Platform Associate- Africa at Mercy Corps

Essential Responsibilities

The Platform Associate will work directly with companies in our portfolio to help them scale by providing post-investment support services. You will collaborate with diverse teams across emerging markets, and your hands-on approach to solving recurring challenges will help companies build permanent capabilities to drive meaningful impact and scale. You will work directly with CEOs and the leadership team of early-stage startups, technical advisors, and partners from top global companies to solve the ventures’ toughest scaling challenges.

In this role, you will work directly with the Head of Platform, the MCV Platform team, external consultants, domain experts, the MCV investment team, and portfolio company founders & teams. This is a great role for anyone looking to work closely with early-stage startups, understand multiple emerging markets and sectors, and have exposure to the full investment lifecycle. 

Specifically, you will:
Design, structure, and complete post-investment engagements around our core offerings. The Platform Associate will directly run engagements on:

• Product: running product sprints with portfolio companies to test & improve their product offerings
• Customer Insights: supporting companies in better understanding target users with a focus on vulnerable people and communities in emerging markets
• Strategy and Growth: supporting companies in designing and implementing their strategy and growth plans

Work with other Platform team members to manage, coordinate, and monitor Platform services including onboarding, engagements, and overall requests

• Onboard new portfolio companies
• Prepare relevant materials for engagements
• Manage external consultants (e.g. finance experts) to deliver Platform engagements
• Work closely with the Investment and Platform teams to design a post-investment support plan

Contribute to the development of offerings for MCV Platform

• Develop and test new post-investment support offerings, with a particular focus on product, growth, marketing, and customer insights
• Undertake iterative processes to gather feedback and build valuable MVPs of these offerings
• Bring together stakeholders (including consultants, MC field offices, advisors and MCV team members) to generate value to our portfolio
• Find the best service providers for the portfolio
• Onboard new consultants to the roster where needed to provide expertise

Test and integrate improvements to the MCV Venture Platform operating model:

• Propose strategies to increase efficiency in Venture Platform’s operating model (e.g what tasks can be automated, how to store and access key information, how do we scale while maintaining quality offerings)
• Build and manage tools that will improve Platform’s operations
• Continually iterate on internal processes to provide better quality support to companies in our portfolio, working closely with other MCV functions
• Track interactions and post-investment engagements, drawing out learnings on a regular basis.

Generate insights and curate knowledge from Platform’s work with companies

• Carry out regular reviews of insights from Platform, consolidating and organizing resources that could be useful for portfolio companies.
• Research and build relationships with peers at other venture capital firms to identify best practices to deliver value to portfolio
• Develop key writing pieces to share our learnings and key findings with public audiences of peers, funders, and donors
• Contribute with key information and results to donor reporting

Supervisory Responsibility

This role may include the direct and indirect management of external consultants.

Accountability

Reports Directly To: Head of Platform

Accountability to Participants and Stakeholders

Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically to our program participants, community partners, other stakeholders, and to international standards guiding international relief and development work. We are committed to actively engaging communities as equal partners in the design, monitoring and evaluation of our field projects. 

Minimum Qualifications & Skills

• 3-5+ years experience in the Sub-Saharan Africa tech and startup ecosystems. Working at a startup or closely with a startup team (i.e. accelerators, incubators, service providers).
• Hands-on operational experience with a proven track record of independent work helping a company advance, ideally with particular expertise in product development, business growth, people, and/or operational management.
• We’re open to all types of educational backgrounds. We believe the strength of our team comes from having a diverse and inclusive workplace.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• English fluency required, French and/or Spanish is a plus