About us:
KAYA is a Germany- and Angola-based organisation that came to life in 2023. It was started by purpose-driven professionals with different cultural backgrounds and with several years of experience in nature conservation, clean energy, and rural development. KAYA’s vision is to mitigate climate change by working with nature. In doing so, it also aspires to support the impacted communities and societies in accessing new livelihoods and becoming more resilient. KAYA’s mission is to develop multi-year landscape-scale conservation and restoration projects in terrestrial ecosystems. It will bring the developed projects upon maturity to the nature market for payments for their ecosystem services.
Your mission:
This is a techno-managerial role in the climate department at KAYA head office (alternatively in the Luanda office of KAYA Angola). The responsible colleague will be a critical link between the scientific staff in the head office and the colleagues in the offices in the countries where the landscape-scale conservation and restoration projects are being developed. The ecosystems in focus are forests, agricultural and grasslands. The work would involve ensuring the adherence of projects, through their lifecycle, to the regulations set forth by various certification standards. The Project Development Specialist will work closely with the Landscape Specialists, Earth Observation Specialist, and GHG Accounting Specialist. Periodic travel to project sites for monitoring and evaluation will be an integral part of this role.
Your responsibilities:
– Steer the feasibility assessments and baseline studies of forestry, agriculture and grassland projects by coordinating the activities of head office climate department and country offices
– Write project concepts and project idea notes based on the inputs gathered from the colleagues in the climate department
– Ensure adherence of project development and implementation to the selected scientific forestry, agriculture or grassland methodology
– Be the organisation’s focal point to Verified Carbon Standard, Gold Standard, BioCarbon Registry, Plan Vivo Standard and Ecosystem Restoration Standard, and track developments there
– Steer the certification standard-mandated public consultation process in the projects under development
– Support the Head of Operations in the planning and scheduling of project operations
– Steer the complete but mainly the certification standard-mandated documentation process through the life cycle of the project
– Coordinate the certification standard-mandated third-party validation and verification process in the projects under development
– Support Head of Climate and the Finance Office in building project financial plans