Head of Development, East Africa

Head of Development – East Africa

About the Role

You will be responsible for building and leading a high-performing Development function across East Africa, with end-to-end responsibility for fundraising, donor stewardship, communications, and team performance. The role enables fundraising success through leadership and organizational excellence, with a strong focus on building the operational systems and team capability required as Sanku enters a new phase of rapid scaling.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and develop the East Africa Development Team (a team of 5 and growing, across major donor fundraising, grants, and communications), setting clear priorities, ensuring high-quality on-time delivery, and building a culture of accountability, rigor, and collaboration.
• Design and improve fundraising systems, processes, and tools, including CRM, reporting dashboards, and AI-enabled workflows, to drive consistency and team productivity.
• Contribute to development strategy in collaboration with the CEO and senior leadership, translating priorities into operational plans with clear accountabilities and timelines.
• Support and enable the team to retain and deepen relationships across Sanku’s existing $10M+ portfolio of strategic institutional and philanthropic funding partners, identifying upgrade and renewal opportunities and building the pipeline discipline to deliver growth as per strategy.
• Oversee the full grant and major donor lifecycle, from prospect research and proposal development through budgeting, submission, compliance, reporting, renewal, and in-country visits and site trips.
• Oversee Sanku’s production and distribution of donor-facing communications and content: impact reports, donor updates, presentations, website content, social media, and other external materials.
• Ensure Sanku is well-represented at donor meetings, partner events, and conferences, matching the right team members to the right opportunities and supporting them to get the most out of each engagement.
• Monitor team and portfolio performance through KPIs and pipeline reviews, identifying bottlenecks and driving continuous improvement.
• Provide support to the CEO and senior leadership on selected transformational funding opportunities (i.e. $10M+ gifts and grants) as needed, while keeping the team’s core portfolio, systems, and delivery on track.

What We Are Looking For

• 5–8 years’ experience leading Development, Business Development or Partnerships teams, within the NGO, Social Enterprise or International Development Sector.
• Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field.
• Experience building and managing teams of five or more, including direct reports who themselves manage staff or lead workstreams.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-scaling environment, with experience building or professionalizing a development function rather than just running an established one.
• Excellent leadership, coaching, and cross-functional collaboration skills. Experience securing funding is desirable, but success leading development operations and teams is essential.