Junior Partner, Tanzania

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 be part of the team leading this engagement, working directly with senior counterparts across Tanzania’s economic development institutions and with Growth Teams’ leadership to deliver concrete results with TISEZA.

Specifically, your responsibilities will include:

• Support TISEZA’s senior leadership and work embedded alongside their staff, contributing to efforts to translate the government’s agenda for economic transformation into productive investment, exports, and jobs.
• Contribute to diagnosing the constraints behind stalled reforms or stalled sectors, and support the development of sequenced, adaptive action plans, updating analysis as new evidence comes in.
• Support the design and facilitation of public-private problem-solving processes, helping surface and work through constraints between growth-oriented businesses and government.
• Support the design and execution of an investment promotion strategy and contribute to developing high-quality investment cases and marketing materials for opportunities in priority sectors.
• Help identify bottlenecks blocking investment in priority sectors and support coordination with relevant government agencies to resolve them.
• Contribute to investor outreach and pipeline development, using investment cases to engage foreign and local investors under the guidance of senior team members.
• Support efforts to enhance the development of special economic zones, contributing to sector targeting analysis and investor-oriented aftercare approaches.
• Support the development of TISEZA’s own capabilities, contributing to the coaching of counterpart staff and the strengthening of the agency’s skills and systems.
• Contribute to relationship management with government officials, private sector actors, and partners, supporting senior team members in representing Growth Teams in key relationships.
• Stay alert to new entry points, policy entrepreneurs, and pockets of effectiveness within the government’s agenda, flagging these to senior team members to inform the strategic direction of the engagement.

Reporting

The Junior Partner reports to the Senior Partner, Tanzania, who will be leading this engagement, and works closely with other Growth Teams staff embedded in Tanzania.

About you

We want someone motivated by our mission, who understands from experience what it takes to turn analysis into real change, and is energized by that challenge.

• 4+ years of experience working on 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 move from diagnosis to results.
• Early evidence of having driven something to an outcome: contributed to a reform, supported a business decision, helped deliver a project, not only produced analysis from the outside.
• Strong analytical and writing skills: the ability to turn messy, incomplete information into clear memos, investment cases, or decision documents that someone can actually act on.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with demonstrated experience engaging productively with diverse stakeholders including government officials, private sector actors, and development partners; early exposure to stakeholder management or public-private dialogue is a plus.
• Comfort operating with incomplete information, and the intellectual honesty to flag when something is not working and adapt accordingly.
• Demonstrated interest in economic growth, structural transformation, or productive sector development in Tanzania or comparable contexts, with some direct exposure to the relationship between government and the private sector in productive sector development.
• Understanding of what sector development requires in practice, including global value chains and the competitive dynamics that shape investment location decisions, is a plus.
• A collaborative, entrepreneurial and problem-solving mindset, with the patience and grit to get things done in uncertain and challenging professional environments.
• Fluent English required; fluency in Swahili is a strong advantage given the volume of daily work with Tanzanian civil servants and firms.
• Based in Tanzania, or willing to relocate, with the ability to travel domestically as required.