Philanthropy Associate/Consultant - Prevail Fund - Nairobi
(2024-02)
- Conducted research on prospective high-net-worth donors, and supported the CEO and Philanthropy Director to develop pitch decks, pitch memos, and data models ahead of the CEO's meeting with the prospective individuals. This eventually led to bringing 4 additional donors on board, and successfully closing Prevail's US$1 billion education fund.
- Own donor stewardship for 3 high-net-worth individuals which entails developing decks, writing memos, and creating bespoke dashboards. Also lead deck development of our annual CEO presentation to all Prevail givers.
- Manage content sourcing from Prevail partners through photo and video shoots in coordination with partner teams and an external consultant, including arranging logistics; and coordinating content edits and writing photo stories after shoots.
- Co-manage Prevail's external communications in the absence of a communications team with the Philanthropy Director, including managing Prevail's LinkedIn page, monitoring emails from Prevails' website contact information, and adapting decks for external presentations for the rest of the team.
- Stewarded Prevail's website development and rebranding, and subsequently developed brand assets including an internal brand guide and templates.
- Supported the Philanthropy Director to grow the Philanthropy team from a team of 2 to 5 in 1.5 years through candidate sourcing, reviewing interview materials, and conducting "temp check" interviews with candidates before final offers.
Strategic Operations Associate - Komaza Forestry - Nairobi
(2023-06 - 2023-12)
Komaza shut down in December 2023 following a challenging fundraising landscape.
- Developed a forecasting pipeline model for Komaza's forestry products that determines the expected timber volumes, associated costs, and expected revenue based on expected tree purchases. The model combined operations across three divisions and would be used for operational planning and company-wide budgeting.
- Led cost analysis for log harvest, timber processing and sales teams to draw insights on spending, identify opportunities for cost-cutting, single out anomalies in transaction posting, and build thresholds and tools for future expense monitoring.
- Undertook a core data clean-up and reporting tool development framework for the company's expected application for Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, which will unlock access to timber export markets.
- Supported log harvests and timber processing teams in their two-week long two-year planning exercise, as they developed OKRS and an associated budget by developing templates, sourcing executive-team feedback, and ad-hoc analysis.
Research Fellow - Delta40 Venture Studio - Nairobi
(2022-02 - 2023-03)
- Deputized the Strategy Director to structure and communicate the organization's Research and Ideation vision and process through managing stakeholder feedback, testing discrete processes, and recruiting team members to drive the vision.
- Pioneered concept note development, structuring the concept format as well as the development process and tools, by writing and managing the concept note research work for the initial concept notes in agriculture.
- Assumed a Strategy and Operations role, providing ad-hoc support to get the studio up and running, including: Recruitment: handling end-to-end recruitment for the founding Field & Market Research team member, and provided needed support in recruiting the rest of the incoming support team.
- Office search: led the search and set-up work for a new office to house the Studio and future start-ups coming out of the Studio.
- Org-wide tooling: organically developed tools needed to manage key Studio processes including recruitment, office asset management, and petty cash management for fieldwork.
Strategy Analyst - One Acre Fund - Nairobi & Kigali
(2019-01 - 2020-10)
- Managed the team responsible for collecting repayments in Kenya during a four-month secondment. With a team of 3 direct reports and 8 dotted-line reports, we succeeded in recouping 97% of total credit.
- Led a year-long detailed research and analysis to support the Rwanda program to make a decision on whether or not to enter the MFI market in Rwanda. This included desk research, primary interviews with banking stakeholders in Kigali, and weekly support and updates to the taskforce charged with making the final decisions.
- Conducted analyses on organization-wide adoption of solar products and effects on various metrics such as adoption of seed and fertilizer, and client re-enrollment in future years. The analyses were used to inform a high-net-worth donor's continued support for the organization.
- Championed regular training for new and newly promoted staff within the Nairobi office in soft and hard accelerator skills. Through the one-year program, I oversaw the training of 12 rising leaders and the expansion of the program to 2 other major One Acre Fund offices.
- Supported regular recruitment for the Internal Consulting Team, as well as urgent roles to be filled across the organization through regular active reach outs to potential applicants.
Strategy Specialist/Senior Specialist - One Acre Fund - Nairobi & Jinja
(2015-11 - 2018-12)
- Led a year-long exercise to build a geospatial data repository using R programming language. The final product was a dashboard with key agricultural metrics for all of Sub-Saharan Africa, used as a go-to source for key expansion information.
- Carried out short-term secondary research and deck building to inform key department strategic questions, including: Researching overindebtedness to determine the potential effects of raising credit limits on client repayment.
- Conducting primary research to establish optimal salaries for field staff working with agro dealers in Rwanda.
- Identifying high-net-worth individuals across the globe who the organization could approach as potential donors.
- Building PowerPoint decks for org-wide strategy communications and executive donor meetings.
- Conducted data analyses of trial and operations data, to inform scaling of health insurance products in Kenya and designing repayment strategy in Uganda.
- Curated custom dashboards for various fast-paced teams to shorten decision-making time, including: A custom repayment dashboard for Malawi, to enable real-time monitoring of performance (built with R).
- A custom client management dashboard to support a trial on distribution of seeds and fertilizers through agro dealers in Tanzania (built in Microsoft Access).
- A custom repayment dashboard for Uganda to monitor collections and repayment performance (built in PowerBI).
Consultant - Career Break
(2020-11 - 2022-01)
I took a ~1.5-year-long break after 5 years at One Acre Fund for health reasons. During this period, I undertook several short-term consultancy projects in improving operational fidelity for a real estate company and a construction company.
