Portfolio Officer – Kano, Nigeria At Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund

About Us
The AECF (Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund) is a development institution that finances early and growth-stage businesses to innovate, create jobs, and leverage investments and markets to create resilience and sustainable incomes in rural and marginalized communities in Africa.

Since 2008, we have invested over US$ 300 million in over 510 businesses across sub-Sahara Africa focusing on Agribusiness, Renewable Energy, and Climate-smart Technologies. We have impacted more than 33 million lives, created over 35,000 jobs, and leveraged over US$ 838 million in matching funds to our portfolio companies.

AECF is headquartered in Kenya, with offices in Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Sudan, Benin, and Somalia.

About Investing In Women, Kano Programme
The Investing in Women in Nigeria (IIW-Nigeria) is a 6-year programme funded by Global Affairs Canada (GAC) that seeks to economically empower women working in the agriculture sectors as entrepreneurs, smallholder farmers, producers, and employees and to address the barriers that prevent women from participating in agricultural value chains in Kano State, Nigeria. Women account for 75% of farmers in Nigeria and agriculture is the economy’s second largest source of employment (36%). Yet women farmers are significantly constrained by restrictive gender norms that limit their mobility, agency, ability to own land and access finance, inputs and technology. Climate volatility further exacerbates these challenges, especially in the North, which is prone to drought and flooding.

Through the project, the AECF will launch challenge fund competitions that will award performance-based grants to women entrepreneurs, producer groups, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) offering employment, products and services that benefit women, that address barriers to women’s participation in agriculture, and are climate smart. It will also provide business advisory services to the companies that are supported with grants, work with micro finance institutions to improve their ability to reach individual women farmers and engage with local community and political structures to support women in agricultural value chains.

The initiative seeks to contribute evidence on the effectiveness of funding the private sector to drive and improve women’s economic empowerment along various agricultural value chains. The project seeks to:

1. Increase access to finance for women-owned/led companies and those creating economic opportunities for women.
2. Increase access to business development services to support the growth of agribusiness that are beneficial to or led by women.
3. Address social norms through community-level and locally gender equality capacity building initiatives, advocacy and awareness campaigns and the recruitment of local champions. The project will support micro, start-up and growth level businesses through matching funding and technical assistance, and work to reduce systemic gender barriers to women’s economic empowerment at the grassroots level.

The role will report to the Programme Manager.

Responsibilities and Qualifications

The Role
The incumbent is responsible for supporting the management of the IIW Nigeria Programme, an investment designed to support women owned and women led enterprises, cooperatives and women groups which is funded by GAC. He/she will lead the technical and grants management support to a portfolio of investments in small and medium sized enterprises and women’s cooperatives in the agriculture sector in Kano, Nigeria. The incumbent is expected to work flexibly and collegially in processing grants, managing relations with investees, supervising the implementation of investment contracts, reporting to management and external donor partners and coordinating technical assistance. The role holder is expected to have right experience in agriculture value chain analysis, cooperative engagement and development.

Key Responsibilities

• Ensure investee performance in line with grant agreements through effective relationship management.
• Lead the planning and execution of investee performance monitoring activities, including data verification exercises to ensure the quality of programme results.
• Implementation of the financial policies, procedures, and systems guidelines for grant recipients.
• Ensure all investee site visits are conducted on a periodic basis, as per the agreed site visit schedule.
• Coordinate identification of investees who require technical assistance and arrange to deliver services based on the AECF Technical Assistance and Learning service delivery framework.
• Contribute to the development of periodic management and donor reports.
• Contribute to proposal development for various potential program areas.
• Contribute to the portfolio learning agenda through collection of investee progress reports and validation of impact reported following AECF guidelines on impact measurement.
• Contribute to baseline, mid-term and endline evaluations.
• Contribute lessons learned to regular reporting as well as ad hoc learning papers produced under the IIW Nigeria programme.
• Ensure compliance with internal controls and risk management of the portfolio in accordance with the wider AECF Management Framework.
• Implement the programme risk and mitigation framework, in line with the overall AECF Risk and Compliance Management Framework.

Suitable candidates should possess:

• Hold a bachelor’s degree in Agribusiness, business, finance economics, sustainable development, or related field.
• Minimum five (5) years’ experience in portfolio or investment management, including experience with financial and operational due diligence of early or growth-stage businesses.
• Have experience in Agribusiness value chain analysis, co-operatives engagement and development.
• Experience in private sector led development, sustainable finance, value chains strengthening or economic diversification.
• Have experience working with SMEs, and financial intermediaries working with micro and small businesses.
• Experience with gender lens investing, will be a distinct added advantage.
• Fluency in written and oral English and Hausa languages.