Lead: Partnership Development & Ecosystem Coordination at Land Bank Careers

Job Advert Summary    

• To develop and manage significant long-term partnerships with the private sector, provincial departments of agriculture, development and commercial banks,  other financial institutions and major implementing partners that are necessary for sustaining agricultural transformation.

Key Performance Areas    

Partnership Origination

• Develops and manages significant long-term partnerships with the private sector entities like commodity organisations, development and commercial banks, financial institutions and major implementing partners that are necessary to sustaining agricultural transformation.
• Represents Land Bank to broad stakeholders that include key partners, development/smallholder farmers, donors, and international organisations.
• Leads the identification and development of strategic partnerships with global organisations and translates them into managed programmes with demonstrable benefits to the agricultural transformation agenda.
• Contributes to and participates in the negotiation of agreements; working collaboratively with the bank’s legal services function.

Partnership Management and Ecosystem Co-ordination

Partnership Management

• Develops procurement linkage frameworks to facilitate the off-take of commodities from farmers on grower programmes by off-taking partners.
• Develop partnership with agricultural local exporters and global importers to unlock export market opportunities for development farmers and aggregators.
• Manages a portfolio of stakeholders comprising development partners and off-takers.
• Develop the pre and post finance-delivery plan.
• Conclude new partnership funds’ Memoranda of Agreement (MOA’s).
• Ensures that there are no adverse audit findings.

Ecosystem Co-ordination

• Positions the Land Bank as intermediary between supply and demand of farmers, aggregators, off-take partners and other key players in the agricultural value chain.
• Develops the bank’s agricultural value chain ecosystem in an agile manner; engaging partners and farmers.
• Leads the creation of all requisite technical infrastructure for successful grower programmes and coordinating the implementation thereof.
• Identifies and coordinates bankable ecosystem opportunities e.g. land rental, equipment purchase and the like.
• Co-ordinates market access of farmers through the ecosystem platform business and grower programmes.

Strategy Implementation

• Implements the strategic partnerships delivery framework.
• Designs, maps and implements partnership processes.
• Develops partnership models to coordinate partnerships, agriculture value chain activities, and market access opportunities aimed at transforming clients’ farming operations into sustainable commercial enterprises.
• Works collaboratively with the banking division’s in-house product development to package solutions.
• Collaborates with banking to have visibility on origination pipeline and progress through reports, dashboards, feedback forums to Exco and other stakeholders or project forums.

Monitoring and reporting on progress and performance

• Reports on partnership development target achievements as aligned to Land Bank’s overall partnership strategy.
• Partners with credit to monitor the concentration risk at partner and commodity portfolio level.
• Works collaboratively with the risk management division to identify and implement risk mitigations.
• Creates processes and reporting approaches to monitor and report on trends, issues, risks and mitigation plans.

People Management

Performance Management

• Ensure the overall team is meeting their targets as prescribed by the Head.
• Monitor manager’s achievements against their development plans.
• Provide inputs to head on performance tracking and monitoring of managers.

Capacity Planning

• Determine the human resource requirements, in accordance with the expected deliverables and current capacity.
• Set out the resourcing and human capital requirements to the head to ensure that deliverables will be met in accordance with the expected targets.
• Minimise staff turnover.

Preferred Minimum Education and Experience    

• Degree in Commerce / Science / Agriculture
• A minimum of 7 years experience at management level
• A minimum of 3 years experience in strategic partnerships development and implementation

Critical Competencies    

• Business development and networking
• Bringing new products or solutions to market
• Stakeholder and client management
• Operationalising strategy
• Legislative and regulatory context
• Additional Requirements    
• Knowledge of PFMA
• Knowledge of Land Bank Act
• Knowledge Banking Products
• Knowledge of Agricultural Operations