Senior 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 lead this engagement. Working directly with senior counterparts across Tanzania’s economic development institutions and with Growth Teams’ leadership, you will be the person most responsible for turning our support into results with TISEZA. You will set the day-to-day agenda for the engagement rather than executing one handed to you, decide where to focus team resources, and be accountable for whether the engagement contributes to concrete economic outcomes.

Specifically, your responsibilities will include:

• Support TISEZA’s senior leadership and work embedded alongside their staff to translate the government’s agenda for economic transformation into productive investment, exports, and jobs.
• Diagnose the actual constraint behind a stalled reform or a stalled sector, and turn that diagnosis into a sequenced, adaptive action plan, revising it as new evidence comes in rather than defending the version you started with.
• Run action-oriented public-private problem-solving processes, serving as an honest broker between growth-oriented businesses and government to surface and work through constraints.
• Design and execute an investment promotion and facilitation strategy and develop high-quality investment cases and marketing materials for opportunities in priority sectors.
• Identify and clear bottlenecks blocking investment in priority sectors, coordinating with relevant government agencies to resolve them.
• Attract investment into priority sectors, building an active investor pipeline and using the investment cases to engage foreign and local investors proactively.
• Enhance and accelerate the development of special economic zones to catalyze new sectors through sharper targeting and an investor-oriented aftercare approach.
• Build TISEZA’s own capability to do this work, coaching counterpart staff so their own problem-solving grows, and strengthening the agency’s skills, systems, and structures so it can deliver without dependence on outside actors.
• Manage Growth Teams staff embedded in TISEZA, setting the quality bar for their work and developing them.
• Build and hold relationships that enable the work, including with senior government officials, private sector actors, and funding and implementation partners in-country, and represent Growth Teams in those relationships.
• Think strategically on Growth Teams’ behalf about where the engagement should evolve, spotting policy entrepreneurs and pockets of effectiveness to support, new entry points to advance the government’s agenda for economic transformation, and funding and partnership opportunities to sustain and scale the work.

Reporting

The Senior Partner will act as a Project Lead with TISEZA, report to a Growth Teams co-founder, and work closely with other Growth Teams staff embedded in Tanzania and with our long-standing in-country partner, Gatsby Africa.

About you

We are looking for a change-maker: someone who believes in the mission of development, understands from experience what it actually takes to generate real impact, and treats it as their life’s work rather than their job description.

• 8+ years of experience breaking down and solving 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 translate diagnosis into results.
• A track record of having actually driven something to an outcome: started a business, run an operation, delivered a reform, negotiated a deal, not only advised on one from the outside.
• Comfort operating with incomplete information, and the intellectual honesty to say when a plan is not working and change it.
• The political judgment and relational skill to operate effectively alongside senior government officials, and enough independence to run a program.
• Understanding of what sector development requires in practice, including global value chains and the competitive dynamics that shape investment location decisions.
• Demonstrated interest in, and ideally direct experience with, the relationship between government and the private sector in productive sector development.
• Strong collaborative, entrepreneurial and problem-solving mindset.
• Fluent English required; fluency in Swahili is a strong advantage, given the amount of daily work with Tanzanian civil servants and firms.
• Based in Tanzania, or willing to relocate, with the ability to travel domestically as required.