Strategy Fellow

About Us:

UpEnergy is the leading developer of anti-poverty climate impact projects in Africa. We accelerate decarbonization and while delivering long-term health and income benefits in local communities. We provide life-improving clean technologies and carbon reduction and capture projects that protect the local environment, deliver health benefits and cleaner air, and reduce poverty through financial savings and employment. Our project sustainably benefits and enables people to live better lives within more climate resilient communities.

To date, UpEnergy has built over 95 emission reduction projects, impacted over 4 million lives, and reduced over 3 million tons of CO2 Emissions across 10 countries. All UpEnergy’s work is characterized by respect for the people we serve, rigorous measurement, deep local knowledge and established teams on the ground to ensure the highest impact and results. We do all this through our commitment to drive long-term business growth through technical innovation, close customer engagement and increased data-driven decision making. The UpEnergy team continues to grow, across multiple African countries, from 20 to over 170+ full time team members in the past two years, reflecting the growth of the company for which we now seek incredible, like-minded talent who are excited to join us in delivering even more impact. Learn more here: www.upenergygroup.com

About the role:

The UpEnergy  Strategy Fellow is an exciting position that will provide the opportunity to work across multiple UpEnergy markets. If you are eager to gain incredibly rich, hands-on experience while being part of one of the fastest growing social enterprises in Africa and believe you’re up for the challenge (as well as a lot of fun!), we’d love to hear from you!

Why Join Us? 

Not your average 9-to-5

UpEnergy encourages teamwork, creativity, and we’re not afraid to get our hands dirty. We stay close to our market, understand our customers, and have a lot of fun while doing our work! If you’re looking for a conventional 9-to-5, you’d be missing out on our adventures!

Opportunity to do things in a new way

As one of the largest compliance credit issuers in Africa, we need to be constantly improving and rethinking our way of work. This means endless opportunities for a self-starter to initiate new ways of doing things or experimenting ways to help us improve.

Personal and Career Growth

Wouldn’t it be a pity to spend so much time working but not growing and learning? At UpEnergy we value both personal and professional growth, and we want to grow as a team. From classroom training to coffee chats to performance review, we want to support every team member to grow into the best version they can.

Create Lasting Impact

Our clean energy products bring a positive impact to both our planet earth and for the low-income communities we work in. We don’t just focus on sales – we follow up and truly understand our customers to make sure that they continue to benefit from our products. Your work will create much longer-lasting impact than what you can see!

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, scope out, implement and monitor strategic projects to improve the effectiveness and/or efficiency of our strategy, operation and execution capability across UpEnergy markets
• Work with leadership to develop strategic initiatives that support operational activities in countries
• Conduct in-depth industry research and analysis to identify market trends, competitor activity, and strategic opportunities.
• Conduct in depth research and develop performance improvement strategies
• Where there are key challenges and areas of underperformance at the country level, provide “hands-on” tactical support for countries to undertake sales turnaround strategies to deliver results
• Designing strategies to mitigate key commercial risks, e.g. market saturation, competitive landscape shifts and market entry
• Where required, support the country to undertake analysis and identify key issues impacting performance, as well as the key levers at their disposal to achieve results

Does this sound like you?

• At least 2-4 years in business / commercial strategy,  project management roles (or similar)

• Experience living and working in Africa (ideally 1-2 years minimum) is highly desirable

• General strategic, analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to breakdown a problem, conduct research and analysis, develop an evidenced-based strategic response, then communicate and align stakeholders around the direction

• Decent analytical skills and ability to synthesize and interpret qualitative and quantitative data into practical strategy recommendations. Critical thinking and analytical skills, with the ability to work with large amounts of data (including Excel modelling) to develop strategies and make rigorous decisions.

• Project management, with the ability to manage high-impact cross-functional strategic commercial projects end to end (including planning, analysis, conclusions and implementation) to achieve result

• Commercial capability across sales and marketing (particularly in B2C), with a demonstrated history of delivering strong commercial results

• Stakeholder engagement and communication skills

• Exceptional judgement, problem-solving skills, and ability to move fast both independently and collaboratively

• Excited to be part of UpEnergy’s growth story

• Open to significant travel to UpEnergy’s markets in sub-Saharan Africa

Language

Language: English. French/Portuguese is a big plus