Senior Partnerships Officer at Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)

The Opportunity

Senior Partnerships Officer – Private Sector, Job Reference: SPO/PD/10/2023

Overall Purpose

In realizing its mission to catalyze the growth of sustainable food systems across Africa, AGRA has identified aligning, influencing, and leveraging partners as a critical mechanism to build a robust enabling environment where private sector thrives and smallholder farmers, especially women and youth, are empowered to produce sufficient, healthy food and go from subsistence farming to operating thriving agri-businesses. 

To support the successful delivery of its mandate, AGRA is seeking to recruit an experienced and exceptional individual to the role of Senior Partnerships Officer – Private Sector. 

The role will be based in Nairobi, Kenya. 

The Position

The Senior Program Officer – Private Sector Partnerships will take a leading role in curating a pipeline of high value programmatic partnerships with key private sector players. H/she will execute AGRA’s partnership strategy by working in close collaboration with AGRA staff in identifying, designing, delivering, and monitoring strategic private sector partnerships for implementation, advocacy, resource mobilization and investment facilitation.

The role will work closely with partners across the continent and the world, and travel is expected to be around 50% per year. Candidates are assumed to have extensive experience of working within the private sector.

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

• Support the Head of the unit to create private sector engagement strategy and country directors to create annual country level workplans. 
• Develop and manage a strong portfolio of highly engaged private sector players committing to multi-year transformative partnerships to increase AGRA’s funding, in-kind support, and impact on the small-holder farmer.
• Coordinate a relationship management framework for private sector engagement leveraging leadership across the technical and country teams.
• Support AGRA Country teams to identify and prioritize new relationships, partnerships and alliances in each country considering the country-specific strategy
• In collaboration with the technical and country teams design partnership models for engagement (collaboration, alliances, co-investments) and facilitate calls for proposals and engagement.
• Support the identification of enabling environment bottlenecks hindering private investments and assist AGRA’s advocacy with regional bodies, governments and donors 
• Mobilize partner engagement for participate in Africa’s Food systems summit, the Agribusiness Dealroom and relevant AGRA events.
• Coordinate private sector partnerships meetings, develop communication material, and ensure measurement and follow upon agreed action items, holding stakeholders accountable.
• Develop partnership related grants, technical assistance, and third-party funding proposals – supporting Resource Mobilization team.
• Tracking indicators and reporting outcomes of AGRA’s partnership activities, this includes a partnership survey.
• Grows best practices across different the AGRA focus countries, support exchange and learnings across AGRA countries.
• Write and publish case studies on learnings and successes, drawing lessons to reflect on and improve implementation of the yearly engagement plans.

Key Qualifications and Experience required:

• A master’s degree in business management, Agriculture, Economics, political sciences, public policy, international relations, or other relevant discipline. Relevant work experience may be considered in lieu of this.
• Minimum of 10 years’ experience in partnership development and business relationship management, with an emphasis on operationalizing programs in the field and/or value chain initiatives
• At least three (3) years’ senior-level management experience in engagement and management of complex multi-stakeholder processes.
• Strong private sector experience in either agribusiness, finance, or related sector is a must.
• Strong network amongst African and global private sector in the food and agribusiness, more specifically input companies, processors, traders, and service providers.
• Ability to build and maintain strong relationships with external and internal partners and stakeholders with an understanding of interorganizational cultural sensitivities.
• Strong business development skills to identify and pursue new partnership opportunities that align with AGRA’s strategy and goals.
• Ability to develop a clear vision and long-term strategy for partnership development.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Ability to communicate and translate fluently between English. French is highly desirable.
• Deep understanding of African Agribusiness trends, activities, investment related policies. Familiarity with agricultural development programs and grant design. 
• Proven track record of building inter-value chain linkages between farmers, companies and different actors across value chains.
• Excellent organizational skills, with demonstrated ability to work on own initiative and to effectively manage and prioritize workload.