Senior Strategy Officer – AECF/SSO/2020 at Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund (AECF)

Reporting to the Chief Executive Officer, the Senior Strategy Officer shall serve as the lead for strategy development and implementation. He/she will support strategy development, execution and adaptation, performance management, and structured analytics to ensure AECF’s impact across sub-Saharan Africa.

The Senior Strategy Officer will be responsible for leading in strategy design and liaising with functional leaders. He/she will be responsible for the overall coordination facilitation of strategy refresh which is scheduled for 2020.

Do you have strong strategic problem-solving skills, excellent interpersonal skills, with a high level of personal initiative and with a knack for generating critical insights, the ability to work well in a distributed, multicultural, fast-paced environment? If so, this is the role for you!

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead AECF’s organizational strategy refresh to attain the institution’s vision of ‘A Prosperous and Enterprising Rural Africa’
• Lead the design of strategy across various programs within the institution. Specifically, drive the strategic planning process and act as a trusted advisor to AECF’s executive leadership and relevant stakeholders during strategy formulation, development, and execution.
• Support the evaluation and development of AECF’s long-term strategic plans across the various departments. The individual will develop the institution’s multi-year strategies and goals, establish measurement criteria to monitor the performance of established strategies consistently, identify deficiencies, and avail actionable solutions.
• Develop frameworks, models, tools and processes to track and critically analyze the strategy; recommend adaptive strategies based on results/evidence, lessons learnt, and insights gained in the face of changing ecosystems.
• Work with key operational units to ensure strategic alignment, business efficiency, resource allocation, internal capacity building etc are affected.
• Provide guidance and quality control in the preparation and the review of the planning and strategy documents
• Create and update dashboards for reviewing and key performances indicators.
• Drive strategic, operational, and cross-functional improvement initiatives across AECF on key areas of focus, and lead on key operational internal change projects within the institution to ensure success.
• Oversee AECF’s piloting and research priorities to drive key business insights.
• Innovate and drive thinking on new ways AECF can respond to the external market alongside keeping abreast with donor and industry trends.

Required qualifications and experience:

• A Master’s Degree in Business Administration, Public Policy, Development Economics/Studies or another related field. Relevant work experience may be considered in lieu of this.
• Minimum 6 – 9 years’ experience working within a management consulting environment or managing medium-to-large projects/programs in the broad field of strategy and/or other related areas (business efficiency, performance improvement, organisational change, business and sector intelligence, stakeholder engagement etc.).
• Deep knowledge of, and experience in, strategy development, execution and review at institutional and territorial level, as well as design and roll-out of analytical frameworks, tools, processes and other documents to facilitate the strategic planning process;
• Superior delivery and leadership capacity – can synthesize strategic intent into tangible deliverables that drive institutional progress;
• Experience in developing and managing strong partnerships and relationships inside and outside the organization, managing conflicts, and building consensus. Comfortably engages with senior decision makers within organization and constructively challenges colleagues, partners and stakeholders.
• Experience of end-to-end project management, including scoping and design, resourcing, risk management and quality assurance.
• Experience in the agribusiness and or renewable energy sectors an added advantage.
• Exceptional oral, facilitation and written communication skills;
• Works well in diverse teams, with efficiency and diplomacy.
• Ability to travel up to 20% domestically and internationally to engage with AECF Investees and regional teams.

The AECF is an Equal Opportunity Employer. The AECF considers all applicants based on merit without regard to race, sex, color, national origin, religion, age, disability or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.