[Hiring] Head of Africa Region @Global Fishing Watch

Role Description

The Head of Africa Region will provide strategic and operational leadership for Global Fishing Watch’s Africa portfolio – currently active in Senegal, Gabon, Madagascar, and with sub-regional fisheries bodies, including the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission (SRFC). This senior leader will be accountable for developing and driving the Africa regional strategy, leading a distributed regional team, ensuring rigorous financial stewardship, and managing complex grant deliverables alongside partner relationships.

The successful candidate will combine high-level political engagement, in support of public data transparency, efforts to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, and advance marine protection, consistent with Global Fishing Watch’s strategy; with the operational discipline required to manage multi-country programs, sub-grants, and donor relationships.

Crucially, this leader will look beyond their immediate region to contribute to wider organizational objectives and ensure strong cross-regional alignment, learning, and central organizational cohesion.

Qualifications

• Senior Leadership Experience: Progressive management experience leading large-scale, multi-country programs in Africa, ideally within an international NGO, intergovernmental agency, or ocean conservation space.
• Grant and Compliance Mastery: Proven track record of managing large, complex, multi-donor grants, including robust financial oversight, sub-grantee management, and rigorous KPI reporting.
• Political Acumen and Diplomacy: Demonstrated success in navigating high-level governmental relationships, ministerial networks, or regional bodies (such as the SRFC/CSRP or African Union) to achieve policy or transparency outcomes.
• Operational Excellence: Experience working with matrixed internal operations teams to implement standard operating procedures, project management frameworks, while monitoring, evaluation, and learning structures.
• Language: Professional fluency in both English and French is required.

Requirements

• Lead Regional Strategy: Design, implement and regularly evaluate the Africa regional strategy, and work plans, ensuring alignment with Global Fishing Watch’s organizational goals and impact priorities.
• Advance Data Transparency: Develop and deliver political strategies to secure public commitments for fishing vessel tracking data, and vessel registry data sharing across the continent.
• Tool Adaptation and Policy Impact: Work closely with internal technical and policy teams to adapt data tools to the explicit needs of partner governments and NGOs.
• Partnership Development: Build a continental engagement pipeline of stakeholders and partners.
• Grant Oversight & Reporting: Serve as the primary accountable lead for all Africa regional grant deliverables.
• Sub-Grant and Partner Coordination: Oversee the logistics, compliance, and programmatic performance of complex sub-grants.
• Budgeting and Fiscal Discipline: Formulate, track, and maintain the regional budget.
• Lead and Support the Regional Team: Supervise, mentor and inspire a distributed regional team.
• Drive Performance and Accountability: Establish clear Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
• Ensure Safe and Effective Operations: Enforce systems, policies and procedures to ensure a safe, secure, compliant, and welcoming work environment.
• Strengthen Cross-Regional Cohesion: Dedicate a strategic portion of time to wider global objectives.
• Central Alignment: Actively contribute to central organizational initiatives.
• Resource Mobilization: Partner directly with the Chief Impact Officer and the Partnership and Philanthropy team.
• Represent Global Fishing Watch externally: Act as the primary spokesperson and face of the organization in Africa.

Benefits

• Compensation range for this position is XOF 49m - 59m per year for Senegal-based employees.
• KES 9m - 11m for Kenya-based employees.
• Compensation is commensurate with experience and will vary depending on the hired candidate’s country of residence.
• GFW offers pension/retirement, health and other benefits commensurate with similar level GFW employees in the country of employment.

Company Description

Global Fishing Watch (GFW) is an international, nonprofit organization committed to advancing ocean governance through increased transparency. Founded in 2015 through a collaboration between Oceana, SkyTruth, and Google, Global Fishing Watch became an independent nonprofit organization in June 2017.

• Our organizational strategy is centered on three pillars: countering illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing; strengthening marine protection; and generating and openly sharing actionable data on human activity at sea.
• We aim to realize our vision of a healthy, productive and resilient ocean.