Senior Grants Manager
Department: Public Policy
Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time
Location: Africa
Description
Job Location: Kenya/South Africa/Nigeria
About the Role
The Senior Grant Manager oversees and manages Sun King’s grant and results-based financing (RBF) portfolio end to end.
This role combines strategic oversight of the grant portfolio with direct management of grant operations, compliance, impact assessment, and reporting. The aim is to ensure grants contribute effectively to Sun King’s commercial scale, market entry, impact, and affordability priorities, while maintaining alignment with donor requirements.
This role reports to a senior executive and works closely with country teams, finance, legal, operations, sales, and external partners.
What you will be expected to do:
Grant Strategy and Portfolio Management
- Oversee Sun King’s grant and RBF portfolio, ensuring alignment with business strategy, market priorities, and delivery capacity
- Review and shape grant opportunities, providing input on strategic fit, delivery requirements, risks, and trade-offs
- Ensure the portfolio remains aligned with commercial priorities as well as donor expectations
- Maintain a forward-looking view of the grant pipeline to inform planning and prioritization
- Identify ways grants can enable scale, reduce risk in new markets, and improve affordability
- Maintain a portfolio tracking system to provide visibility on value, risk, and workload
- Contribute to positioning Sun King as a reliable and delivery-focused partner for donors
Grant Lifecycle Management
- Manage end-to-end grant processes, from opportunity identification through to close-out
- Coordinate proposal development, ensuring submissions are high quality, realistic, and compliant
- Oversee grant setup, including alignment on scope, budgets, reporting, and operational considerations
- Act as the primary point of contact for donor compliance, reporting, and audit readiness
Grant Operations and Compliance
- Establish and improve grant management processes, templates, and tools
- Manage reporting timelines and ensure submissions are timely and accurate
- Coordinate audits, verifications, and donor reviews, addressing issues as they arise
- Ensure grant requirements are integrated into business operations
- Act as a point of contact for compliance or delivery-related risks
Cross-functional Coordination
- Work closely with country managers and program teams on grant delivery
- Coordinate inputs from finance, legal, operations, and sales teams
- Streamline data requests by improving standardization and aligning reporting with business KPIs
- Promote clear awareness of donor requirements and grant obligations across teams
External Engagement and Partnerships
- Manage relationships with donors, fund managers, and verification partners
- Coordinate external consultants facilitating proposals, compliance, or audits
- Represent Sun King in donor engagements related to grants and RBFs
You might be a strong candidate if you have:
- 8+ years of experience in grants management, results-based financing, or donor-funded programs
- Experience managing complex, multi-stakeholder grants or RBF programs
- Strong data management capability, with familiarity in M&E and impact measurement frameworks
- Experience engaging with international donors, DFIs, or fund managers (e.g., World Bank, FCDO, GIZ/EnDev, IFC, or similar)
- Practical knowledge of impact reporting and delivery requirements for credible results
- Ability to operate effectively across teams in fast-paced environments
- Familiarity with sector reporting frameworks such as GOGLA methodology and World Bank/ESMAP/GIZ indicators
What Sun King offers
- Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry
- An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
- A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
- Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun Center for Leadership.
We place great importance on sustaining a diverse, inclusive work environment.
We believe that innovation and understanding comes from diversity on every spectrum. We work to make sure every Sun King team member knows that they belong, knowing that sustaining an inclusive workplace requires conscious effort and is a continuous journey, not an end-state.
Sun King recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes people based on their experience, skills, effort, and results. We explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, religion, caste, national origin, color, gender, marital status, family structure, sexual orientation, HIV/AIDS status, or disability.
