The Chief Impact Officer (CIO) drives Plan International’s global efforts by strengthening programming quality, country office capability, and portfolio performance to deliver measurable, credible, and transformative impact for children and girls across humanitarian, development, and sponsorship work. This role ensures that our work is grounded in evidence, responsive to global shifts, and strategically connected to advocacy, communications, and partnerships.
The CIO sets the organisation’s global impact agenda, providing strategic leadership across humanitarian response, global campaigns, performance and learning, and country portfolio management. This role ensures coherence between global strategy and local delivery by integrating humanitarian, development, sponsorship, and influencing work. Through this alignment, the organization delivers measurable results for girls and children, guided by evidence and learning.
The CIO works alongside the CEO and Regional Directors to strengthen strategic coherence and accountability across global, regional, and country-level delivery and impact. This partnership focuses on empowering country offices by simplifying systems and reducing operational complexity, enabling faster, locally led humanitarian responses. The CIO also coordinates performance reporting across the global portfolio to support learning, accountability, and informed decision-making.
Key Accountabilities and Main Responsibilities
- Ensure strategic coherence and accountability across global, regional, and country-level delivery and impact, and strengthening capabilities of country offices to be future fit, through co-management of the Regional Directors and in collaboration with the CEO.
- Lead global portfolio to deliver measurable, credible, and transformative impact across humanitarian, development, and sponsorship portfolios.
- Drive agile and effective humanitarian preparedness response at the regional and global level, simplifying systems to reduce operational complexity and ensuring risk-informed, context-aware programming.
- Oversee global performance and impact reporting, ensuring evidence informs advocacy, learning, communications, and decision-making.
- Ensure that Plan’s work is grounded in evidence, responsive to global shifts, and strategically connected to advocacy, influencing, communications, and partnerships.
- Anticipate sector shifts and mobilise internal and external knowledge networks to drive innovation, learning, grow the humanitarian portfolio, and enable organisational agility in a rapidly changing context.
- Connect thematic programmes and monitoring and evaluation expertise across Plan Worldwide to ensure Country Offices benefit from practical, evidence-based guidance that drives real-world impact.
- Strengthen global positioning and influence through evidence-based external engagement and strategic partnerships.
- Enable Plan’s work on influencing, advocacy, communications, and brand strategy, ensuring alignment with programme evidence and strategic priorities.
- Represent Plan International externally in multilateral fora, global coalitions, and strategic partnerships to amplify the organisation’s voice, influence and impact.
- Take a strong people and culture focus towards wider strategic resourcing and talent pipelines (i.e. attract high calibre, develop, progress and retain a diversified and global workforce – promoting equity, diversity and inclusion; focus on identification of high performers and talent and developing clear succession plans for key roles at the global, regional and country levels) and ensuring that staff at all levels feel empowered and supported to deliver at their best, and feel pride in the work that they deliver.
- Lead in driving positive and high-performance culture change across the organisation, consciously embracing and personifying the values-based leadership framework underpinned by feminist principles, holding self and others accountable for behaviours, drawing on strengths and reflecting on areas of self-development. Be intentionally aware of the impact and power, purposeful and visible about changing the organisational culture and our internal power dynamics and empower teams to live and participate in the culture as a group.
- Ensures that Plan International’s global policies for Safeguarding Children and Young People and Gender Equality and Inclusion are fully embedded in accordance with the principles and requirements of the policy including relevant Implementation Standards and Guidelines as applicable to their area of responsibility. This includes, but is not limited to, ensuring staff and associates are aware of and understand their responsibilities under these policies and Plan International’s Code of Conduct (CoC), their relevance to their area of work, and that concerns are reported and managed in accordance with the appropriate procedures.
Key Relationships
Internal:
- CEO and PII’s Leadership Team
- Direct Reports
- External partners and stakeholders
- Country, Regional and National Directors
- PII Board, Programme Committee and other sub committees as required
External:
- UN agencies, multilateral institutions, donors, INGOs, and global advocacy coalitions (in collaboration with the Director of Global Affairs)
Competencies, Expertise, Skills, and Knowledge
- Qualifications: BA/BSc/HND qualification.
- Expertise, Knowledge, and Skills:
- Senior leadership experience at an enterprise level in international development and/or humanitarian response.
- Proven ability to drive strategic alignment, performance management, and evidence-based impact.
- Proven ability to lead global impact strategies across humanitarian and development ensuring coherence from global to local levels.
- Strong understanding of risk-informed, context-aware programming and agile humanitarian preparedness and response.
- Experience in impact measurement, MERL systems, and using evidence to inform advocacy, learning, and decision-making.
- Skilled in external representation, global advocacy, and building strategic partnerships with multilateral institutions, donors, and INGOs.
- Track record in driving culture change, embedding feminist leadership principles, and developing diverse global talent pipelines.
- Ability to anticipate sector trends, mobilize knowledge networks, and scale successful local innovations globally.
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