About the Africa Jobs Fund

Africa Jobs Fund is a philanthropic investment fund working to catalyze high-productivity jobs as the durable route out of poverty in Africa. We believe that moving people into higher-productivity work is the best way to improve quality of life for low-income people at scale, and we pursue this through two targeted pillars: export manufacturing and international labor mobility.

Our operating model is to launch pioneer firms that open new pathways for African exports and labor to integrate with global demand. We mobilize talent and capital against prioritized opportunities, typically through a scoping investment followed by a pilot investment structured as revenue-based financing or concessional debt, with the aim of recycling capital and unlocking downstream commercial funding.

We sit at an unusual intersection. We hold ourselves to the analytical rigor of the Effective Altruism and GiveWell-adjacent funding world, anchored by a headline target of a cost per Doubled Consumption Year at or below $10. At the same time, the entities we back are real, dynamic, early-stage businesses operating in difficult markets.

You can read more about our approach to impact here.

Role background

Most M&E frameworks were built for one of two worlds. Randomized-trial-grade evaluation gives credibility to funders but imposes costs, administrative burden, and constraints on operational flexibility that are not suited to new startup businesses. On the other hand, light-touch reporting keeps portfolio firms nimble but fails to produce the causal, welfare-linked evidence that rigorous funders expect.

We are looking for someone who can build an M&E strategy that is credible to a sophisticated impact-funding audience while staying proportionate to the reality of fast-growing pioneer businesses. This is a strategic design and judgment role and success would be a measurement approach that our funders trust and our portfolio companies barely notice.

What you will do

Design AJF’s overall M&E strategy and theory of change measurement, translating our thesis on high-productivity jobs into a defensible, welfare-linked evidence framework.
Own the methodology behind our headline Cost per Doubled Consumption Year metric: define it precisely, pressure-test the assumptions, and make it auditable and comparable to GiveWell and Coefficient Giving standards.
Select and adapt the right evaluation methods for each portfolio activity, drawing pragmatically from the full toolkit: RCTs and quasi-experimental designs where they earn their keep, alongside lighter approaches such as pre-post tracking, benchmark comparisons, administrative-data linkage, and structured qualitative evidence.
Build measurement that is proportionate to business burden, embedding data collection into the normal operations of portfolio firms rather than bolting on parallel reporting systems.
Set portfolio-level standards and a tiered evaluation approach, so that scoping investments, pilots, and scaled activities each carry a level of measurement matched to their stage and stakes.
Advise founders and deal teams during diligence and structuring, so that measurability is designed in from the start rather than retrofitted.
Produce credible impact reporting for anchor donors and prospective funders in the Coefficient Giving and GiveWell-adjacent universe.
Establish the data infrastructure and cadence for ongoing monitoring, flagging when a pathway is underperforming against its cost-effectiveness threshold.

Who you are

Deep expertise in impact measurement, applied microeconomics, development economics, or a closely related evidence discipline, ideally with hands-on experience across both rigorous and rapid evaluation methods.
Fluent in the language and standards of the effective altruism and cost-effectiveness world. You can hold a conversation about marginal cost-effectiveness, moral weights, and counterfactual impact, and you understand why a Doubled Consumption Year is a meaningful unit.
Grounded in operating reality. You have worked with or inside real businesses or field programs and understand the cost of measurement, so you instinctively look for the lightest method that still answers the question.
Comfortable with ambiguity and building from a blank page.
A clear writer who can make a rigorous case to a skeptical, quantitatively literate funder.
Specific interest (and ideally prior experience) in evaluating private sector firms and economic growth (i.e. as opposed to a track record focused only on the evaluation of health and education interventions).
Bonus: familiarity with labor markets, migration, manufacturing, or African markets specifically.

We are open to candidates who are currently pursuing a post-graduate degree or who have other work commitments, so long as they can reliably commit 5–10 hours per week to this work.

To apply

Complete and submit the form below and tell us why you are interested in the Africa Jobs Fund and the role.

This position was originally posted by Africa Jobs Fund and has been curated by PurposePhil Career. To apply, please visit the original listing on the "apply" link on the side. We are not affiliated with the employer organization of this job ad or consultancy, and provide this curated listing as a service to our users.

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