Technical Project Manager

Remote (based in Sub-Saharan Africa)
About the African Visionary Fund

The African Visionary Fund (AVFund) is unleashing breakthrough impact by driving resources to high-impact African founders. Our belief is simple—when tackling challenges and improving lives on the continent, proximity matters. Despite their potential for impact, African-led organizations receive less than 5.2% of all US foundation giving across Africa and less than 0.4% of all international funding. We envision a world where African visionaries are recognized and resourced by funders for their ability to accelerate progress and drive systems change on the continent.

The AVFund got started in 2020 and we are entering an exciting moment of growth as we expand our funding partnerships and our portfolio of African changemakers, launch our philanthropic systems change strategy, and grow our team to help us deliver on our ambitious vision. We have a small but mighty team of 7 spread across 3 time zones and 4 countries. In the last three years, we have raised close to $8M, committed over $4.5M in flexible multi-year funding to 25 African changemakers, been featured in the New York Times and The Guardian, and we are just getting started!

We’ve successfully achieved our target of raising $10M by the end of 2023. Our next milestone is to channel $50M or more in catalytic resources to African founders through a new fund by 2030. With the new fund launch in 2024/25, we plan to fund more organizations at different funding levels, we also plan to analyze our application data to encourage other funders to invest in locally-led organizations and for our advocacy to move more funds to African-founded and African-led organizations. We are a nimble start-up on a mission to live out our values in every aspect of our work. They will have a unique opportunity to build a portal that will enable our grantmaking process to be unique, centering the experience of our partners, and funders and putting people first.

We believe deeply in our core values of Transformative Impact, Equity, Solidarity, Trust and Integrity, and Striving to Learn. We strive to take the path aligned to these values at every decision juncture, even if the less values-aligned path might be faster or easier. We are looking for team members who are passionate and dedicated to these values and who will continue to challenge us to live into them at every turn.
 
Role Summary

We are a growing start-up fund and this role will ensure that our grantmaking and portfolio services stay equitable and less burdensome to our partners and those in our pipeline. The Technical Project Manager will lead the design, development, launch, and maintenance of two important software systems: Our application system and portfolio services system.

Initially, this role will focus on the design and development of an application system that will be used to support AVFund’s grantmaking processes (receiving and reviewing applications leading up to grantmaking decisions), in collaboration with our grantmaking team.

For the portfolio services system, the emphasis is to streamline and document all actions and data relating to supporting our portfolio organizations in their organizational growth journey – enabling us to see and tap trends and synergies in our fast-growing grant portfolio. The Technical Project Manager will smartly guide the integration of the two systems.

An important focus for this role is the user experience for the local organizations across Sub-Saharan Africa: ensuring easy access and keeping in mind different perspectives and barriers (language, technology, disability access, etc). Overall, our goal is to create a tech-enabled system that is aligned with our values of equity and solidarity.

The data and insights collected from the application and grantmaking processes and portfolio services will be used as a base for our advocacy work, helping us gain and communicate a deeper understanding of the needs of African-founded and African-led organizations. The system will also enable ways to share application information with funders interested in funding locally-led organizations.

The Technical Project Manager will work closely with our Programs and Operations Team based in SSA and will report to our Africa Co-CEO.

Key Responsibilities

Manage Portal Development

You will lead the start-to-end development of our portal that will support AVFund’s grantmaking processes. This includes defining the scope of work, stakeholder mapping, and consultant/technology sourcing to support the portal development, testing, and implementation of a user-friendly portal that integrates with other internal systems. We are interested in adopting existing technologies/platforms for this project. You will also act as asounding board for the senior leadership team, ensuring that the platform meets the organizational needs.

Pipeline Management

Continuously collaborate with the team to ensure that once the platform development is complete, the inputs are organized and sorted based on AVFund’s internal needs.

Insights & Analytics

Analyze data based on our Theory of Change and help the AVFund surface important insights

What You’ll Bring
Our ideal candidate is a strong technical Project Manager, with a proven interest in social impact & community development. They should have experience leading the development of robust technological products and systems in the African context, keeping in mind AVFund’s values.