Associate, Markets 12 views

Job Title: Associate, Markets

Location: Addis Ababa

Department: Market Solutions Practice

Reports To: Manager, Rural Reach

About Kifiya:

Kifiya is an AI-powered financial and market infrastructure company advancing inclusive economic growth across Africa. We design and deploy risk decisioning systems, intelligent financial infrastructure, and market linkage platforms that unlock credit, insurance, payments, and capital access for MSMEs and smallholder farmers. We build the AI, data, and financial infrastructure that helps financial institutions serve hard-to-finance segments at scale.

Business Unit Description

The MSP corrects market failures by leveraging four core infrastructures: intelligent data and decisioning, intelligent financial services, digital agriculture, and smart mobility to enable MSMEs, smallholder farmers, and low-to-middle-income individuals to access finance and markets. MSP’s integrated solutions drive job creation, social inclusion, and economic empowerment.

Position Summary

The Associate, Markets will support the implementation of rural reach activities focused on expanding access to finance for smallholder farmers, MSMEs, and rural value-chain actors through uncollateralized digital lending and enhanced rural market linkages.

The role will work at the intersection of financial services, agricultural value chains, and digital solutions, supporting partnerships with financial institutions, partners, cooperatives, and market actors to expand last-mile access to productive finance and digital financial services that improves incomes, resilience, and market opportunities across rural Ethiopia.

Key Responsibilities

Market and Value Chain Development

• Support analysis of priority rural value chains, identifying financing gaps, market bottlenecks, and opportunities for productive credit.
• Assist in designing and implementing interventions that strengthen market linkages between smallholders, buyers, processors, and service providers.
• Contribute to the development of inclusive market systems that enable sustainable access to finance.
• Support the strengthening of cooperative-based market systems by leveraging MPCs and RuSACCOs to improve aggregation, input distribution, market access, and financial inclusion.

Access to Finance and Digital Lending

• Support partnerships with financial institutions to pilot and scale uncollateralized, data-driven credit products for rural clients.
• Assist in integrating alternative data sources to support rural credit scoring.
• Monitor uptake, usage, and early outcomes of digital lending solutions along rural clients.

Partner Engagement

• Coordinate with cooperatives, aggregators, off-takers, and local institutions to facilitate adoption of digital financial services, productive credit and market solutions.
• Support the onboarding, capacity building, and performance monitoring of cooperatives as last-mile agents for customer acquisition, financial literacy, digital loan origination, repayments, and market linkage services.
• Support training and sensitization activities for rural clients on productive credit use, repayment discipline, and market participation.

Monitoring, Reporting, and Continuous Improvement

• Track workstream delivery performance using defined KPIs.
• Contribute to project reports, case studies, and learning briefs for donors and stakeholders.
• Track indicators related to credit access, market participation, productivity and income outcomes.

Key Outputs

• Market and value-chain assessments with actionable insights
• Support to operational digital lending pilots targeting rural clients
• Strengthened partnerships with financial and market actors
• Evidence of improved rural market linkages and access to productive finance
• Strengthened network of cooperatives serving as effective last-mile channels for digital finance, market linkage, and customer engagement.

• Bachelor’s degree in Economics, Finance, Agribusiness, Development Studies, Business, or a related field
• 5-7 years of experience in market systems development, rural finance, agribusiness, fintech, or development projects
• Familiarity with access-to-finance interventions, especially for rural or populations
• Understanding of Ethiopia’s rural economy, agricultural value chains, and financial sector is a strong advantage
• Experience working with banks, MFIs, cooperatives, fintechs, or donor-funded market systems projects preferred
• Fluency in both Amharic and Afaan Oromo is preferred

Core Competencies

• Results driven execution
• Strong stakeholder management
• Data informed decision making
• Understanding of rural context and barriers
• Problem solving and structured escalation
• Commitment to inclusive finance and impact
• Ability to work effectively with cooperative structures and rural community institutions