Gender Officer At Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund

About Us

The AECF is a leading development finance organization that supports businesses to innovate, create jobs and leverage investments to build resilience and sustainable incomes for rural and marginalized communities in Africa.

AECF’s goal is to bridge the investment gap between early-stage enterprise and business maturity for entrepreneurs serving the poorest communities. We provide patient capital to new and innovative business models in the agribusiness and renewable energy sectors across Sub-Saharan Africa through various financing instruments. To supplement finance, we also offer advisory services, investment support, and knowledge and insights.

AECF has successfully implemented programmes across 26 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, supporting over 400 enterprises, impacting over 30 million lives.

AECF is headquartered in Kenya, with offices in Côte d’Ivoire and Tanzania.

The Gender Officer will be part of the Investing In Women – Nigeria (IIW-Nigeria) project team and collaborating with Gender team leading AECF’s work in social finance, women economic empowerment and gender lens investing. The role holder will deliver gender activities across in the project including technical assistance to portfolio companies, coordinate and support the work of gender officers embedded in country, and work in close collaboration with AECF impact, knowledge, and partnership team to contribute to the overall learning, though leadership, dissemination and business development of AECF’s GLI work.

The role will report to Programme Manager.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the principal resource on gender equality issues, practices, and policies relevant to the project and in the project context.
• Provide technical assistance to portfolio companies on gender integration and gender smart solutions for increased business performance.
• Take the lead in conducting and updating gender-based analysis, and contribute to the other technical analysis.
• Identify and review supporting outputs and activities to achieve gender equality outcomes.
• Provide input into defining, collecting, and analyzing sex-age disaggregated baseline data; define gender-sensitive and sex-age disaggregated indicators and targets for the draft performance measurement framework (PMF).
• Provide inputs into all aspects of the project work plan and budget.
• Coordinate implementation of the gender equality strategy and related project activities.
• Strengthen the project team, implementing organizations and partners’ gender equality knowledge, skills and capacity with training and tools.

Suitable candidates should:

• Hold a bachelor’s degree qualification in Gender Economics, Gender Studies, Development Studies, Economics, Development Finance, or other relevant fields of study.
• Possess a minimum of four (4) years of post-training experience in one or more of the following areas: gender economics, social entrepreneurship, impact investing, management consulting, development, renewable energy, agribusiness, SME finance, rural financial services and/or renewable energy and adaptation to combat climate change.
• Possess hands-on experience in agribusiness and renewable energy sectors.
• Possess strong experience/ interest in social finance and impact investing in the international development context.
• Possess experience working in an international team and proven ability to deliver in a complex environment with multiple, divergent stakeholder interests.
• Be fluent in written and oral English and Hausa languages.