results Framework with long-term project outcomes and the organizational strategy, including abortion care quality measures, stigma measurement, CSO/CBO capacity assessments, feminist approaches and ecosystem evaluations.
• Collaborate with the TEX team to operationalize the results framework and achieve intended deliverables, including the learning agenda and systems-level evaluation plans
• Sponsor cross‑country and organization-wide functional learning agendas to test assumptions, surface evidence, replicate promising practices, and inform strategic adaptation.
• Contribute to the development of learning and communication materials.

Donor and External Relations

• Collaborate with the country and global (especially De