Chief Program Officer

Job Description

Location: Nairobi, Kenya

Reports to: Chief Executive Officer

About SHOFCO

SHOFCO was born in 2004 in Kibera when Kennedy Odede, who grew up in the community, saved 20 cents from factory wages to buy a soccer ball. After the games, neighbors gathered to talk about what they were living through. From those conversations, a movement grew.

Twenty years later, SHOFCO reaches 2.5 million people across 40 of Kenya’s 47 counties. It runs the largest network of community social groups in the country, the SHOFCO Urban Network (SUN), with more than 2 million members. It is the largest non-government provider of girls’ scholarships in Kenya. It operates the first aerial water piping system ever built in an informal settlement, serving 37,500 people daily. And it is on track to become the first licensed water company ever to serve an informal settlement in Kenyan history.

SHOFCO has won the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, the world’s largest humanitarian award. Kennedy Odede was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2024 and received the United Nations Nelson Mandela Prize in 2025. These recognitions reflect two decades of evidence that community-led change, done with rigor and at scale, works.

The Moment You’re Joining

SHOFCO is in the middle of its most ambitious expansion to date. Two flagship programs, each backed by $60 million in long-term investment, are running simultaneously. The Integrated Investment in Vulnerable Children (IIVC), supported by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, is targeting 181,000 children in education, the management of 100,000 GBV cases, and clean water access for 100,000 new users across 15 high-need counties. Youth Voice and Empowerment (YVE), supported by the Mastercard Foundation, is engaging 2.1 million young people in civic life and aims to place close to a million of them in dignified work by the end of its five-year term.

At the same time, SUN is scaling across every county in Kenya, building toward a national civic organizing platform that currently gives 2.5 million community members the organized power to hold government accountable, shape county budgets, and win on the issues that matter most to their lives. In 2025 alone, SUN-led advocacy was instrumental in the removal of a KES 1,000 fee on lost National IDs and bringing youth mental health into Kenya’s Universal Health Coverage framework.

The CPO is the executive who makes all of this real. This is not a strategy role, a fundraising role, or an externally-facing one. SHOFCO’s CEO and Advancement team carry the funder relationships and external positioning. The CPO carries delivery: building and running the operational machinery that turns community power into measurable change at scale.

This is a role for someone who is as comfortable sitting with a program director to interrogate a lagging indicator as they are reading a quarterly MEL report or navigating a WASH licensing process with the county water authority. The CPO’s credibility comes from deep technical competence in program delivery, financial management, and evidence systems, not from speaking at conferences or writing thought pieces.

You will be the executive most responsible and accountable for whether SHOFCO meets its multi-year commitments to:

• 181,000+ children kept in school
• Hundreds of thousands of children protected from violence
• Clean, affordable water for 100,000 households
• Close to 1 million young people placed in dignified work
• A national civic network that shapes how Kenya is governed

The Portfolio You Will Lead

SHOFCO’s programs are integrated by design. A girl stays in school because she also has access to clean water, a safe home environment, and a mother with enough economic stability to keep her enrolled. The CPO is accountable for the quality, delivery, and continuous improvement of all five program areas.

SHOFCO Urban Network (SUN)

SUN is not a program in the traditional sense. It is SHOFCO’s theory of change manifested. With more than 2.5 million members across 40 counties, SUN organizes communities to set their own agendas, elect their own leadership, and collectively demand accountability from government at every level.

In 2025, SUN held 41,000 youth forums reaching 1.2 million young people. Advocacy coordinated through SUN removed the KES 1,000 National ID fee, a policy win that directly benefited millions. A Youth Agenda presented to the Council of Governors brought mental health into Kenya’s Universal Health Coverage framework. Twenty-nine county governments incorporated community priorities into their development plans.

The CPO’s mandate for SUN is not just scale. It is power: ensuring that the 2.5+ million organized members translate into a coordinated civic force that shapes how Kenya is governed at community, county, and national levels.

Education

SHOFCO is the largest non-government scholarship provider in Kenya. The Education program currently supports 181,000+ students, with specific focus on preventing poverty-driven dropout for the most vulnerable girls. The program delivers scholarships and bursaries, menstrual hygiene products, uniforms, and scholastic materials that remove the everyday barriers pushing girls out, teacher capacity-building, and STEM and ICT lab upgrades in public schools.

Delivery in partnership with the Ministry of Education at national, county, and sub-county levels means that SHOFCO’s education work builds government capacity, not parallel systems. 97% of students in SHOFCO-supported schools met or exceeded KPSEA national expectations. Teen mothers supported through the program ran at nearly double the year-one target.SHOFCO also runs two girls leadership academies in Kibera and Mathare.

Gender Equality and GBV Protection

This program is a movement to end gender-based violence in Kenya’s informal settlements, not just respond to it. In 2025, the team managed 26,749 GBV cases with full psychosocial and legal support. More than 28,630 adolescent girls participated in ROC (Rights of Children) clubs. Legal aid partnerships are fast-tracking defilement cases for prosecution through the courts.

1,553 gender champions and male allies are now embedded within SUN governance structures, reaching 100,000+ people through community-led prevention. This shift from NGO-delivered response toward community-owned prevention is one of the most important strategic movements in the program, and one the CPO will be responsible for deepening and sustaining.

WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene)

SHOFCO pioneered the aerial water piping system in Kibera in 2016, delivering clean water at 60% below the cost charged by private vendors. Today, the system serves 37,500 people daily. The program includes water kiosks and ATMs, solarized treatment plants, gender-segregated school latrines, community sanitation blocks, and behavior-change programming in 64+ schools.

Research by the African Population and Health Research Center documented a 31% reduction in waterborne illnesses among children under five in communities served by SHOFCO water infrastructure. The next milestone is historic: SHOFCO is in the process of becoming the first licensed water company serving an informal settlement in Kenya, a step that would extend safe, affordable water to 100,000 households. This licensing process requires active navigation of regulatory and policy pathways with national and county water authorities.

Health and Wellbeing

SHOFCO’s health program reached 470,105 household members in 2025. Its clinics in Kibera and Mathare have achieved a 0% mother-to-child HIV transmission rate, against a national average of 15%. When multiple nearby clinics closed following the USAID funding drawdown, SHOFCO’s facilities absorbed a 70% surge in demand without interrupting services, demonstrating the value of community-rooted health infrastructure that is not dependent on international funding cycles.

Health is delivered as part of a whole-family model, integrated with WASH, gender programming, and education so that the underlying determinants of poor health are addressed alongside clinical services. Mental health, through peer networks and trained community ambassadors (12,000 trained to date), is embedded throughout.

Key Responsibilities

Program Strategy and Delivery

• Lead the strategy and implementation of all programs across all geographies, ensuring consistency, quality, and alignment with SHOFCO’s organizational priorities
• Own delivery against SHOFCO’s multi-year commitments across IIVC, YVE, and all program areas, ensuring that reported results are accurate and that targets are met or exceeded
• Work alongside the COO to identify and resolve delivery bottlenecks, risks, and operational challenges in real time
• Ensure ethical, accountable, and community-centered delivery across all sites, with safeguarding embedded in every intervention
• Scale the SUN organizing platform into new counties and communities while protecting the depth of trust and member ownership that makes it effective
• Convert community scale into influence: ensure SUN’s 2 million members translate into a coordinated, credible advocacy force shaping policy, budgets, and service delivery at county and national level
• Build SHOFCO’s policy and government-engagement capability so that programmatic evidence feeds directly into advocacy positions, with organized communities driving the conversation

Program Quality and Impact

• Establish and lead a culture of continuous improvement across all program areas
• Define and own clear performance metrics and outcomes for every program, tied directly to multi-year funder commitments and SHOFCO’s strategic targets
• Use SHOFCO’s MEL infrastructure (approximately 20,000 interviews per quarter, 15 large-scale surveys annually, research partnerships with Oxford, Busara, KEMRI, IDInsight, and others) to improve delivery approaches, not just report on them
• Lead regular performance reviews to assess progress, identify gaps, and drive concrete improvements
• Ensure that reported results meet the standards for accuracy and credibility that major funders including CIFF and the Mastercard Foundation require

Team Leadership and Management

• Lead and develop a high-performing team of program directors across Education, Gender, WASH, Health, and SUN
• Build strong leadership capacity within program teams, with clear accountability and ownership at every level of the organization
• Oversee recruitment, onboarding, and retention across a large, multi-site program workforce spanning 40 counties
• Foster a culture of ownership, execution, and learning across all teams
• Create clear structures for communication, decision-making, and escalation across geographies

Financial Management and Program Sustainability

• Oversee program budgets across a portfolio that currently includes two $60M flagship programs, in close partnership with Finance
• Ensure strong financial discipline, identifying variance early and managing resources efficiently across all geographies
• Provide accurate and timely reporting on program performance and financial status to funders, the board, and senior leadership
• Ensure programs are delivered in a financially sustainable and operationally efficient manner

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning

• Own SHOFCO’s MEL function, setting the standard for data quality, evidence generation, and accountability that a movement serving 2.5 million people requires
• Ensure robust systems for data collection, verification, and analysis, including baselines, results frameworks, data verification plans, and integrated reporting dashboards, so that reported results are accurate and defensible
• Translate data into insights that change how programs are designed and delivered, not only how they are reported to funders
• Strengthen systems for capturing and sharing learning across teams and geographies
• Ensure program outcomes are clearly documented and communicated to funders, partners, and government counterparts

Integration and Coordination

• Deepen coordination across program areas so that the person receiving services experiences SHOFCO as one integrated offer, not five separate programs
• Ensure alignment between program teams, operations, and other internal functions
• Support integrated, community-centered delivery approaches that treat the household, not the intervention, as the unit of change

Government Partnership and Funder Reporting

• Maintain strong working relationships with the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, county water authorities, and other government counterparts whose systems SHOFCO programs operate within or alongside
• Provide the Advancement team with accurate, timely, and complete program data and evidence to support funder reporting and donor communications; the CPO is the source of the evidence, not the lead on its external presentation

The Person We’re Looking For

• SHOFCO is looking for a deeply technical program strategist/operator who has built their career running complex, multi-sector delivery at scale in Kenya. This is a role defined by execution, financial discipline, and evidence rigour. Candidates whose primary strength is fundraising, external relations, or advocacy are unlikely to be the right fit.
• Minimum 10 years of senior experience in program management and delivery in East Africa, with a demonstrated track record managing complex, multi-sector programs at scale across multiple geographies; previous C-suite or equivalent senior leadership experience preferred
• Proven ability to manage large program budgets across multiple funders and reporting frameworks; hands-on experience overseeing budgets of comparable scale to IIVC and YVE (each approximately $60M) is a strong advantage
• Technically proficient in monitoring, evaluation, and learning: experience designing and running rigorous MEL systems, including results frameworks, data verification plans, baselines, and reporting dashboards; must be comfortable interrogating data directly, not just receiving summaries
• Proven track record managing large, geographically dispersed teams with clear outcomes, accountability structures, and strong retention
• Deep knowledge of Kenya’s government structures from national level through county and sub-county, and the ability to build operational partnerships with Ministry counterparts in Education, Health, and Water that support SHOFCO program delivery
• Experience working directly in Kenya’s informal settlements or underserved rural communities; this is not a preference but a near-requirement for someone who will be accountable for programs running at community level across 40 counties
• Experience in community organizing, civic mobilization, or community-led service delivery is strongly preferred, given that SUN is both SHOFCO’s largest program and its theory of change
• Genuine alignment with SHOFCO’s values of community-led change, accountability, and the belief that communities already hold the power to change their circumstances, and need the right systems to act on it

How to apply

All interested applicants should send their CV and detailed cover letter to recruitment@shofco.org with the job position “Chief Program Officer” in the subject line. Applications due by June 20, 2026.

SHOFCO Recruitment and Hiring Notes:

Please note that SHOFCO does not charge any fee in the recruitment process, as the entire hiring process is free and fair.

SHOFCO is committed to upholding Gender Equality, Diversity and Social inclusion, and seeks to reflect the communities that we serve. Additionally, SHOFCO seeks safety for the people that we serve,and employment with SHOFCO is conditional upon successful background and reference checks and other verification as needed. SHOFCO has a zero-tolerance policy on gross misconduct, including sexual exploitation, harassment, and abuse.

SHOFCO will request a certificate of good conduct and information from job applicant’s previous employers about any findings of sexual misconduct, fraud, or abuse. By submitting an application to SHOFCO, the applicant confirms her/his/their understanding of these recruitment procedures.