Chief Impact Officer

Organization Overview:

Village Enterprise’s mission is to end extreme poverty in rural Africa through entrepreneurship, innovation, and collective action. By empowering women, refugees, and youth to launch small businesses and savings groups, our cost-effective model provides dignified and sustainable pathways for individuals to lift themselves and their families out of extreme poverty for good. To date, Village Enterprise has trained 396,872 first-time entrepreneurs, 80% of whom are women, and supported the launch of 120,609 businesses and 9,309 Business Savings Groups (BSGs). These efforts have positively impacted 2,478,065 lives across Africa. With operations in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, and partnerships in other sub-Saharan African countries, Village Enterprise continues to expand its reach. As we scale our impact, our aim remains ambitious yet achievable: to lift 20 million people out of extreme poverty by 2035.

Role Purpose:

The Chief Impact Officer is accountable to the CEO for Village Enterprise’s organization-wide evidence agenda — ensuring that monitoring, evaluation, research, knowledge management, and cost-effectiveness work as one coherent system that credibly demonstrates and improves the organization’s impact.

The role provides unified strategic leadership across the Monitoring, Evidence & Learning (MEL) and Research functions, and is accountable for translating that combined evidence base into knowledge products, research partnerships, donor and policy narratives, and thought leadership that strengthen Village Enterprise’s positioning, funding, and influence.

The role bridges technical rigor and organizational strategy: it sets the standards by which Village Enterprise measures and communicates what works, integrates evidence into decision-making at every level, and represents Village Enterprise’s evidence base externally to donors, governments, and the wider development sector.