This exciting and stretching role offers the opportunity to deliver against some of the UK’s highest priority objectives in a unique environment. The successful candidate on a developing work strand aiming to advance the Home Office and wider HMG objectives, to address the causes of illegal migration at source and tackle visa abuse through effective programming.

The postholder will be based at the British High Commission in Abuja and will report to the Home Office’s Justice and Home Affairs Attache.  

The role will be responsible for leading preventative programmes to address the upstream drivers and enablers of irregular migration from Nigeria to the UK and tackling visa abuse. This role will lead the planning and delivery of programmes focused primarily on irregular migration. The post holder will be responsible for managing complex and often sensitive workstreams, ensuring strong financial control, clear planning, and prompt delivery of measurable results. The role requires a high degree of autonomy, sound judgement, and the ability to operate at pace in a dynamic policy and operational environment.

Nigeria is an important partner for both the UK Home Office and wider HMG and the successful candidate will engage with implementing partners, the Federal Government in Abuja, various agencies engaging in this work, state governments in priority states such as Lagos, and the wider international community (diplomatic missions, international organisations, and NGOs) to support delivery of these initiatives, including:

• ISF programming to tackling drivers of visa abuse and irregular migration.
• Nigerian Immigration Service on strategic communications to counter the narrative of people smugglers around irregular migration to the UK.
• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to work more closely together on initiatives such as the Niamey Declaration.
• Home Office International Operations to ensure join up with their counter-visa abuse work.

Beyond Abuja, you will have regular travel to other Nigerian states important to HMG’s migration equities, including Lagos.

• Planning and delivery of programmatic activity, including strategic communications warning against illegal migration to the UK, to counter visa abuse alongside both UK and local partners.
• Manage the end to end delivery of migration programmes, ensuring objectives are clearly defined, costed, and delivered on time
• Lead programme planning, financial management, and performance monitoring.
• Designing and implementing effective governance structures to monitor progress, understand impacts, identify/ mitigate risks and develop evidence base of future initiatives.
• Develop expertise on the subject matter, supporting clear advice and recommendations to senior colleagues based on robust evidence and financial analysis.
• Take ownership of delivery risks and issues, escalating appropriately and proposing pragmatic solutions.
• Work independently to manage competing priorities and respond rapidly to emerging demands.
• Leading engagement across the Nigerian system on tackling visa abuse to promote work and foster cooperation, with a view to influencing federal government policies and approaches.

• Strong programme management skills and proven track record delivering complex programming/ projects with multiple strands under pressure and to tight timeframes along with delivering budget management and assurance compliance.
• Ability to quickly get up to speed on complex and politically sensitive policy areas, using judgement to provide nuanced advice that considers the wider context.
• Proactive and able to work independently, using judgement to progress activity and unblock issues.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement skills, building relationships with key interlocutors – internal and external to government –, managing sensitivities and balancing conflicting interests to deliver results.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills including the ability to express complex and sensitive information in a clear and persuasive way tailored to your audience, including for senior officials, Ministers, international stakeholders.