Our mission

CDC is the UK’s development finance institution. Founded 70 years ago, they invest in the most challenging markets of Africa and South Asia with the aim of supporting economic development. CDC has net assets of £5.1bn, with over 1300 growing businesses in their portfolio. Last year CDC committed over £1 billion of capital across 50 transactions. CDC is wholly owned by the UK government, who has committed a further £3.5bn of capital for CDC to deploy over the next two to three years. They are expanding their presence in Africa and South Asia with further new offices openings planned.

CDC take an entrepreneurial approach to investment. They think innovatively about ways to deploy their capital, attract and mobilise other investors, and drive transformational impact. Primarily, CDC invests to achieve impact and a financial return which is reinvested into more businesses. Their aim is to create jobs and accelerate economic prosperity and focus on sectors that will do this; manufacturing, food and agriculture, infrastructure, financial institutions, construction, health and education. CDC works with likeminded ambitious people who are primarily motivated by their mission to deliver impact. They are currently a growing team of over 400 and place immense value on diversity within the organisation.

Team and role overview

Purpose

• CDC’s Development Impact Management team is market-leading and provides technical leadership to assess, manage and evaluate the impact of our investments. CDC’s objective is to push the boundaries in impact management within a world-class impact framework. So we take an active approach to impact management, utilising an impact management framework based on the Impact Management Project’s consensus and the Operating Principles for Impact Management.
• We embed impact professionals within our investment teams working side by side to actively manage the impact of every investment we make. This approach is designed to create deals teams with the professional capability and expertise to reflect our mandate to improve people’s lives and make a financial return.
• CDC’s Development Impact Management team is currently 14 people and growing it operates a matrix structure of Managers organised by product or region (e.g. equity, funds & S. Asia) supported by embedded leads for each sector (e.g. food & agriculture, financial institutions etc) and generalists who work across products, sectors and regions.
• CDC has a longstanding commitment to Infrastructure (we have deployed nearly $3bn to Infrastructure projects historically and the value of our Infrastructure investments currently represent about one third of CDC’s total portfolio). In 2019 our investees generated almost 57GWh of electricity. We cover key sub-sectors of energy (power generation, transmission & distribution, decentralized energy, gas midstream), transports & logistics, water and waste management investing both equity and debt. Example investments include Globeleq, Gridworks, Ayana, Nachtigal and Greenlight Planet.

Responsibilities
The role is focussed on ensuring effective and high-quality impact management consistent with CDC’s Impact Framework for the Infrastructure portfolio. The Manager will form part of the Impact Management Leadership team and will be given oversight responsibility for the Infrastructure portfolio. The position will be expected to play an active role in the investment process, working with investees to enhance their impact and supporting the development of the wider Development Impact team. Specific responsibilities will be driven by priorities and the dynamic needs of the team at the time, but are expected to include the following:

• Leadership of impact management, including accountability for impact management for the Infrastructure portfolio and relationship management (internally and with investee companies):
  • The Manager will provide impact leadership for infrastructure portfolio. This will include CDC’s strategies, pipeline and portfolio management activities and entail effective impact management prioritisation, resourcing, issue identification and resolution.
  • Building CDC’s impact management capability for infrastructure and providing impact management decisions and advice which is consistent with CDC’s Impact Management Framework, priorities and precedents.
  • Supporting the development of impact-led investment strategies within Infrastructure supporting origination of investments where CDC can make the greatest difference to people’s lives.
• Delivery of impact management activities (supported by Sector Executive and cross-cutting resources) for CDC’s infrastructure portfolio:
  • Assess development impact as part of the investment due diligence process. Working seamlessly with investment team colleagues to inform the investment decision and define the impact objectives.
  • Develop a high-quality development impact dashboard for each investment based on the Impact Management Project’s consensus which will involve desk research, facilitating discussions, due diligence and managing external suppliers where necessary. As part of the deal team supporting investment professionals through the investment process including at Investment Committee.
  • Actively manage and support investments to enhance the impact by participating in the design and implementation of initiatives and partnerships. Coaching investee company employees and sharing knowledge and lessons learnt of best practice.
  • Define the monitoring plan for the investment and collect the impact metrics to track actual impact of investments, ensuring analysis is timely and high quality.
  • Assess how the portfolio and investments are performing against their initial development objectives, determining when course corrections are required and completing exit reviews, feeding back learning to the investment team and the broader organisation.
• Building the capability of the Development Impact team and our impact framework and processes:
  • Support the continual development of CDC’s impact management framework ensuring tools, systems and capabilities remain world class. All Manager roles are expected to lead on developing specific areas of the framework.
  • Represent CDC and build, maintain and leverage a network of leading impact managers in the infrastructure sector. Build CDC’s brand within the impact management sector focussed on infrastructure.
  • People management, coaching and development of one Development Impact Executive.
  • Supporting the development of the overall capability of the Development Impact team through oversight and coaching of team members. And supporting the upskilling of CDC staff more broadly on effective impact management.

Our cultural values
We look for team members who aspire, as we do, to work at our best and to be:

• Impact-led, commercially rigorous
• Tenacious in the face of challenges
• Collaborative and caring

CDC is committed to diversity and inclusion and welcomes all applicants regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation.

Background

• Strong academic credentials. Preferably a Master’s in Economics, Development Economics or equivalent analytical post graduate degree
• Strong work experience in a relevant field, preferably as an impact manager within impact investment or, at a minimum, with a good grounding in development impact management working with private sector companies
• Work experience in developing countries, preferably in Africa and/or South Asia
• Work experience of impact management in the infrastructure sector and strong understanding of the challenges resulting from Climate Change
• Experience in management positions

Skills

• Practical understanding of impact management, private sector development and how to achieve development outcomes through investment with a focus on the priorities of the infrastructure sector
• Experience of making high quality judgment calls to make impact investment decisions and manage impact outcomes. Conscious of costs and benefits and capability to explain opportunities and challenges to investee companies
• Understanding of underlying commercial strategies and ability to consider development impact in an entrepreneurial and pragmatic manner
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills. Confident dealing with complexity and can combine objective quantitative analysis with expert qualitative judgment. Confident in managing data and collating and presenting evidence
• Good knowledge and network of third parties in infrastructure sector and impact management who can be leveraged to help deliver enhanced impact with our investee companies
• Track record in management: Organising team to meet agreed deadlines and drive productivity and cohesion. Strong project management, analysis and reporting skills, with the ability to deliver data and insights informed strategic approaches. Able to prioritise tasks and manage multiple work streams simultaneously in a complex and fast-moving environment
• Strong communication skills: the ability to describe complex development impact scenarios with accuracy and concision and the ability to explain development impact to non-professionals and across a range of cultural backgrounds
• Self-starter with a bias for action who is resilient, with a problem-solving approach
• Proven capability of effective team work and strong stakeholder/relationship management
• The role will require regular travel, mostly within Africa and South Asia to work with investee companies

• Globally competitve salary and package
• The opportunity to join a longstanding organisation committed to making an impact

CDC is the world’s oldest development finance institution (DFI) founded in 1948. Their mission is to 'support the building of businesses throughout Africa and South Asia, to create jobs and make a lasting difference to people’s lives in some of the world’s poorest places.'

Between 2004 and 2011, CDC’s strategy was to provide capital to businesses in emerging markets through private equity funds. Since 2012, they have been through an exciting transformation, and now provide capital in all its forms, investing both directly and through fund managers that are aligned with their vision.

CDC aims to invest in countries where the private sector is weak and jobs are scarce and in sectors where growth leads to jobs. They assess every investment for its potential to create jobs and take a commercial approach to investing and lending activities because development impact is well correlated with strong financial performance. However, as a DFI, they can also take a flexible and patient approach because value creation in their markets often takes many years to materialise.

CDC is wholly owned by the UK Government through the Department for International Development (DFID) and plays a key role in DFID’s private sector strategy to alleviate poverty. They invest from their balance sheet and it is a measure of CDC’s high quality investment processes that despite investing in regions of the world that are typically considered very high risk, they have received no new capital from government since 1995 and remain self-funding. CDC invests in a number of ways:

• Placing capital with expert fund managers (GPs) who then use their local knowledge and expertise to find promising businesses in which to invest;
• Providing direct investments or co-investing in specific businesses, including alongside local GPs;
• Making loans, guarantees and offering micro-finance support.