Venture Associate, BFA Global

About us

BFA Global is an impact innovation firm that combines research, advisory, venture building, and investment expertise to build a more inclusive, equitable, and resilient future for underserved people and the planet. We partner with leading public, private and philanthropic organizations, global and local, to catalyze innovation ecosystems for impact across emerging markets.

About Jobtech Alliance

The Jobtech Alliance, launched in late 2021, is a pioneering initiative focused on inclusive jobtech in Africa. Our goal is to support digital platforms that connect individuals to work opportunities, including gig-matching platforms, job-matching services, and e-commerce marketplaces. Through two main workstreams, we aim to create an enabling environment for entrepreneurs to build platforms that provide quality livelihoods. This involves expanding the sector’s knowledge base through research, community-building, and highlighting its significance. Simultaneously, we work to enhance funding by curating investors, fostering discussions on sector financing, and addressing critical policy and infrastructure needs.

The Jobtech Alliance has a grant portfolio that allows us to conduct various acceleration activities with jobtech start-ups. We partner with jobtech start-ups across 10 African markets to support strategy, product, and operational innovations that make their services more viable, scalable, inclusive, and/or deliver better-quality jobs for their users. The program deploys a range of support to start-ups, including technical assistance, project delivery support, grant capital, and connections to investors and other partners.

About the Role

The Venture Associate will work with the business strategist to support end-to-end engagement with Jobtech Startups. You will support the development of a pipeline of exciting jobtech platforms with the potential for significant employment outcomes, accelerating the Jobtech ventures and strengthening the ecosystem around them.

This includes engaging and helping startups grow, capturing insights through research that can inform the startup support strategy, sharing these insights and learnings with the ecosystem, and engaging stakeholders to enable business growth.

The position will report to Business Strategist, BFA Global.

What You’ll Do

As a Venture Associate at BFA Global, we seek someone with the following capabilities:

• Work with Business strategists in supporting venture building (VB) engagements for startups as part of Jobtech. This includes:
  • Working on the VB engagement from beginning to end
  • Building strong relationships with the ventures in the programs,
  • Scoping the support and sprint activities that would accelerate their journey to Product-Market Fit,
  • Coordinating with relevant specialists to deliver on the scope of work,
  • Providing dedicated and required support where feasible,
  • Ensuring the startup is fully satisfied with the support offered, by providing the programs with a high NPS while also remaining within the venture-building engagement budget.
• Contribute to Jobtech’s learning in strategic areas and external publications. This includes:
  • In partnership with portfolio start-ups and other Jobtech Alliance members, identify key research topics and build collaborative research on key topics surfacing from our work
  • Integrating knowledge learned from VB projects into the learning outputs like blogs and other influential publications to share knowledge with the industry.
• Engage with ecosystem stakeholders as part of Jobtech. This includes:
  • Sharing insights about Jobtech’s work with investors and other relevant stakeholders.

Qualifications & Requirements:

• 3-5 years of experience working as a venture builder at an accelerator investment fund, or as part of a fast-growing startup team. Additionally, direct founder experience will be viewed as a plus.
• Degree in Business, Finance, Engineering or equivalent. MBAs are also a plus.
• Strong experience supporting startups across emerging markets globally in developing products and analyzing data to understand business performance.
• Expertise in lean product management, including design sprints, value proposition design, hypothesis-driven experimentation, roadmaps prioritization, as well as in business modeling.
• Must demonstrate the ability to think on your feet, i.e. a “hacker” mentality.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, startup environment, with strong attention to detail for all tasks, even virtually.
• Ability to complete tasks on time while balancing several assignments with inputs from multiple team members.
• Strong analytical skills to perform data deep-dives on startups’ data.

Anticipated Start Date: August 2024

Preferred location: Nairobi, Kenya

Candidates must have local work permits. Compensation will be commensurate with experience.

Only shortlisted candidates who provide the required information will be contacted for follow-up.

APPLY HERE

At BFA, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and teammates without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation, and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, military, and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

BFA believes that diversity and inclusion among our teammates are critical to our success as a global company. We seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool and to carry out the best inclusion work we undertake. 

*BFA will not sponsor work permits.

**BFA will not pay for relocation expenses.