Head of Local Social Sector

Role Overview

This is a senior regional post that owns how the organisation partners with, strengthens, and progressively hands over ownership to locally rooted social sector actors — refugee-led groups, community-based organisations, youth- and women-led initiatives, faith-based bodies, and others whose trust, relationships, and contextual knowledge make them indispensable to durable development outcomes. Rather than running a single programme, the holder of this role is expected to construct a lasting institutional capability: a strategy, an operating model, a partner portfolio, and the country-level teams and systems that make it work. The position sits at the intersection of strategy and delivery, shaping regional direction while working alongside Business Growth Services, Investment, MERL, Programme Design, and Country Leadership so that local partnerships reinforce the wider pathways to enterprise growth, employment, and resilience.

Key Responsibilities

• Author and continually refine the regional strategy and operating model for local social sector engagement, converting it into country-level approaches, portfolio choices, staffing and budget requirements, and measurable outcome targets.
• Design the organisational strengthening methodology, including how partners are selected, supported, assessed for progress, and eventually transitioned toward independence or deeper ownership of functions that complement the organisation's work.
• Put in place the standards, quality controls, risk safeguards, and partnership management practices that make engagement consistent and defensible across multiple markets.
• Build and lead a regional team plus the appropriate country-level capacity, recruiting, coaching, and developing staff while creating clear ways of working between regional, country, and cross-functional colleagues.
• Cultivate and steward relationships with local organisations, government bodies, funders, private-sector actors, networks, and ecosystem players — pursuing co-investment, referral pathways, resource mobilisation, and complementary capabilities that widen reach.
• Partner with internal teams in enterprise development, investment, measurement and learning, and programme innovation to pinpoint where stronger local institutions unlock entrepreneurship, employment, and economic participation, and to ensure new partnerships extend rather than duplicate existing strengths.
• Generate evidence and learning on which types of organisations, partnership structures, and institutional development approaches produce the greatest value, and feed those findings back into the model.
• Own portfolio-level performance, managing impact, institutional development, risk, cost, and sustainability, along with the function's budget — making disciplined calls on where to invest further, redesign, hand over, or exit.

Requirements & Qualifications

• A minimum of ten years of relevant professional experience, with substantial leadership responsibility in organisational development, institutional strengthening, localisation, partnerships, or ecosystem building.
• Demonstrated history of creating or scaling a function, programme, partnership portfolio, or organisational capability from an early or formative stage.
• Proven ability to develop strategy and translate it into operating models, team structures, systems, and measurable results.
• Experience building and leading high-performing teams that span multiple countries or cut across functions.
• Outstanding partnership and stakeholder management skills, including the capacity to influence outcomes without formal authority over the people involved.
• Sound strategic and commercial judgement, particularly around portfolio decisions, resource allocation, long-term sustainability, and risk.
• Prior work with locally rooted institutions — community-based, refugee-led, or similar organisations — is strongly preferred, and exposure to fragile, displacement-affected, or otherwise complex operating environments is an advantage.
• Comfort synthesising data and insight to improve outcomes for partners and team members, adapting approaches as context and demands shift, and coaching staff to draw on your technical expertise and exceed expectations.
• A Bachelor's degree in Development Studies, Business, Organizational Development, Public Policy, Education, Social Sciences, or a related discipline; a Master's degree is preferred.

What We Offer / Why Join

• Work with direct, visible impact on livelihoods and job creation across East and Central Africa.
• A competitive salary with the potential for a performance-based bonus.
• A strong organisational culture with genuine room for learning and professional growth.
• Colleagues drawn from across the region, within a workplace whose policies reflect a commitment to equity and inclusion.
• An entrepreneurial, fast-moving environment that values innovation and social impact.
• Health insurance covering the post-holder and their family.
• Staff savings and provident fund arrangements, plus negotiated bank rates available to long-serving employees.
• Generous annual leave, parental leave, and sabbatical options.