Partnerships Senior Officer/Director (South Africa)

Prevail partners with organizations in the Global South to scale solutions that can transform millions of lives. We’re looking for a hands-on leader to drive our work in South Africa – someone who can build and implement a country strategy, develop strong relationships, and work directly with partners to solve challenges on the ground.

This is an exciting opportunity to take a leading role in scaling proven solutions that can drive national impact. If you’re an operational leader in South Africa eager to shape the future of education and scale what works, we’d love to hear from you.

About Prevail

Prevail is a new foundation that’s working to mobilize bolder approaches to the world’s biggest problems. We raise large-scale philanthropic capital, and then direct it towards partner organizations with proven solutions. Then, we help those organizations grow - providing funding that increases over time and targeted support to help them reach national scale.

Our first initiative aims to improve foundational education for over 25 million children across 10 national governments in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Over the past two years, we have:

Made significant progress towards our ambitious fundraising targets
Hired 20+ mission-driven team members globally
Partnered with 20 organizations across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia
Run 15 execution projects to strengthen key functions for our partners.

This work is informed by our team’s collective experience; our co-founding board members have scaled social enterprises that total over 12,000 staff members and annual budgets exceeding $500 million.

We’ll be launching our website in mid-2025. Until then, you can find more information about us here.

About the role

South Africa is a priority country for Prevail. You will develop and execute a country-level strategy that maximizes foundational learning gains. This means working directly with partners to remove barriers to scale, identifying the strongest organizations to support, and building connections across South Africa’s education and policy landscape.

Build and execute our country-level strategy

Develop a long-term ecosystem strategy. Help shape and continually refine this strategy and work with and across partners to implement it.
Track key developments in the ecosystem. Actively maintain a network of key stakeholders and create opportunities for collaboration across South Africa’s political and educational landscape.

Identify and assess potential organizations:

Build a pipeline of potential partners and support the diligence process.
Conduct field visits, interview experts, and review impact data to assess the most promising organizations.

Support organizations to scale:

Work directly with organizations to identify and remove bottlenecks to scale.
Scope and lead projects that unlock growth opportunities and strengthen execution.
Spend significant time on the ground, troubleshooting alongside teams and ensuring they have what they need to succeed.

Cross-team collaboration

Partner with other partnerships officers at Prevail on projects that could impact the broader cohort. For example, bring together leaders to workshop specific opportunities and challenges.
Since Prevail is a start-up, there may be some additional work to ensure we are fulfilling all key activities necessary to run our fund – for example, supporting a specific donor request or researching new Government initiatives.

About you

Operational experience: You have at least 12 years of experience working in or alongside companies or organizations that have grown significantly. Experience in the education sector and/or with government systems is helpful, but not essential.
Hands on consulting/advisory experience: You’ve ideally worked directly with external partners or leadership teams to help solve their challenges.
Stakeholder coordination: In this role you’ll be working with partners, funders and policy makers on shared goals. You can bring stakeholders together, align them around shared goals, and deliver results collaboratively.
Consistent track record of results: You have a strong track record of directly achieving big goals. You’re comfortable leading projects independently, making decisions, and moving quickly.
Relationships and networking: You naturally build strong, lasting relationships and ideally have an established network within South Africa’s impact ecosystem.
Hands on: This role involves travel and on-the-ground support. You are drawn to the heart of the action and motivated by working alongside our partners to achieve shared goals.

Location: Remote within South Africa. We welcome flexibility to work from other locations periodically, but you must be based primarily in South Africa. Unfortunately, we cannot sponsor visas for this position.

Level/seniority: We are open to hiring at two different levels for this role - Senior Officer, or Director.

Compensation: Prevail offers a competitive salary based on experience, skills and location. We pay at the 50th percentile of our reference class. For this role we are open to hiring at multiple levels, therefore we share salary bands to candidates via email before they interview with us. Final offers are based on interview performance.

Benefits: We offer comprehensive health insurance, home workspace or coworking stipend, individual travel & collaboration budget, generous learning and development budget and computer/equipment stipends.

Start date: As soon as possible – applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Duration: Full-time. We are open to a part-time start if there’s a commitment to transitioning to full time later.

Application process:45-60 minute initial conversation with our people team
Technical round with hiring manager (~1hr)
Paid, take-home case study (~5hrs)
In-person panel interview (90 minutes) and 1-on-1s to meet others in the team

For more information

Ready to apply? If you’re excited to help us scale, apply now through our quick application form (no cover letter required). We review every application and aim to invite successful candidates for an informational call within 2-3 weeks.

This position was originally posted by Prevail Fund and has been curated by PurposePhil Career. To apply, please visit the original listing on the link. 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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Partnerships Senior Officer/Director