Head of Light Manufacturing Export & Venture Builder

We’re looking for a former founder or senior operator to build out our work in light manufacturing for export. That means apparel, footwear, leather goods, wood furniture, assembly and other labour-intensive goods. These factories employ large numbers of people, and they’re how most countries started industrialising. You’ll find, back and help build founders creating export factories in Africa, from the first buyer conversation to a running production line.

What a great background looks like

• You’ve run or built a manufacturing business, ideally one that exports.
• Experience working in Africa, ideally in manufacturing.
• You know the buyer side: how international brands and sourcing agents choose suppliers, and what it takes to keep them.
• You understand compliance (social and environmental audits, certifications) and day-to-day factory operations.
• You have relationships with brands, sourcing agents or manufacturers in apparel, footwear, leather goods, furniture or assembly.

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 talking to brands, sourcing agents and factory operators to find the products and countries where African factories can win orders, whether that’s garment assembly in Ethiopia or leather goods and furniture for European brands.
• 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 an experienced factory manager ready to run their own plant, a diaspora manufacturer, or an established producer looking to expand into Africa.
• 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, flying out to an industrial park to vet a site and its power and logistics, or opening doors to international buyers.

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. French would be most valuable, but Portuguese, Mandarin, Arabic and other sourcing- and buyer-market languages are all 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 Africa and to buyer and sourcing markets.