Associate, Product

Incentives are Aceli’s primary “product” offering and are used to unlock increased private sector lending to agricultural SMEs. The Product team plays a critical role within the organization and consists of two functions: a product design function, which is responsible for market research and incentive adjustment calibration; and a product operations function, which oversees loan reviews, incentive payments, and data. Across these two functions, the team: oversees information-gathering to help Aceli assess if its product is well calibrated to the market; provides input into the design of the incentive program, alongside other senior leaders within the organization; manages the rollout of adjustments to the program; ensures that loans submitted by lenders are aligned with Aceli’s guidelines; and manages incentive payouts to lenders.

The role holder will support the product design function. Specifically, the role holder will support the Manager, Product across various workstreams: our annual benchmarking exercise, which is an extensive, data-heavy market research piece conducted with Aceli’s lending partners; as well as our annual audit, incentive budget modeling, incentive adjustment design, roll-out, and monitoring. This individual will also be involved in developing web-based dashboards for internal and external use.

Key responsibilities:

• Support in multi-month process for Aceli’s annual benchmarking and annual audit: data collection with lenders, data cleaning and data analysis
• (Related to the above) Support in the internal synthesis / distillation of the findings from the annual benchmarking exercise. This may include PowerPoint design, drafting of memos, etc. intended for public-facing audiences
• Support the incentives product design / adjustment process – from helping with putting the evidence together, modeling/estimating the impact of potential changes, and working with multiple teams within Aceli and with lenders to implement these
• Support and ultimately manage ad-hoc data / analysis projects with lenders – for example, investigating the performance of one aspect of our incentive program with a subset of lenders
• Support in the annual incentive budgeting process – collating and doing the first cut of the analysis, providing input and helping to sense-check the assumptions and outputs of the model
• Develop and maintain data dashboards built on PowerBI for internal and external use.
• Support the CEO, MD, and Executive Office in running special analyses for internal and external communications – including for periodic reports to the Board, Steering Committee, as well as current and prospective funders.

Qualifications

• Minimum of four years of work experience, with at least two years in a management/strategy consulting firm, with demonstrated upward mobility during your tenure
• Excellent PowerPoint development skills
• Excellent Excel analysis skills. Bonus for data visualization skills in PowerBI
• Familiarity with the agri-SME sector in East Africa. Beneficial if this knowledge extends to agri-SME lending
• Bonus for previous work experience in finance or investing
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, as demonstrated by experience developing senior-level and external-client communications
• Other attributes: strong attention to detail, curious and entrepreneurial mindset, excellent time management, and openness to feedback
• Personal commitment to having a positive impact on farmer livelihoods and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa
• A bachelor’s degree in a data or finance related field

Additional Information

Aceli is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage all qualified applicants to apply.

Interested candidates should submit a one-page cover letter, expressing their interest and qualifications for the role, along with an updated CV by Friday, January 31st, 2025. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis.