Expertise France is seeking to recruit a part-time Liaison Officer for the AFD-funded “Solwara Na Graun Blo Pipol” project (SoNG) in Papua New Guinea (PNG), which means “Ocean and Land for the People” in melanesian language, tok pisin.

Expertise France is creating a country office in PNG, to be deployed in 2025. The country office will comprise a Project Support Unit (PSU) and the agency's Project Management Units (PMU) in Papua New Guinea. The part-time liaison officer will work in the PMU of the SoNG project in PNG, alongside the project manager, the deputy project manager responsible for biodiversity expertise, the long-term grants expert, the grants officer and a full-time liaison officer.

She/he will be responsible of ensuring good communication, coordination and alignment between the key project stakeholders on the ground - selected provincial authorities - so that their activities are synergetic, coordinated and complementary, both technically and operationally as part of an integrated vision for the project implementation.

Main tasks:

1. In liaising with the provinces:

-   to ensure the circulation of information at all governance levels, visiting provinces and communities to raise awareness of the importance of public conservation policies;

-          to provide a link between local initiatives, provincial and national authorities, fostering a vertical integration and multi-level governance of natural resources;

-          to support provincial authorities in organizing “Protected Area Roundtables” to inform them on how to strengthen sustainable value chains, and thus instigate actions for the sustainable management of natural resources;

-        to coordinate with the other liaison officer (full-time) to implement an integrated approach to the provinces coordination activities lead across the project.

2. Cross-cutting to the whole project:

-        to support the consistency of the activities engaged across two first components of the project, in coordination with the project manager;

-        to ensure the technical and operational articulation and complementarity of the project activities with those implemented by the EU-FCCB including in their geographical scope, working either with provinces that do not already benefit from its support, or hand in hand focusing on the same provinces and building on their complementarity;

-       to pay a particular attention to E&S risks, in order to be able to identify, prevent and manage them with the social and environmental expert’s support;

-          to suggest solutions based on its observations for consistent project implementation;

-          to ensure compliance of the activities driven by the project’s stakeholders with AFD's safeguard policies and current legislation in Papua New Guinea;

-          to make available all data and information from his observations required for the preparation of periodic reports on project implementation;

-          to represent Expertise France to the various project stakeholders.

The part-time Liaison Officer will be based in Port Moresby, with frequent trips through the provinces in order to meet the various stakeholders (provincial authorities, community representatives, etc.) and will report to the Project Manager. The inception phase will determine the provinces targeted by the project, where the part-time liaison officer will carry out her/his duties. She/he will work in functional liaison with Expertise France headquarters in Paris. She/he will work in close coordination with the agency's other projects in the country (EU-FCCB), and will ensure that the activities carried out are in synergy with the agency's other projects and initiatives.