Search for Common Ground (Search) is an international non-profit organization that promotes the peaceful transformation of conflict. With headquarters in Washington, DC, and Brussels, Belgium, Search’s mission is to transform how individuals, organizations, and governments deal with conflict—moving away from destructive approaches and towards cooperative solutions. With more than 700 staff worldwide, Search implements projects in more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and North America.

Search is seeking an experienced senior leader for our Niger Delta Regional Office. The role will specifically focus on overseeing a project that is funded by the European Union. The project will be implemented in consortium with co-applicants with the overall goal of fostering inclusive community security approaches to address the systemic drivers of violence and criminality in Bayelsa, Delta, and Rivers States. The position may continue to support additional projects in the Niger Delta region if funding opportunities come in.

Bringing together four leading peacebuilding and development organizations in the Niger Delta, the consortium offers a holistic, community-centered approach to addressing core drivers of criminality, violence, and conflict in the region, with a specific focus on the empowerment and inclusion of youth in the security of their respective communities in the Niger Delta. The consortium partners will leverage existing relationships with the action’s diverse target groups, including at-risk youth, local communities impacted by oil production and oil bunkering, state security actors, the private sector, journalists and media actors, key civil society organizations, and policymakers at the state, regional, national, and international levels, to secure broad-based buy-in and participation in the action. Overall, the project will seek to shift how relevant actors think about and approach issues of oil bunkering, criminality, and security in the Niger Delta in favor of more bottom-up, human-centered perspectives. This institutional and social shift is necessary in order to sustainably reduce the prevalence of oil bunkering and other forms of criminality and violence in the region in the long term.

The design of the action centers around four activity streams, each addressing a systemic driver of division, violence, and criminality in Bayelsa, Rivers, and Delta States: 

Stream 1 will foster intra-community collaboration around issues of social exclusion, lack of economic opportunity, and environmental degradation.

Stream 2 will build trust and collaboration between communities, the government, and security actors for more participatory, community-centered security operations. 

Stream 3 will leverage arts- and culture-based approaches to foster social cohesion between divided communities, both online and offline.

Stream 4 will facilitate policy change to institutionalize community-centered security approaches at the local, state, regional, national, and international levels. 

To apply, interested candidates should send the following items to our career portal here:

1. Current resume

2. Cover letter