**Private Sector Partnership Specialist**
**About Palladium**
Palladium is a global company working to design, develop and deliver positive impact on the lives and livelihoods of people around the globe; broaden access to health, water, power, and infrastructure; build enduring, sustainable, and transformative institutions and market systems to address global challenges; and conserve the natural world. We operate in over 90 countries and have a workforce of 3,000 talented, motivated, and diverse staff of all religions, races, languages, and gender identities.
**Project Overview and Role**
The goal of the USAID Enterprises, Employment, and Enabling Environments (E4) Activity is to increase employment and jobs through increased private productivity and competitiveness. The theory of change is: "For the number of jobs to increase, businesses must grow; and for businesses to grow, constraints preventing growth must be removed." Following this logic, Palladium will focus on removing obstacles to growth at the firm level and will work to develop skills identified by employers or develop entrepreneurial expertise. Additionally, Palladium will work to address legal and regulatory constraints if they are determined to be significant inhibitors of firm growth. These efforts will result in the creation of new firms and jobs and the growth of existing firms.
Work performed under the E4 IDIQ is divided into three components:
- Component 1: Enterprises - Fostering Competitive Industries
- Component 2: Employment - Developing a Capable Workforce and Entrepreneurship
- Component 3: Enabling Environments - Creating Conditions for Jobs and Investment
The E4 IDIQ regional office is located in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and country offices are located in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
**This Opportunity**
Over the last four years, Palladium has been successfully implementing the Future Growth Initiative (FGI) Task Order of the E4 Activity in all five Central Asian countries. This task order works to increase the competitiveness of high-growth industries to provide jobs and incomes for Central Asia's growing workforce, propelling the region toward self-reliance. FGI is transforming market systems in ways that help high-potential firms and sectors grow, fostering market linkages to match the demand for workforce skills with training offered to youth and women, linking entrepreneurs to high-growth markets, and building more business
- and worker-friendly policy environments and institutions to sustain private sector-driven growth.
The program has recently been extended until 2026 through the awarding of the FGI 2.0 Task Order. By building on FGI's success and lessons learned, FGI 2.0 will work to increase the competitiveness of high-growth industries through a market systems approach that incentivizes private and public sector behavior change. The new task order will facilitate the regionalization of business advisory and enabling environment ecosystems, harmonize policies and regulations, foster trade and market linkages, and align the skills of women, youth, and vulnerable populations with private sector needs.
FGI 2.0 will take a partnerships-based approach, facilitating firm-level assistance, industry association capacity building, and regulatory reform under:
- Objective 1: Drive national-level, private sector-led economic growth and inclusivity in the five Central Asian Republics (CARs).
- Objective 2: Support competitiveness and job creation in each country, serving as the foundation for regional growth and integration.
- FGI 2.0 will also facilitate domestic and regional public private dialogue (PPD), policy reform and harmonization, and investment attraction efforts to support Central Asia's integration into the global economy of the future.
Palladium seeks a Private Sector Partnership Specialist for the FGI and FGI 2.0 Task Orders under the USAID E4 Activity who will be responsible to building and maintaining successful partnerships and collaborative alliances and implementation of grants activities in Tajikistan.
Activities concerning partnership facilitation will include building a pipeline of prospective anchor firms, understanding their main constraints to growth, identifying opportunities on addressing their investment and advisory needs, building and maintaining strong anchor firms relations, and drafting concept notes for program engagement. Activities regarding facilitating collaborative alliances will complement anchor firm partnerships to tackle horizontal or cross-sectoral challenges that cannot feasibly be addressed by a single firm. Stakeholders in collaborative alliances may be formed and structured in different variations and sizes depending on the issue to be addressed. Palladium will include business development services (BDS) providers in the stakeholder alliances and encourage them to unlock their potential aimed at building demand for commercial high-quality va