Job vacancy at Invest Salone – Market Development Lead

Invest Salone is recruiting for a Market Development Lead.

Invest Salone is a private sector development initiative that aims to help Sierra Leone realise the benefits of international trade and raise the incomes of 370,000 people by 2025. It plans to achieve this through reducing the risk of investment in Sierra Leone and supporting market development.

 

Job Description

Job Title: Market Development Lead

Reports to: Portfolio Manager
Responsible for Market Development (Pillar 1) Intervention Managers, Short-Term Technical Assistance (as needed)

Working
Arrangements The Market Development (Pillar 1) Lead will report to the Invest Salone Portfolio Manager and be expected to work closely with other Pillar Leads, as well as the Communications and Monitoring and Results Measurement (MRM) teams and Gender, Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) Focal Point, to ensure complementarity of interventions.

Job Overview and Purpose
Invest Salone is a six-year initiative funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) that aims to catalyse investment in export sectors, thus helping Sierra Leone realise the benefits of international trade and raising the incomes of 370,000 people by 2025. Invest Salone is primarily delivered through technical assistance, knowledge and analytical work, and capacity building. The programme engages in four thematic sectors (agriculture, fisheries, light manufacturing and tourism), and explores multiple pathways and relationships with change agents within government, and with non-government stakeholders in Sierra Leone and internationally.

Invest Salone contributes to its objective through three complementary Pillars or delivery pathways comprising:   
Pillar 1:  Market system development – focused on local agents and value chains within the four core sectors, designed to catalyse wider transformative change within the larger market system.
Pillar 2:  Investment and export promotion – focused on catalysing productivity improvements and investment from domestic and foreign companies in key sectors.  Invest Salone will do this by strengthening readiness, productive and export capacities of firms through research on binding constraints, capacity building, efficiency improvements, and helping the private sector to overcome market failures (in coordination, access to land tenure, supply chains, innovation, etc.) which limit their export competitiveness.
Pillar 3:  Investment climate reform – focused on catalysing systemic and behavioural change, working with and through forums for dialogue and advocacy (such as the Public– Private Dialogue initiative), thus building a constituency for reform.

The programme is managed through Nathan Associates in-country office in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The Market Development (Pillar 1) Lead will be responsible for Invest Salone’s strategy and approach to market development, ensuring ongoing scoping work for agribusiness, tourism, fisheries and manufacturing sectors. S/he will have oversight of the whole market development portfolio and will directly manage some strategic interventions. The Lead will be responsible for managing a team of intervention managers.

Core Responsibilities

• Responsible for delivery of the market development portfolio of interventions, including line management of Market Development Intervention Managers.
• Responsible for the ongoing scoping and identification of businesses and new partnership opportunities, leading to a pipeline of potential market development interventions which contribute to Invest Salone’s results targets for businesses receiving support to become investment and/or export ready.
• Examine the wider economy to spot emerging opportunities which may influence the work of Invest Salone and benefit women, youth and disabled people.
• Ensure good practice in terms of market development and commercial sustainability is taken into account across the Invest Salone programme.
• Continue to monitor the investment climate and raise emerging issues and risks.
• Undertake or oversee in-country research into sector opportunities and keep sector strategies up to date.
• Provide fortnightly updates to the Portfolio Manager on the Pillar work plan and ensure staff are delivering against targets, identifying corrective actions where necessary.
• Keep the Invest Salone portfolio of businesses up to date, including ensuring records are current and performance is monitored to support a pipeline of export-ready and investable Sierra Leonean firms.
• Manage key business relationships through regular interaction and communication about Invest Salone’s facilities.
• Be directly responsible for the design, delivery and refining of a number of interventions based on successes, failures and dependencies, using Adaptive and Agile Management, integrated with the investment climate reform workstream activities.
• Robustly track intervention results in delivering the overall programme’s strategy, ensuring consistency between the intervention portfolio and Invest Salone’s sectoral and overarching strategies.
• Work closely with the Portfolio Manager to ensure that the overall Invest Salone portfolio risk–return ratio is balanced, using the INTERCHANGE Results and the risk, value for money, and logframe tracker dashboards.
• Disseminate current and emerging opportunities, trends and ideas within the private sector development space, and contribute to the business development strategy by identifying opportunities to promote our interests and expertise.
• Continuously identify and establish relationships with new stakeholders for Invest Salone to partner with for broader impact.
• Coordinate with other relevant programmes to identify potential areas of synergy and collaboration. Regularly review the effectiveness of these partnerships to determine where they need further deepening and/or renegotiation.
• Ensure Invest Salone is meeting its targets driving the synergy between investment climate and private sector development efforts.
• Contribute to key knowledge management activities including training and dissemination workshops. Prepare case studies and articles on the lessons learned on inclusion from Invest Salone interventions to feed into the Communications team, contributing to the delivery of the programme’s communications and engagement strategy.

Qualifications and Experience

Essential:
• Bachelor’s degree
• In-depth knowledge and experience working with or for Sierra Leonean SMEs in one or more of Invest Salone’s sectors of intervention (agribusiness, fisheries, light manufacturing and tourism)
• Experience delivering results in a project setting, with good analytical and writing skills • Line management experience

Desirable:
• Further qualifications (e.g. master’s degree, professional certifications)
• International experience
• Experience working in multicultural teams

Women and candidates from under-represented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

How to Apply
Eligible candidates should submit a full CV and cover letter to

[email protected]

by 22nd January 2021. Please note that only shortlisted applicants will be contacted.