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Senior Associate, Nutritious Foods Financing
About the Role
- The post holder will play a key role in identifying technical assessment needs of SMEs, as well as being responsible for designing technical assistance support packages tailored to the individual SME’s.
- To be successful in this role the post holder will play a key role in the scaling up process in order to consolidate the chances of the project making a real impact and its ability to grow and succeed. They will work on innovative financing, impact investing and coordinate activities under the Nourishing Food Pathways(NFP) work package focused on innovative finance for nutrition.
- The Senior Associate will work closely with the Programme Lead, other project colleagues and the other GAIN Country Offices.
The Nutritious Foods Financing Facility (N3F): Pioneering Nutrition Financing
- Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are a critical engine of transformation: in Africa, for example, they produce over half of calories and over 80% of animal-source foods, fruits, and vegetables, while processing or handling about 65% of food in later stages of the value chain. For low-income consumers in particular, SMEs are essential for ensuring access to nutritious, safe foods.
- Even though SMEs play such an essential role in food systems, they struggle to access the financing necessary to scale up their offerings to increase the availability and accessibility of nutritious, safe foods.
- The N3F aims to address these problems through a blended finance approach that focuses on improving nutrition by supporting SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa. The N3F will provide targeted funding to SMEs based on their financial needs and their ability to absorb and use the funds. With consumer nutrition at its core, N3F will have an integrated approach to impact and assess how SMEs support gender equity, environmental sustainability, engagement of consumers and suppliers, and employment.
- To ensure the power of SMEs to deliver nutritious, safe foods is fully unleashed, N3F will also provide support beyond financing, through a technical assistance and impact monitoring component. These components are both led by GAIN, drawing on several years’ prior experience of providing technical assistance to SMEs.
Key Responsibilities include
- Identify technical assessment needs of SMEs operating in the food value chain that are potential pipeline for the Nutritious Food Financing Facility (N3F) Fund, working together with the investment officers at our partner asset manager Incofin Investment Management.
- Develop technical assistance support packages tailored to individual SMEs and group training according to common needs in the portfolio.
- Perform matchmaking between Technical Assistance(TA) requirements and service providers, manage engagements between GAIN, service providers, and our beneficiaries.
- Oversee the implementation of project workplans and ensure that all assignments deliver maximum value for money.
- Review and refine procedures, monitoring mechanisms, and feedback forms for the provision of TA to SMEs.
- Represent GAIN at national and regional technical meetings and workshops and assist in coordinating the organization of national and international events, technical meetings, and workshops.
About You
- The ideal candidate for this position should have professional experience and technical understanding related to impact investment and/or development finance, business development, due diligence, food supply chains and SMEs.
- You will have the ability to operate within the private and public sectors to effectively liaise diverse stakeholders and multi-cultural settings. You have experience working in accelerator or business incubator settings and constantly assessing impact investing.
- The position holder should possess excellent coordination, communication, research, and writing skills with a strong analytical ability. They will build key relationships will SME’s, internal teams and implementing partners. The candidate should have an educational background in a relevant field such as finance, business, food value chain, economics, or other relevant field. Master’s level highly desired.