Head of Venture Building, Jobtech Alliance Greater Nairobi, Kenya Area

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, both global and local, to catalyze innovation ecosystems for impact across emerging markets.

About the Jobtech Program

Jobtech Alliance is an ecosystem-building initiative focused on advancing the jobtech sector in Africa. In collaboration with Prosper Global ( former Mercy Corps), we work with technology platforms, entrepreneurs, investors, and ecosystem partners to create more, better, and inclusive work opportunities across Africa.

As we enter the scale phase, we are expanding our work with jobtech companies, helping them grow sustainable businesses while improving income and employment opportunities, particularly for women and young people.

About the Role

The Head of Venture Building oversees venture-building engagements within the Jobtech Alliance. This role ensures that all engagements meet high-quality standards, align with strategic goals, and achieve job-creation targets.

Key responsibilities include supporting venture leads, managing engagement quality control, enhancing portfolio health tracking, and developing the infrastructure and systems required for effective venture support.

We are seeking a Head of Venture Building to manage our expanding portfolio of jobtech companies across Africa.

In this role, you will work with the sourcing lead to select high-potential companies, analyze their key business challenges, and deliver actionable support to drive growth and create jobs.

You will collaborate closely with founders, venture-building experts, and the Jobtech Alliance team to ensure all support interventions are effective, relevant, and results-driven.

The ideal candidate possesses a strong understanding of business growth dynamics, enjoys working with entrepreneurs, and can translate business challenges into practical solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Portfolio Strategy and Growth (20%)

Together with the sourcing lead, Identify and assess promising jobtech companies that could benefit from Jobtech Alliance support.

Understand their business models, growth potential, challenges, and opportunities to create jobs.

Determine appropriate venture lead and venture support (specialist) team members for each new company; determine extern requirements

Ensure consistent definitions and standards around what constitutes a “job”

Develop clear inclusion and engagement hypotheses for each platform, defining how Jobtech Alliance support is expected to translate into increased access to work and improved worker outcomes.

Build strong relationships with founders and leadership teams.

Maintain an overall view of the portfolio and identify companies that need additional attention.

Identify opportunities to connect companies with investors, partners, and other resources.

Co-ordinate with the project manager and the PMU team to ensure contracting with companies is completed accurately and on time after steering group approvals

Platform Engagement Design & Quality Assurance (60%)

Ensure each platform engagement is appropriately designed, resourced, executed, and linked to measurable job outcomes.

Review detailed Sprint 0 (and mini-sprint 0) notes, provide inputs and feedback to venture leads as they are designing venture support scope

Review and quality-assure engagement designs, workplans, technical assistance scopes, milestones, and expected outcomes before implementation.

Challenge assumptions around the constraints preventing platforms from creating or expanding opportunities for disadvantaged youth.

Work with platforms and program teams to establish realistic transition-to-work targets and pathways

Translate platform needs into clearly defined technical assistance requirements.

Coordinate the allocation of BFA team members, technical specialists, consultants, and other resources across engagements.

Maintain forward visibility of upcoming platform engagements and anticipated specialist requirements.

Ensure interventions address commercially relevant barriers, including demand generation, worker acquisition, matching, pricing, retention, geographic expansion, worker productivity, and operational scalability.

Ensure gender and inclusion considerations are embedded into platform engagement design rather than treated as standalone activities.

Work with technical specialists to determine the appropriate expertise and resources required for each platform.

Identify interventions that can improve participant activation, retention, earnings, work quality, and progression.

Conduct structured check-ins with platforms to assess progress, support quality, challenges, and emerging opportunities.

Conduct mid-sprint check-ins directly with portfolio companies to assess progress and surface challenges

Lead or facilitate post-engagement reviews to understand what worked, what did not, and what should change in subsequent engagements.

Monitor whether technical assistance is achieving the intended outcomes and recommend adjustments as needed.

Help build a network of relevant specialists who can support platform needs across growth, product, operations, gender and inclusion, worker experience, finance, technology, and other priority areas.

Continuously improve Jobtech Alliance platform portfolio health management process.

Learning & Adaptive Management (20%)

Jobtech Alliance’s is a system change initiative and, as such, learning and sharing is a critical component of this role.

Working with the research lead, Identify recurring patterns across platform engagements and translate them into actionable insights.

Assess which sectors, platform models, worker pathways, and interventions generate the strongest work and income outcomes.

Document what works—and what does not—in increasing participation and outcomes for young women and marginalized youth.

Work closely with research, learning, results measurement, gender, and program teams to translate operational experience into evidence.

Ensure learning from individual platforms informs future platform selection and engagement design.

Contribute to strategy reviews and recommendations regarding DAWN's future scale and geographic expansion.

Support the development of case studies, learning products, donor reporting, and ecosystem insights where required.

Profile & Experience

The strongest candidates will combine jobtech/digital platform experience, venture-building or consulting capabilities, and portfolio-level management skills. They should be equally comfortable working directly with a founder on a growth or operational challenge, reviewing the quality of a technical assistance engagement, analyzing platform and worker data, and advising program leadership on portfolio strategy.

The ideal candidate will bring:

8–12 years of relevant professional experience in venture building, digital platforms, startup support, management consulting, portfolio management, entrepreneurship, venture capital, impact investing, or related fields.

Demonstrated experience working directly with startups, technology companies, digital platforms, founders, or growth-stage businesses, ideally in Africa or other emerging markets.

Strong understanding of platform business models and the relationship between business growth, demand generation, worker participation, revenue, and job creation.

Experience overseeing a portfolio of companies or multiple concurrent engagements.

Strong commercial judgment and ability to assess business models, growth strategies, operational constraints, and market opportunities.

Experience designing or managing technical assistance, consulting engagements, venture-building programs, accelerators, or similar interventions.

Strong analytical skills and comfort working with company, portfolio, employment, and impact data.

Ability to challenge founders, technical teams, and senior stakeholders constructively while maintaining strong working relationships.

Experience coordinating multidisciplinary teams and specialists without necessarily having direct line-management authority.

Strong project and portfolio management capability, with excellent attention to execution and follow-through.

Strong written, verbal, facilitation, and stakeholder-management skills.

Experience in jobtech, future of work, digital livelihoods, inclusive employment, gender-lens programming, youth employment, or platform economies in Africa would be particularly valuable.

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Business, Economics, Finance, Entrepreneurship, International Development, Innovation, Technology, or a related discipline.

A master's degree, MBA, or other relevant postgraduate qualification is advantageous but not required.

Relevant practical experience and demonstrated success working with technology businesses and founders will be given significant weight.

Anticipated Start Date: January 2027

Location: Kenya

This is a fixed-term contract starting January 2027 to December 2028

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.

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.