Save the Children UK has an opportunity for a Portfolio Manager to manage our West and Central Africa (WCA) portfolio within the Global Impact group from January 2026 for 12 months. In this pivotal role, you'll oversee a diverse range of programmes and partnerships across the region, ensuring they are well-managed, strategically aligned, and delivering lasting impact for children and communities.

Working closely with Country Offices, donors, and internal colleagues, you'll manage risk, drive performance, and capture learning that shapes future portfolio opportunities. Success in this role will require strong portfolio management expertise, excellent relationship-building skills, and fluency in both English and French to engage effectively across the region. Above all, you'll bring a commitment to ensuring children everywhere can survive, learn and thrive.

Please Note: Even if this fixed-term WCA role isn't quite the right fit, we welcome you to submit your CV to be considered for other upcoming Portfolio Manager opportunities across Save the Children UK, including positions overseeing Portfolio's in regions such as the Middle East or East Africa that do not require French.

About Us

Save the Children UK believes every child deserves a future. In the UK and around the world, we work every day to give children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm. When crisis strikes, and children are most vulnerable, we are always among the first to respond and the last to leave. We ensure children's unique needs are met and their voices are heard. We deliver lasting results for millions of children, including those hardest to reach.

About the Team

The Portfolio & Risk Team manages the SCUK International Restricted Portfolio, supporting Country Offices and local partners in achieving strategic goals. They collaborate closely with Country Offices and other members, offering expertise in programme management, donor compliance, and risk management. Their responsibilities include ensuring compliance, quality assurance, and addressing sensitive issues such as fraud, safeguarding, and safety/security concerns. The team also ensures that learning from the portfolio informs future partnership and portfolio opportunities.

Key Accountabilities

The Portfolio Manager for West and Central Africa (WCA) is responsible for overseeing the successful implementation of Save the Children UK's portfolio across multiple Country Offices in the region. This includes providing direct management support to Country Offices, ensuring compliance with donor requirements, and supporting the effective delivery of programmes and partnerships. Working with a high degree of autonomy, the postholder will lead on managing risks, issues and challenges specific to the WCA portfolio and escalate as necessary to senior colleagues.

The role works closely with the Senior Portfolio Manager for WCA and the Regional Portfolio Lead to ensure regional priorities are supported and delivered. This includes contributing to the effective development and implementation of regional and strategic partnerships, identifying and addressing systemic risks and issues across WCA, and capturing lessons learned to inform future portfolio development opportunities. The Portfolio Manager will also collaborate with colleagues across Partnership Engagement and Portfolio Development to strengthen new partnership opportunities in the region.

In this role, you will:

• Manage the delivery of Save the Children UK's (SCUK) portfolio by overseeing grant and contract management, ensuring compliance with donor requirements, and supporting Country Offices (COs) in achieving program deliverables and managing risks and issues.
• Provide oversight of risk management and portfolio performance, making informed decisions on issues, ensuring key performance indicators are met, and escalating concerns when required.
• Support portfolio development efforts, identifying new funding opportunities with COs, and maintaining up-to-date award and information systems.
• Monitor portfolio performance across designated regions, or other regions when resourcing help is requested, evaluating progress, ensuring adherence to SCUK policies, and ensuring compliance with donor and partner requirements, making adjustments where necessary to ensure success and sustainability.
• Develop and maintain strong relationships with key staff in Country Offices, offering operational support as needed to ensure quality programming and donor compliance.
• Work to ensure Country Office priorities drive SCUK support for programming, while fostering collaboration across relevant SCUK teams.
• Oversee relevant research projects, ensuring compliance with donor requirements and quality standards, and managing associated risks. Ensure quality assurance processes are completed for research projects, resulting in the right product for the right audiences and adherence to research ethics. Explore solutions for efficient management and synthesis of evidence and learning from SCUK-supported and external research to feed into future partnerships and portfolio design.
• Ensure continuous improvement by facilitating the sharing of lessons learned, best practices, and success stories to inform future portfolio and partnership development efforts and capture knowledge management across the SCUK portfolio.
• Support in identifying new funding opportunities, as follow on from existing awards and/or as part of the day-to-day interaction with donors and that this will be included in the central pipeline management. As directed by the Head of Portfolio Development, this role may be asked to support on proposal development as necessary.

• About You

We are looking for someone with the following experience, competencies and skills:

• Project and Portfolio Management: Experience in managing portfolios across multiple Country Offices, with knowledge of donor compliance requirements and the proven experience of ensuring a portfolio of work is delivered on time, within scope, and in alignment with donor requirements and agreed outcomes.
• Risk Management and Mitigation: Proficiency in identifying, assessing, and addressing risks at both the portfolio and project levels, ensuring that strategies are in place to minimise or resolve potential issues.
• Stakeholder and Donor Relationship Management: Strong ability to develop and manage successful relationships with donors, strategic partners, and Country Offices, ensuring effective communication and alignment with organisational priorities.
• Monitoring, Evaluation, and Reporting: Skilled in overseeing the collection and analysis of data for portfolio performance, as well as financial management and ensuring effective monitoring and reporting to internal and external stakeholders.
• Knowledge Sharing: Ability to facilitate the sharing of best practices and lessons learned to enhance future portfolio management and development opportunities.
• Management Skills: Ability to manage a diverse portfolio, to ensure the portfolio's success across various regions and partnerships.
• Communication and Relationship Management: Proven ability to work effectively in a team and build strong relationships with colleagues from different organisations, functions, and cultures. This includes excellent communication skills for engaging with multiple stakeholders, including Country Offices, donors, and internal teams, ensuring clear and effective dissemination of information and fostering collaboration.
• Problem-Solving and Analytical Skills: Good attention to detail with the ability to identify risks, assess potential issues, and develop solutions that support successful portfolio delivery and overcome challenges across different contexts.
• Technical Expertise: A good understanding of program management, international development, and donor relations.
• Language Skills: Fluency in French (essential) and English.

Please note: To avoid disappointment, you are advised to submit your application as soon as possible as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if a high volume of applications are received. This is to ensure that we can manage application levels whilst maintaining a positive candidate experience. Unfortunately once a vacancy has closed, we are unable to consider further applications.

Location & Ways of Working:

The majority of our roles can be performed remotely in the UK, but at times you will be required to come to your contracted office (usually between 2–4 days per month, depending on the needs of your role, team, or service). For many roles, this is likely to be the minimum required to deliver impact.

This will be discussed and agreed with your manager / team and we encourage candidates to discuss our ways of working in more detail at interview stage.

Please note: travel costs to your contracted office will be at your own expense. 

Flexible Working - We are happy to discuss flexible working options at interview.

Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: 

Save the Children UK believes in a world that is fair, inclusive and equitable where all children have the opportunity to change their world. We apply this to our workforce and we are committed to developing and supporting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisation where all employees have a sense of belonging and feel that they can be "Free to Be Me". We are not looking for just one type of person - we want to recruit people who can add fresh perspectives, innovative ideas or challenge that disrupts the risk of group think. 

We are especially interested in people whose childhood experiences - of life on a low income, of migration, of being in a racialised community, of the care system, of being LGBT+ or in an LGBT+ family or living with (or with someone with) a disability - help us to see things we might otherwise miss. Whatever your story is we want to hear it because we know that different voices, ideas, perspectives and knowledge, working together will enable us to better the lives of children around the world. This is the reason why we are all here. 

To see our full statement please visit this link: https://jobs.savethechildren.org.uk/our-policies/diversity/

Salary Structure: 

Save the Children is committed to paying staff in a fair and equitable way and will benchmark all salary offers in line with the pay of existing staff. To see our full offer please visit this link: Save the Children | Careers

Interview Expenses: 

Candidates should note that unfortunately it is not our policy to reimburse expenses accrued when attending interviews at Save the Children UK unless you are requested to attend an interview in an alternative location to where the role is based.

Pre-employment Checks:

Any Employment with Save the Children UK will be subject to the following checks prior to your start date:

• a satisfactory police record check to include a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check and/or an International Criminal Record Check (If applicable)
• receipt of satisfactory references
• proof of eligibility to work in the national location for this role

If you have any questions, we have an FAQ section here.

For anything else you can email us on: careers@savethechildren.org.uk