About Founders Factory Africa
Founders Factory Africa (FFA) exists to create a thriving African startup economy that drives prosperity across Africa. We are venture builders dedicated to solving some of Africa’s biggest challenges and capitalising on its incredible potential by leveraging market and tech opportunities. We seek to build an ecosystem that supports authentic innovation and our goal is to be the best growth engine for entrepreneurs across Africa and beyond. We believe by supporting entrepreneurship and innovation, we will unlock employment opportunities and drive inclusive growth across the continent.
Since 2019, we have supported 50+ African ventures with investment capital alongside hands-on support backed by 40+, full-time experts covering engineering, product development, growth, corporate partnerships, and investment.
In 2023, we will leverage this experience and expertise to create an internal impact-driven venture that will directly create youth and gender-focused employment opportunities through tech-enabled learning. We are looking for a strong, agile, digitally-savvy, data-led entrepreneur with a passion for youth education in Africa to lead the creation of this venture.
The incumbent will play a critical role in building our Entrepreneur Academy. The successful candidate will lead the design and execution of strategic experiments across multiple markets in order to: create effective curricula that is delivered via a scaleable, tech-enabled model, leading to the creation of a significant number of youth-employment opportunities in the next 5 years. The Entrepreneur Academy Director will be supported by a dedicated team as well as having access to the broader FFA team.
This is a full-time position and will be required to work in London, Johannesburg, Kenya, or Nigeria. We operate a hybrid model where you will be required to be in the office at least three days a week
Responsibilities:
- Developing a Entrepreneur Academy strategy that leverages FFA’s unique experience and expertise in building tech start-ups and is informed by the complex challenges driving youth unemployment across the markets we work in
- Leading the design and execution of iterative experiments/pilots aimed at creating, validating, and refining all aspects of FFA’s Entrepreneur Academy program
- Overseeing qualitative research using methods such as qualitative interviews, experience mapping, service blueprints, and user journeys
- Build up a support team and manage a dispersed team across our key markets
- Representing FFA in the broader Entrepreneur Academy ecosystem to ensure that our program reflects emerging best practices and to identify opportunities for collaboration, partnerships and for amplification of our work
- Working with our Community & Communications team to develop effective branding and marketing materials and strategies for recruiting high-potential learners
- Working with our Embedded Impact and Learning team to design and implement a monitoring and evaluation framework that tracks the impact of the program, distils insights, and creates feedback loops that drive continuous improvement in programming.
The ideal candidate is or possesses…
- Leadership experience and ability that translates into execution. Likely demonstrated by previous experience leading the successful creation of a company or program that scaled
- Demonstrated ability to clearly distil a problem and subsequently identify solutions through iteration(e.g., by following the data and pivoting the approach) rather than charging forward with an initial hypothesis
- Digitally savvy, with a keen sense of the importance of tech in creating scalable delivery channels as well as the risks posed by poorly designed, tech-for-tech’s sake solutions
- Performance-focused in their approach to work. Comfortable with setting ambitious targets and managing to these, including the desire to be incentivized based on performance
- A passion for education in Africa, The candidate may not be an expert but views Entrepreneur Academy as a critical problem to solve and has empathy for the target market
- Experience working across markets in Africa
- Preference for candidates with a deep network in E4E or Venture Design that they would be able to tap into
- Preference for candidates that have: led a startup, worked in the impact space, or have worked in an Edutech context
Candidates should meet the following minimum requirements:
- At least 10 years of relevant experience building companies or programs in Africa
- Undergraduate or honours graduate degree in a related discipline
- Adept in developing and implementing cross-functional projects
- Strong collaboration and project management skills are a must.