Senior Partner

Growth Teams mission is to lift millions of people into prosperity through productive jobs and higher incomes. To do so, we work with governments to find and launch new export industries–to kickstart export booms. We do this by forming teams with government leaders, combining policy development with the management systems to deliver.

Our approach is demand-driven. We partner with reform-minded policy entrepreneurs inside government when there is a window to act, and we shape our support around what the context calls for rather than a copy-paste blueprint. We don’t hand over reports that gather dust or stand up parallel units that work around the system. Instead, we help government teams build lasting capabilities by solving real problems alongside them–learning by doing. 

Much of that work sits at the interface between government and business. We engage firms directly to surface what is really holding back their growth, help government coordinate the full range of public inputs needed to address those barriers, and establish feedback loops to adapt that support as market realities shift. We stay on the government’s side of the table, with a horizon beyond typical project cycles. Success is measured in real economic outcomes–new investment, exports, and jobs–and in whether our counterparts can keep driving them after we leave.

Established in 2022, we work across Africa and India, with engagements in Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, Ghana, and Senegal, as well as Goa and Meghalaya in India. Selected results include:

• Rwanda – We supported the Rwanda Development Board to kickstart the IT and business process outsourcing sector, helping create 4,000+ formal jobs and establish firms now among Rwanda's largest private employers.
• Tanzania – We helped craft the national development strategy with the Planning Commission (with Gatsby Africa), enabling senior policymakers to identify high-growth sectors and the actions needed to develop them, and worked with the investment agency, TISEZA, to develop investment cases in agro-processing and reform the country’s SEZ framework. 
• Malawi – We led action-learning workshops with the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Malawi Investment and Trade Centre, identifying high-growth sectors and new strategies to facilitate exports.
• Senegal – We supported the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Cooperation to evaluate Senegal's industrial policy, convening 20+ government institutions in learning workshops and identifying key reforms in priority sectors.

We are now scaling up our work in Tanzania and Ghana, with additional opportunities in the pipeline.

Our team–led by Kartik Akileswaran, Jonathan Mazumdar, and Chema Triki–brings many years of experience working with and advising governments in Sub-Saharan Africa and India on investment, job creation, and economic growth. Our advisory board includes experts in this space, such as Stefan Dercon, Lant Pritchett, Kunal Sen, Lindsay Whitfield, and Pallavi Roy.

Growth Teams is a non-profit organization that has received support from Coefficient Giving, Gatsby Africa, Mulago Foundation, Livelihood Impact Fund, African Climate Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Scott Alexander’s ACX Grants, FCDO, and the EU ICR Facility, among others.

About the role

Growth Teams is working with the Tanzania Investment and Special Economic Zones Authority (TISEZA), the country's investment and export promotion agency, to attract investment into productive sectors that boost exports and create jobs.

Since 2023, we have provided strategic guidance to the Planning Commission to shape Tanzania’s Vision 2050 (Dira 2050), the new national development strategy, facilitating high-level workshops with leaders from across government on policy implementation and assessing high-potential sectors for economic transformation. We are now ramping up our support to TISEZA, one of the key government agencies responsible for delivering on Dira 2050. We will support TISEZA to prioritize promising opportunities within high-potential sectors, attract the private investment needed to kickstart them, and clear the bottlenecks that hold back exports and jobs.

You will lead this engagement. Working directly with senior counterparts across Tanzania's economic development institutions and with Growth Teams' leadership, you will be the person most responsible for turning our support into results with TISEZA. You will set the day-to-day agenda for the engagement rather than executing one handed to you, decide where to focus team resources, and be accountable for whether the engagement contributes to concrete economic outcomes.

Specifically, your responsibilities will include:

• Support TISEZA’s senior leadership and work embedded alongside their staff to translate the government’s agenda for economic transformation into productive investment, exports, and jobs.
• Diagnose the actual constraint behind a stalled reform or a stalled sector, and turn that diagnosis into a sequenced, adaptive action plan, revising it as new evidence comes in rather than defending the version you started with.
• Run action-oriented public-private problem-solving processes, serving as an honest broker between growth-oriented businesses and government to surface and work through constraints.
• Design and execute an investment promotion and facilitation strategy and develop high-quality investment cases and marketing materials for opportunities in priority sectors
• Identify and clear bottlenecks blocking investment in priority sectors, coordinating with relevant government agencies to resolve them.
• Attract investment into priority sectors, building an active investor pipeline and using the investment cases to engage foreign and local investors proactively.
• Enhance and accelerate the development of special economic zones to catalyze new sectors through sharper targeting and an investor-oriented aftercare approach
• Build TISEZA’s own capability to do this work, coaching counterpart staff so their own problem-solving grows, and strengthening the agency’s skills, systems, and structures so it can deliver without dependence on outside actors..
• Manage Growth Teams staff embedded in TISEZA, setting the quality bar for their work and developing them.
• Build and hold relationships that enable the work, including with senior government officials, private sector actors, and funding and implementation partners in-country, and represent Growth Teams in those relationships.
• Think strategically on Growth Teams’ behalf about where the engagement should evolve, spotting policy entrepreneurs and pockets of effectiveness to support, new entry points to advance the government’s agenda for economic transformation, and funding and partnership opportunities to sustain and scale the work.

Reporting

The Senior Partner will act as a Project Lead with TISEZA, report to a Growth Teams co-founder, and work closely with other Growth Teams staff embedded in Tanzania and with our long-standing in-country partner, Gatsby Africa.

About you

We are looking for a change-maker: someone who believes in the mission of development, understands from experience what it actually takes to generate real impact, and treats it as their life's work rather than their job description.

• 8+ years of experience breaking down and solving complex economic, institutional, or organisational problems in government, consulting, entrepreneurship, or a private-sector operating role. The domain matters less than a demonstrated ability to translate diagnosis into results.
• A track record of having actually driven something to an outcome: started a business, run an operation, delivered a reform, negotiated a deal, not only advised on one from the outside.
• Comfort operating with incomplete information, and the intellectual honesty to say when a plan is not working and change it.
• The political judgment and relational skill to operate effectively alongside senior government officials, and enough independence to run a program.
• Understanding of what sector development requires in practice, including global value chains and the competitive dynamics that shape investment location decisions.
• Demonstrated interest in, and ideally direct experience with, the relationship between government and the private sector in productive sector development.
• Strong collaborative, entrepreneurial and problem-solving mindset
• Fluent English required; fluency in Swahili is a strong advantage, given the amount of daily work with Tanzanian civil servants and firms.
• Based in Tanzania, or willing to relocate, with the ability to travel domestically as required.

Interested in Applying?

Deadline: 31st August - Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis; early applications are encouraged. 

Location: Dar es Salaam, with travel within Tanzania.

Contract: Full-time.

Compensation: Competitive, based on experience.

Application: To apply, complete the application form here: https://forms.gle/YVTc14oLHQeYdgNh7 

You will be asked to upload your resume/CV and to respond to the prompts below:

• Tell us about a time a plan you were responsible for did not survive contact with reality, and what you did when it diverged from what you expected.
• What is the most important constraint you think is holding back economic transformation in Tanzania today, and why?
• Tell us about your specific interest in this role and what you expect to get out of it.

If your experience does not perfectly match the list above, but you believe you are the right person for this job, tell us why in your application. We would rather hear that case than lose a good change-maker to a checklist.