Role: Venture and Investment Manager – Remote Work Opportunity
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Position: Full-time permanent
Who We Are
EWB exists to create a world where everyone has the opportunity and the agency to live a life of meaning and value. We cannot accept that today this opportunity is determined by someone’s place of birth.
We seek to support socially transformative enterprises that have the potential to alter the structure or dynamics of a sector/industry, creating more inclusive business models that can give agency and opportunity for large numbers of underserved people in Sub Saharan Africa. Because of the importance of gender equality as a foundation for inclusive and sustainable development, we take a gender lens to our work. We seek to support indigenous owners and diverse teams as they bring personal experience and are uniquely positioned to build sustainable and disruptive businesses in Africa.
We focus our support at the founding, pre-seed and seed stages of those enterprises – as such, we focus our support as much on the social entrepreneur themselves as we do on the transformative idea they have. We provide leadership development support, facilitate access to a strong and reliable pro-bono talent pool and on rare occasions and only when we are truly catalytic, we make highly selective equity and quasi-equity capital investments. Specifically, EWB’s investment model offers the following to each of our partners:
- Talent placement: We recruit, train and place highly-skilled talent right into the management teams of our ventures on targeted capacity development missions shaped and determined by the founders/teams. This takes place virtually and is a global program.
- Pre-seed and seed capital when we are a founding investor and/or truly catalytic for our ventures, offering mostly equity and quasi-equity.
- Ongoing portfolio management: We are usually observers on our partners Boards of directors and spare no effort in finding the right support for them in all situations.
The Opportunity
As the Venture and Investment Manager on EWB’s team, you will be responsible for sourcing, vetting and recommending potential ventures for talent support and investments. You will take part in portfolio management activities and work in partnership with our talent team to continuously improve our talent offering to ventures. You will also play a crucial role in representing EWB’s pipeline and potential investments to EWB’s funding partners who are interested in backing our venture work.
Our goal is to support entrepreneurs to access the next stage of investment from others. We aren’t dogmatic about only supporting businesses in certain sectors as what we are seeking is first and foremost a transformative model – one that alters power and resource dynamics in an entire sector. At the same time, we have the most experience in the fintech and agriculture areas. Our investments are concentrated in East Africa, though we also operate in select parts of West Africa.
As the Venture and Investment Manager, success for you will be measured not only by the impact of our individual partners, but also by our ability to prove our impact model and scale it.
- Source and cultivate a pipeline of founding-stage, systemically impactful venture investment opportunities. Vet and present opportunities to our Venture Support Team and when appropriate, EWB’s Investments Committee.
- In tandem with the talent support team, develop mechanisms to deliver high quality support, networking and other opportunities to selected ventures. Actively engage ventures to evaluate the impact of EWB’s talent support.
- Work closely with EWB’s communications team to capture stories that highlight EWB’s impact through our venture support programs.
- Work closely with EWB’s fundraising team to support relationship-building with new/existing partners and help present the work in compelling ways that garner meaningful funding partnerships.
The Candidate
We are looking for someone with great communications skills, a relationship builder with a passion for early stage entrepreneurship and innovation-driven approaches to impact. Someone with the drive, ambition and resilience to champion a vision and hold high standards of excellence in execution.
Our ideal candidate will be able to demonstrate a minimum of 3 years experience in one or more of the following:
- Experience and track record in startup / social entrepreneurship – most valuable from a context of operating in Sub-Saharan Africa with strong instincts on what makes early stage companies succeed;
- Experience in investing (impact or commercial direct investments), including financial and operational due diligence
- Experience in bringing a gender lens and systems thinking/social innovation to impact investing and talent development – part of your job will be to go off-the-beaten-path to identify talent and investment opportunities in places that others overlook or undervalue
- Leadership style that builds trust and sets a high bar for team performance
- Be an owner and be entrepreneurial: take responsibility for finding a way to get things done, gain traction and deliver value to EWB & our partners – be proactive about improving things where they need to be improved.
- Have a sense of humour! We take our work seriously, but we try not to take ourselves too seriously.
- Be cool as a cucumber under pressure: this job is about solving hard problems, so by definition it is unpredictable and can get stressful, so it’s important to keep perspective and show you can make informed decisions in busy times when obvious answers aren’t there.
- Follow the golden rule: treat others as you would like to be treated.
- Be an incredible teammate: everything comes back to trust and respect – demonstrating empathy will make you far more successful in your work at EWB.
LocationThis is a remote work (i.e. “work from home”) opportunity based in Nairobi (Kenya).Successful candidate must be a Kenyan resident and eligible to work in Kenya.
The position requires regular travel.
Contract Terms (all monetary values are in Canadian Dollars – CA$- and based on an annual rate)
- Fixed contract ending 30 November 2022
- Annual compensation rate – CA$ 33,711 annually.
- 15 days vacation annually + Kenya statutory holidays + office closure over Winter Holidays (including Christmas and New Year’s Day)
- Up to CA$1,500 in health and dental insurance
- Up to CA$1,500 professional development, health & wellness fund
- Up to CA$1,200 in mobile and internet expenses
- Up to CA$350 provided for technical equipment purchase
- Up to CA$250 in remote work set up
- Opportunity to travel internationally, barring pandemic travel restrictions
Application Process
You must submit your cover letter and resume or CV through the link below.
In your cover letter, please illustrate how your experience and specific track record makes you the right person for us.
Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. While all qualified applicants will be considered, only candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.
EWB is an equal opportunity employer. We actively seek out diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and skills so that we can be collectively stronger and have sustained global impact. Please let us know if you require any accommodation throughout the application process, and we will do our best to accommodate.
