Head of Manufacturing Relocation

We’re looking for a former founder or senior operator to build out our work on manufacturing relocation. The goal is to get manufacturers in China, India, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, Turkey and elsewhere to set up export production in Africa. You’ll find them, convince them, and help them through market entry, from picking a country to working with government and export processing zones.

What a great background looks like

• Senior operator experience in a manufacturing firm with international operations, or deep experience doing manufacturing FDI deals on the investor or company side (not the government side).
• Experience working in Africa, ideally with governments, export processing zones or industrial parks.
• You understand how manufacturers choose where to build: labour, power, logistics, trade access and incentives.
• You have relationships with manufacturers, industrial park developers or sourcing agents in China, India, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia or Turkey.
• Chinese (Mandarin) is a strong plus.

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.

This isn’t a Venture Builder role. Rather than building new companies from scratch, you’ll find established manufacturers overseas, convince them to set up in Africa, and support them until their factories are running. Where it has high leverage, you’ll also deploy our concessional capital to make a move happen.

This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports.

You’ll spend your time on:

• Finding manufacturers. Identify manufacturers in China, India, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia and Turkey with a reason to expand or move production, and get in front of the people who make the decision.
• Making the case. Convince them to set up in Africa, with a clear business case on labour, power, logistics, trade access and incentives.
• Market entry. Help them pick a country and a site, connect them to export processing zones (EPZs) and industrial parks, deal with government on licences and incentives, and find local partners. Then stay close as they hire and ramp up production.
• Concessional capital. Deploy our concessional capital where it has high leverage, for example where a small investment de-risks a much larger one or tips a manufacturer’s decision towards Africa. You’ll build the cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) behind each investment.

The pace is quick and the bureaucracy is minimal. 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. Chinese (Mandarin) is the most valuable. After that, Hindi, Bengali, Vietnamese, Turkish or another language spoken by the manufacturers you’d work with, plus French.
• 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 China, India, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, Turkey and other manufacturing hubs.