Head of Francophone Africa Export Manufacturing & Venture Builder

We’re looking for a former founder or senior operator to build out our export manufacturing work across Francophone Africa. You’ll find, back and help build founders creating export factories and processing businesses across the region, in light manufacturing, agri-processing and other labour-intensive sectors, selling to buyers in Europe and beyond.

What a great background looks like

• You’ve built or run a manufacturing or export business in Francophone Africa.
• Fluent French is required.
• You know the operating environment on the ground: industrial zones, customs and export procedures, and how to get things done locally.
• You have relationships with manufacturers, buyers or industrial zone operators in the region.

The Africa Jobs Fund catalyses high-impact companies that can dramatically boost incomes for people in Africa. We focus on two areas with the biggest potential to move the needle: export manufacturing and international labour mobility. We intend to mobilise $100m towards these spaces over the coming years, with which we aim to create $50bn in income gains for African workers and double the lifetime incomes of over 250,000 low-income people. You can read our full thesis and impact model on our website.

We venture-build new companies (identifying high-impact opportunities and sourcing talented founders to build them), and we make catalytic investments in existing companies. Not only do we intend to have a huge direct impact on hundreds of thousands of lives, but we also hope to shift the development (and startup) conversations in Africa towards approaches that effectively and durably increase incomes at scale.

We’re a very small team, and we’re moving fast. You’ll work directly with the co-founders with enormous autonomy from day one. We are looking for someone who is exceptionally talented, impact-motivated, high-agency and hardworking.

This role sits in our export manufacturing pillar: building the companies that put African workers into formal, productive factory jobs. Industrialisation is the only route countries have ever taken to become rich, short of finding oil. Britain started by exporting textiles in the 1780s and China in the 1980s, with many countries in between, but all of them climbed the ladder by exporting increasingly complex value-added products to global markets. A formal manufacturing job typically doubles the income of a worker coming out of informal or subsistence work. Your job is to make more of that happen.

You’ll find, build and fund new companies in your segment, and own each one end to end: spotting the opportunity, finding and convincing the founder, building the company alongside them, structuring and making the investment, then supporting them hands-on as they scale. You’ll run projects from first conversation to investment yourself, with just a (quick) final approval from management.

This is a senior individual contributor role. All our Venture Builders are peers. Each one owns a segment, builds companies in it and has no direct reports. The title reflects what you own, not the size of a team.

To be clear, this is not an investment job. You’ll need to be hugely proactive in building companies, constantly exploring new projects and making new investments, not sitting back and evaluating pitches.

You’ll spend your time on:

• Market scoping. Work out which products, sectors and countries in your segment we should focus on. Speak to international buyers, sourcing agents, factory operators and industrial park managers to find where the real opportunities and bottlenecks are. Here, that means finding the countries, products and industrial zones in Francophone Africa where export factories can compete.
• Founder sourcing and conviction-building.Find potential founders and convince them to build a company with us. This isn’t just sourcing; you’ll have to persuade exceptional people to take on this challenge, while also assessing them as potential investments. That could be a manufacturer already operating in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal or Cameroon, or a senior operator ready to build their own factory.
• Investment assessment and structuring. Assess investments, develop investment cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs), and structure deals. You might be deciding on a revenue-based financing model vs equity, or modelling the future income gains that a particular factory can create as it scales its workforce.
• Company building and portfolio support.Build with our companies before and after investment, make connections into our network, and help them scale. We don’t run training programmes or share abstract insights; this is concretely helping founders build their companies 0 → 1. For example, vetting a site in an industrial zone, or opening doors to buyers in France and the rest of Europe.

The pace is quick and the bureaucracy is minimal. A strong Venture Builder should be funding 10+ new companies and projects every year. As you grow in the role, we will keep giving you more responsibility and autonomy. The ceiling on this role is very high for the right person.

We will not hire anyone who doesn’t meet all of the following:

• Exceptionally talented and intelligent. You can think about hard problems deeply, absorb information quickly and generate insightful analyses.
• Problem solver.You’re excited about taking on new challenges every day. You’ll constantly be tackling new and different tasks and you should find that energising rather than uncomfortable.
• Hardworking.This is not a 9-5. We’re a small team with a huge mission and we work hard.
• Mission-driven.You’re driven by a real desire to have a positive impact in an evidence-driven way.
• Results & evidence-focused.You don’t just care about working in impact, you care about working on the projects that are most likely to yield results. You understand why export manufacturing is one of the most promising routes to increase the quality of life for low-income people.
• AI-native. You regularly use the best AI tools to automate your work and rely on them to optimise your workflows.

We want people who have built and run something real, with a P&L, paying customers, or capital they deployed and were accountable for.

If your background is mainly in grant-funded programme delivery, donor fund management or running accelerator portfolios, this probably isn’t the right role for you. That work matters, but this job is about businesses that have to stand on their own commercially, and we need people who have built or run one.

Alongside the segment experience above, you’ll need:

• You’ve founded a company, or operated at a senior level in one. You’ve carried real responsibility for outcomes: a P&L, a plant, a business line, a company.
• Strong experience working in Africa.
• 5–25 years of experience.We’re flexible on seniority; we care more about finding exceptional people.

Bonus experience. These are not required, but would be great to have:

• Experience in investment, structuring deals, or VC.
• Language skills. Beyond French, Portuguese, Mandarin or Arabic is a bonus.
• Academic grounding in development economics and a working understanding of cost-effectiveness analysis.

• Competitive compensation appropriate for the role. (We’re flexible on the exact scope of work and level of experience because we want to find exceptional people, and compensation will reflect that.)
• Remote, with a preference for candidates based in Africa.
• Travel across Francophone Africa and to buyer markets.