Senior Business Analyst SHONA

SHONA is a community for entrepreneurs building Good Businesses that are creating good jobs, improving quality of life, creating wealth, building industries and their communities.
By 2030, our goal is to build a community of at least 1,000 Good Businesses positively benefitting at least 35 million people.
Why Good Business?
We believe that a diverse range of thriving small, medium and large businesses, spread across East Africa and across all sectors, are the biggest opportunity to unlock East Africa’s social and economic growth, through job creation, increase in the access of much needed products and services, and higher economic output.
To thrive and achieve this success continually and over the long term, these SMEs need to be well run and be highly responsible in their dealings with staff, customers, business partners and the local communities where they are based. This is good business as a strategy, and at SHONA we call these Good Businesses.
A Good Business is a well run business that is good for customers, employees, owners, value chain partners, the environment and the local communities where it is based.
We exist to transform East Africa’s economies and societies by building a thriving East Africa private sector driven by Good Businesses.

How SHONA builds Good Businesses
We partner with Entrepreneurs, Corporates, NGOs, Investors, and Development Partners to design and implement initiatives to build Good Businesses. We currently run two programs:
• Agrifood Founders Growth Program. Initiatives helping entrepreneurs build Good Businesses contributing to a sustainable food system in East Africa.
Female Founders Growth Program. Initiatives helping female founders to build Good Businesses.
Since 2013, we have worked with 720+ SMEs in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda, operating in multiple sectors including: Agriculture, Financial Services, Healthcare, Education, Water & Sanitation, Energy and Manufacturing.

Your Mission
SHONA is planning to launch a new initiative under our Female Founders Growth Program, to identify and support female-driven businesses in WASH, climate smart food production, agriculture, climate change, nutrition, digitalisation or skills development sectors in Uganda and Kenya. This initiative will focus on:
• Building the capacity of 40 growth oriented female-driven businesses in Uganda and Kenya
• Increasing the flow of capital to these female-driven businesses
As a Senior Business Analyst, your role will involve working with the program team to lead the recruitment and selection of some of the female-driven businesses and support some of the female-driven businesses to benefit from the initiative.
We are looking for up to three Senior Business Analysts to support this initiative.

Key Responsibilities
• Recruitment and Selection: Support the recruitment and selection of female driven businesses.
• Business Diagnostics: Lead the review of business models and other data sets of the selected businesses
• including market segmentation, positioning, competitor analysis, industry trends, etc to assess business health and identify operational and strategic gaps and growth opportunities and draft reports with recommendations for improvement.
• Financial Analysis: Analyze business financials, strategies and operational systems and design excel
• dashboards and scorecards that provide visibility into KPIs, effectiveness of current strategies and key business trends or drivers.
• Financial Modeling: Build financial models and analyze pricing models, unit economics and capitalization tables to support the decision analysis on potential participants in the program and future investments into SMEs.
• Industry Research and Analysis: Research and conduct sectoral and industry analysis,and develop insights to support acceptance of businesses into our programs and investment decisions into businesses. This will also involve validating our selection criteria to ensure relevant data points are tracked from the beginning of the program.
• Reporting and Analysis: Collect and analyze financial and operational data sets from program SMEs to develop and deliver/present reports identifying positive and negative trends, notable risks, opportunities for revenue growth and propose actionable recommendations for improvement to management teams.
• Business Planning: Support management teams to develop and implement strong business plans by scrutinizing strategic directions, including market segmentation, positioning, competitor analysis, industry trends, etc
• Curriculum Quality Assurance: Ensuring the design and execution of the curriculum is aligned with and meeting the needs of the businesses in their respective market contexts.
• Account Management and entrepreneur engagement: As part of your role, you are expected to lead account management, working closely with assigned businesses and entrepreneurs to ensure key deliverables are met and the businesses benefit from the initiative. This may include travel to the location of the businesses.
• Doing whatever it takes to support project teams and the businesses we work with: We are a small
• entrepreneurial team that steps up when there is work to be done. At times, you’ll be expected to work outside of just your role to contribute to our team’s overall efforts.

Qualifications
Education/Work Experience
• Bachelor’s degree majoring in business, finance, accounting or economics preferred
• At least 5 years experience in banking, accounting, management consulting and investment Advisory

Skills + Capabilities
• Highly numerical and analytical i.e you are very comfortable with numbers and able to analyze large sets of qualitative and quantitative data
Highly proficient with excel, MS Word and MS Powerpoint. Proficiency with Power PBI is an added advantage.
• You have experience stepping into ambiguous and disorganized situations and bringing structure.
• You have experience building financial models, cap tables and conducting quantitative and qualitative financial analysis.
• You have experience in developing business plans, building and managing dashboards and analyzing data from diverse sources.
• You have strong communication skills i.e ability to write and present investment memoranda in both written and oral communication
• You have experience working on teams with diverse cultures.
• You are able to quickly build rapport and maintain strong relationships with teams, entrepreneurs, partners and investors
• You are able to coach and support entrepreneurs to finding their own solutions to challenges
• You have the ability to strategically think and interact with management teams to prepare, understand and present analytical reports

SHONA Foundational Skills
These are core foundational skills that apply to all members of our team.
• Independence/Self Starter – Ability to assess and initiate things independently. Ability to manage a growing task/project without much guidance or structure. A person who is sufficiently motivated or ambitious to work on their own initiative without needing direction. Shows Initiative and is proactive in taking action.
• Business Acumen – Ability to understand how a business operates and makes money, and to proactively anticipate, navigate and leverage trends impacting the business.
• Proven at accomplishing results – Diligent executor, result driven and methodical in their execution.
• Team collaborator – Ability to work as a team to achieve the common goal.
• Life-long learner – Has a growth mindset, is curious and demonstrates a commitment to continued learning and development
• Intellectual curiosity – The desire to want to know more, to poke around in blind spots and new areas, to make connections between different challenges and opportunities to cross-pollinate ideas.
• Resilience and perseverance – The ability to thrive in a variety of circumstances.
• High emotional intelligence – Self-aware, self-regulated, strong interpersonal skills, curious about people and empathetic.
• Relationship building – Ability to quickly build rapport and engagement with people, including listening and clear communication.
• Analytical skills – Ability to collect, gather, visualize and analyze information in detail and see a problem or situation from different points of view. Analytical skills allow you to solve complex problems by making decisions in the most effective way.
• Project management – Ability to plan, execute, coordinate – leading to completion of the work of a team, achieving specific goals and meet specific success criteria in the required timeframe
• Technology Savvy – Ability to use a computer and online tools to support effective delivery of SHONA work, including but not limited to Google Drive, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint and Email.

SHONA Values
We are a values-driven organization, and we love to work with people that share these values:
• We are People focused
• We Do and Do better
• We Bet on potential
• We are Bold and Courageous
• We are Honest and Transparent