Entrepreneurship in the territories: is it the right time?
Job Overview
We are seeking a highly motivated technical ‘product’ delivery expert in the role of a Country Operations Associate to join our team. In this role, you will act as the key technical and programmatic advisor to country representatives across Francophone Africa. Your primary focus is on helping design, implement, and scale high-impact Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) to achieve inclusion at a population scale.
The ideal candidate must possess a builder mindset, a bias for technical action, and a background rooted in technical product management, software engineering leadership, or systems architecture. We are open to candidates with backgrounds in public policy, economics, political science, or international development as long as there is demonstrated willingness to understand technology and apply it to improve people’s lives. Candidates should be resourceful, comfortable working with ambiguity, and ready to roll up their sleeves with a ‘do what it takes’ mindset in start-up mode to drive impact in the countries we work with - with some impatience.
DPI components you will focus on include data-sharing, identity, trust infrastructure, and payment systems. To learn more about design thinking and the implementation approach visit docs.cdpi.dev.
What does a day in the life of a Country Operations Associate look like
As a Country Operations Associate, your day is centered around bridging the gap between national policy objectives and scalable technical execution in the francophone Africa region.
- Technical strategy note (Morning): You begin by drafting a technical strategy note, reflecting technology capabilities country-one should build to meet their economic inclusion mandate. You work with the technical architects in the team to refine your drafts.
- Use-case and Advisory consultation (Mid-day): You host a virtual session with the technical and programmatic counterparts from a country-two's IT ministry. You act as the subject matter expert, providing hands-on guidance on DPGs/open-source solutions, driving them towards use-cases, or reviewing the progress of a proof of concept/ internal build.
- Product building and internal brainstorm (Afternoon): You build an ‘advisory product’ using AI to help countries better understand technology and policy choices, and their impact on citizens’ lives.
- Stakeholder Alignment (Evening): You hold a strategic meeting with country-one’s representative and a multilateral development bank to align on funding and policy frameworks. Your role is to communicate the technical roadmap clearly, identify the local "country champions" who will drive adoption, and diplomatically address any unstated political or operational concerns.
Key Responsibilities
Owning technical strategy and roadmap:
- Understand needs and priorities, transforming policy problems into DPI implementation opportunities.
- Work with technical architects to evaluate, adapt, and drive the adoption of DPG/open-source DPI components, ensuring technical fit for country-specific needs.
- Co-create a technology strategy and an implementation roadmap with the country teams.
- Offer technical support, conduct training sessions, and develop learning materials on DPI.
- Understand constraints (capacity / resources) and actively work to de-bottleneck.
Own and maintain a country advisory portfolio:
- Identify high-potential countries and teams.
- Build and maintain relationships with country representatives and government officials.
- Collaborate with CDPI team members to leverage open-source solutions to meet country-specific needs and support the development of a regional DPI ecosystem.
- Engage with policy partners like AfDB, WB or UNDP to support countries with policy frameworks, technical advice, tech implementation and funding.
Support DPI implementations:
- Orchestrate DPI implementations using the DaaS way, or with other ecosystem partners.
- Track technical design choices, adherence to DPI principles, use-case focus, and build timelines; actively seek ways to speed up implementations
- Defining clear success metrics and managing the iterative process required to scale solutions to millions of users.
- Build and maintain relationships with country representatives and government officials, and engage with policy partners like ADB, WB, or UNDP to support countries with policy frameworks and funding.
