Job Title: Entrepreneurship Lead

Reports to: Director – Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Terms: Full-time, 24 months (Renewable Contract)

Location: Lusaka (Primary); Hybrid/Remote

Start Date: ASAP

About BongoHive

BongoHive supports entrepreneurs of any background, by enhancing skills, accelerating growth, strengthening networks of collaboration, and helping them navigate the barriers to growth. BongoHive delivers its support to enterprises through custom incubation and accelerator programmes.

Utilising this knowledge of the level and type of support required to build strong cohorts of startups and scale-up enterprises, BongoHive also provides custom interventions to SMEs and corporations through its Consult arm. The Consult team delivers tailored structured innovation and digital transformation consultancy that allows clients to grow their market through new ideas, products, approaches and technology.

BongoHive also offers flexible coworking offices for startups and entrepreneurs under the Hive Coworking brand.

Job role

The Entrepreneurship Lead manages the organisation’s entrepreneurial programmes. You will work with a variety of entrepreneurs across sectors and stages. This role ensures that we have the entrepreneurs’ interests at the core of the programme we design. The goal is to support entrepreneurs through the programmes to provide them with the best possibility of success.

In this role, you will work closely with our Project Lead, Innovation Lead, Community Liaison and Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation to support our clients in building products and services their customers love.

Duties and Responsibilities

Internal Entrepreneurship Management

• Manage the organisation’s entrepreneurship programmes, which include programme design, participant recruitment, facilitator and mentor management.
• Coordinate cross-department resources —finance, marketing, monitoring and evaluation.
• Prepare and manage programme budgets ensuring that programmes are run within the budget.
• Design and develop entrepreneurial programmes to meet clients’ needs.
• Train entrepreneurs at various levels.
• Support and coach junior staff to achieve their deliverables.

External Entrepreneurship Management

• Maintain existing partnership relations with government entities, private sector and non-governmental organisations as well as build new partnerships.
• Support business development efforts by proposal writing and looking for business opportunities.
• Represent BongoHive at various functions and events.
• Develop strategies to ensure that BongoHive is a leader in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Zambia and the continent.

Key Accountabilities:

• Recognize and stimulate unusual ideas with high potential impact.
• Use personal networks to link ideas and people that might not otherwise interact.
• Apply unique skills and interests to develop new opportunity domains.
• Ask tough and insightful questions.
• Provide constructive coaching and advice to entrepreneurs at various levels—early-stage to investor readiness .
• Drive entrepreneurship programmes through to completion.
• Ensure to exercise decision-making and independent judgement while being aligned with customers and management.

Expectations

• Ability to navigate through an area for which there is not yet a map (requires curiosity to pursue the interesting without getting distracted by the unimportant).
• Capable of fostering individual and collective creativity.
• Able to create processes and procedures for ideation, prototyping, and production.
• Able to balance risks against the potential rewards of the teams’ work, based on organisational tolerance for risk and organisational objectives, as well as other factors.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and thrive on change.
• High Emotional Intelligence. Specifically, empathy and active listening, the capacity to understand what others are feeling and thinking and engage them the right way.
• Active online presence and familiarity with social media (Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)
• This position requires flexible hours of work which might include working long hours and weekends.
• Have a willingness to learn. Share feedback, get feedback, and operate in a culture of being open-minded to grow.
• Ability to overcome critique.

Requirements:

• Proven experience in helping other people turn their entrepreneurial ideas into reality; work with multiple fluid team structures that require trust and integrity.
• Candidates must have previously held a leadership position(s).
• Candidates must have proven project management experience.
• Proven experience in the ability to understand wide-ranging, out-of-the-ordinary, technical, and business proposals in depth.
• Experience in organising and facilitating brainstorming workshops to bring new ideas to fruition.
• Experience in showing commercial sense, contract structuring and negotiation, and business strategy development.
• A proven understanding of lean methodology.
• A deep insight into business and technology in different industries and disciplines
• Positive, enthusiastic, and able to adapt to fast-changing situations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and interpersonal skills.
• Social media proficiency – overall engagement.
• Assertive and have a strong drive to develop those around you.

Experience

• Master’s degree or equivalent in business, computer science, innovation, entrepreneurship, strategy, or related fields.
• 3+ years of relevant project management, business, or, product development, digital transformation experience.
• Passion for and understanding of entrepreneurial communities.
• Experience working in a dynamic environment.
• Experience using varied problem-solving methodologies (preferred).
• Knowledgeable of EPIC communication techniques (nice to have).
• Finance professional qualification (ZICA, ACCA, CIMA) added advantage