Post Date: April 7, 2025

In our first decade, Namati’s Resource Mobilization team (RM) was small, but punched above its weight to sustain Namati’s growth around the world. Now, our ambitions for our current strategic plan (spanning 2024-2028) are to cultivate a team of superstars with the fundraising chops to secure a growing annual revenue goal, drive opportunities with a spirit of bold initiative, and promote a culture of fundraising within the organization. Each person on the RM team contributes their fundraising expertise and leadership in complementary ways to form a synergistic, generative whole greater than the sum of its parts.

About the Position

Within this team, the Senior Manager, Partnerships (Bilateral Agencies) will oversee the development and execution of a strategic plan to cultivate relationships with bilateral agencies – both at the headquarters and country level – toward the goal of expanding funding from these agencies. We seek a teammate with a track record of submitting successful proposals as the prime or sub-applicant at the seven-figure level.

The right person for this role will possess exemplary process management and communication skills, outstanding attention to detail, a drive to excel in all responsibilities, and an ambition to grow in response to the needs of our always-evolving team and organizational budget.

Responsibilities:

• Identification of potential supporters: Conduct landscaping analysis of potential bilateral donor agencies and opportunities annually to identify and pursue multiple new target bilaterals per year. Landscaping analysis should examine funding at both the headquarters level – primarily in Europe and Asia – as well as the country level, with an initial focus on embassy funding opportunities in the countries where Namati operates.
• Designing our positioning strategies: Develop positioning strategy for each target bilateral donor target, including registering with the donor and their proposal submission portal, refining talking points, tailoring capacity statements aligned to each target agencies’ interest, deepening relationships with current significantly-funded implementing partners, and submitting proposals to specific calls.
• Analysing opportunities: Identify, analyze, and share bilateral business opportunities with Namati teams (and groups of teams), with a focus on deeply understanding the widely differing contexts and programs of each team, and digging deep to discover particular areas where Namati’s strategy and funder priorities overlap.
• Proposal management: Oversee the development of responses to bilateral funding opportunities by developing calendars, writing outlines and technical design agendas, identifying and engaging partners, developing partner and Namati scopes of work, collating partner packets, facilitating meetings and proposal reviews, reviewing technical drafts, generating supporting document annexes, coordinating inputs across proposal teams and partners, conducting the final edit and formatting of proposals and, finally, submitting your finely-crafted proposals according to funder instructions.
• Financial materials oversight: Engage with Namati’s global finance team, country finance teams, and partner finance teams as relevant to develop and review budget and cost responses in proposals, and obtain supporting documents. Support program teams on budget analysis and reporting for active awards.
• Internal fundraising guidance: Develop guidance, templates (such as sample outlines, budgets, and budget narratives) and processes to support other staff and teams across Namati to develop quality responses to bilateral opportunities. Train staff on bilateral donor agency rules and requirements, and help teams develop incisive, effective language to describe their work to potential bilateral funders.
• Writing and editing: Write, edit, develop, and refine concepts, proposals, talking points, and other funding-related collateral.
• Funder-facing engagement in the field: Identify and attend bilateral donor agency conferences that align with Namati’s competencies. Attend events at local embassies around the world. Secure public speaking opportunities and private meetings with important funders and stakeholders for key Namati staff. Organize and produce occasional cultivation events in partnership with bilateral agencies and local embassies.

Here’s what you might have tackled last week – 

• Convened a meeting with the Swedish embassy in Nairobi in partnership with Namati’s Land, Environment and Climate Justice team to discuss common thematic priorities. This might include briefing both teams in advance of the call and identifying clear ties to other work you are managing to cultivate SIDA for other proposals across Namati.
• Reviewed a seven-figure Request for Proposals posted by the Norwegian development agency NORAD, identifying points of thematic relevance across one or more of our country programs (as well as the Grassroots Justice Network), convening key Namati program and finance team members to decide on a go/no-go, and coordinating dialogue with a key partner around the potential structure of a partnership and contours of a submission.
• Drafted a concept note covering cross-programmatic work on tenure rights, and coordinated review across relevant Namati colleagues before submitting to the U.K.’s FCDO.
• Supported Namati’s CEO, Vivek Maru, to prepare for his upcoming travel to the Netherlands by coordinating and leading on preparation for a series of meetings with relevant staff inside the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Qualifications

• 7 years’ experience in international proposal development and/or program management (with at least 5 in bilateral proposal development/program management)
• Track record of submitting successful 7-figure bilateral proposals
• BS/BA and/or Master in law, social sciences, international affairs, environmental sciences or related field preferred
• Experience in social justice (environment, climate, land, citizenship and/or human rights) preferred
• Experience living or working in Sub-Saharan Africa and/or Asia preferred

Location

This position is open to candidates currently based in Nairobi, Kenya or the following locations in the United States: Washington DC, CT, MA, MD, NJ, NY, or VA. If the successful candidate is based in/near Nairobi, Kenya, or in/near Washington DC, they will follow Namati’s hybrid office policy, which calls for staff to report to the office two days per week between Tuesday and Thursday.

Namati has the potential to provide a work permit for candidates currently based in Nairobi, Kenya. Namati cannot sponsor visas in the United States so candidates must already be legally eligible to work in the United States to be considered.

The successful candidate will be expected to occasionally work non-standard hours to accommodate the various time zones of Namati’s teams, and can expect to travel multiple times a year, including internationally.

Compensation 

We base our compensation on the markets where our staff operate. We work to communicate transparently with candidates (including talking about compensation very early in the process; for this position, we will send the salary range for the candidate’s location when reaching out to request a screening interview). Throughout the hiring process we will seek to understand your specific skills, experience, and abilities as they will fit into our team and our job levels. We will finalize pay and responsibilities based on the qualifications, experience, and country location of the person joining.

We also offer excellent benefits: while the exact terms vary somewhat based on location, they always include health coverage, generous paid time off, retirement or old-age plan contributions, sick leave, and parental leave. All staff also have access to funds for professional development opportunities.

To Apply

Please apply by completing our online application form. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, but we will prioritize applications received by 5pm ET on Friday, April 25, with initial interviews being held late the following week.

No phone calls, please. Namati is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Namati’s work has been featured in/on Democracy Journal, Amanpour & Co. New York Times, the Guardian, Devex, WIRED, the Washington Post, among others, and has been documented by the Sundance Institute. Vivek Maru, Namati’s CEO, gave a TED Talk in 2017 which has been viewed over 1.3 million times. In 2016, Namati was honored with the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and in 2017, the Schwab Foundation named Vivek Maru and colleague Sonkita Conteh two of its Social Entrepreneurs of the Year. Namati has a perfect score, 100/100, on Charity Navigator and has earned Guidestar’s Platinum Seal of Transparency. 

About Namati

Since 2011, Namati has worked to build a movement of grassroots justice advocates worldwide. We’ve grown tremendously, from a small founding group of big-hearted change-makers to a global staff of 180+ people across 12 time zones in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Grassroots Justice Network, which we co-founded and still convene to this day, has grown from 30 people in one room to the world’s largest community of justice advocates, with membership from 4,200 organizations across 175 countries.

We have supported local communities to take on thousands of justice issues, directly improving the lives of over 1.5 million people since our founding. Together with communities, partners, and Network members, we’ve envisioned – and won- transformative changes, like the Customary Land Rights and National Land Commission Acts of Sierra Leone, and the world’s first Legal Empowerment Fund.

About Resource Mobilization

Alongside the growth in our ambition and impact, Namati’s budget has increased, on average, by 18% per year — from $5M to more than $15M in ten years. Our donor base has grown from 3 founding partners to over 40 bilateral and philanthropic funding partners. Major recent investments include an unrestricted award from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, and an 8-year, $20M award from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation through the Racial Equity 2030 competition. Many of our funding partners remain with us for the long haul. We are particularly proud that two longtime supporters, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation, went on to support the Legal Empowerment Fund, with an aim to mobilize $100M to support grassroots justice.

At the heart of our fundraising track record is our commitment to bold, inspired action as fundraisers: fundraising is organizing. Namati’s Resource Mobilization team does not take a transactional approach to fundraising; instead, we form relationships with funding partners committed not only to our organization, but to the entire Legal Empowerment movement. We strive to build and steward expansive, long-term, and high-level funding partnerships that match the ambitious scale of our vision.

This kind of fundraising requires a team of aligned, courageous, and strategic connectors who understand where Namati is uniquely placed to make a difference, who can learn continually from our work – and the work of our network and collaborators – to identify promising opportunities, and to create new ones.