The Senior Finance Manager is a member of the FP&A team and is a dedicated, internal resource to the Global Development – Africa Office program team. The focus of the Africa team is to enable collective impact for the foundation in Africa by influencing policy and finance towards key development priorities, strengthening capacity and enabling systems for delivery, and innovating and leveraging cross-cutting enablers for impact at scale. The Senior Finance Manager must be successful at influencing through effective partnership and communication skills and should have experience using financial analysis and modeling skills in advisory roles. Other critical skills for success include a solution-orientation and a proactive approach to responsibilities. The ability to synthesize data and a good sense of humor are key, and most importantly, the candidate must be passionate about the foundation’s mission, particularly in addressing the global health inequities that exist today. Financial experience navigating matrixed organizations and not for profit experience a plus. This role is based at the foundation’s Seattle, WA headquarters with travel to Africa.
This role will support the Africa offices (Nigeria, Ethiopia & South Africa) and many of our local African partners therefore the candidate should expect to travel internationally (mainly to Africa) approximately 30+% of the time.
Strategy & Financial Planning
- Identify, perform analysis and provide leadership with strategic and financial information to support effective financial resource allocation and decision-making during strategy refreshes and reviews.
- Work closely with PST leadership and Program Officers to translate PST strategy into long-term investment forecast and annual plan. Create dynamic financial planning tools that support decision-making and communication with senior leadership.
Grant Pipeline/Payout Management
- Monitor actuals and forecasts against budget, including major risks.
- Create financial monitoring tools, including workflow management and monitoring tools, and partner with PSTs to manage grant and contract spending.
- Identify operational and financial risks of executing against annual budgets and propose mitigating strategies to the PST leadership.
- Facilitate and drive conversations with team and divisional leadership around critical operational and financial risks
Investment Analysis
- Perform financial and risk analysis to support investment-making and investment management. Partner with PSTs to structure effective investments and develop appropriate mitigating strategies to manage risk.
- Proactively engages and leads on organization due diligence to drive local partner sustainability.
- Ability to translate investment and organizational due diligence risks into structuring alternative.
- Benchmark costs where possible and make recommendations and provide advice to Program Officers in negotiating investments and sizing payments.
- Analyze business plans and examine the economics of a certain business; also analyze the financial health of organizations through discussions with CFOs and reviewing financial statements.
Cross-foundational / Project-based
- Participate in PST-related and cross-foundation projects to develop tools and best practices in support of effective investment-making, pipeline management and operational excellence.
- Participate in complex transactions and special projects for PSTs with significant financial analysis component.
Other
- This role is responsible for high quality interactions and clear and consistent communications with grantees and partners in the field.
- Respond to internal and external portfolio data requests and analysis.
- Broad knowledge of finance (corporate, global markets)
- Knowledge of developing country economics and dynamics preferred, but not required
- Knowledge of risk management and due diligence
- Knowledge of systems and processes related to financial management
- Financial and strategic planning skills, including analytical, numerical and financial modeling skills
- Strong relationship building skills
- Business plan development and evaluation skills
- Ability to translate data into user-friendly tools/resources
- Ability to communicate complex financial concepts to partners with diverse backgrounds, including leadership, program staff, grantees and other foundation stakeholders
- Synthesizing skills/ability to absorb and quickly distill significant amounts of information
- Intellectual curiosity and a growth mindset
- Ability to read and analyze financial statements
- Ability to influence without formal authority
- Ability to manage and coordinate multiple projects and activities across multidisciplinary teams
- Negotiation skills
- Solution and action orientation
- Advanced Excel (pivot tables, VB Scripts, SQL) and facility with Tableau
- Bi-lingual English/French speaking would be beneficial in this role but not required