Project Manager, Partnerships & Consulting

About Pula

We are an insuretech firm that provides agriculture insurance design and execution services, specialising in index based insurance and are backed by top tier VC investors who have invested more than $25 million in the business. Since 2015 we have provided climate insurance to 19 million smallholder farmers, 41% of which were women across 13 markets in Africa and Asia who pay an average of $6.8 per season to insure their crops. So far we've unlocked over $2.5 billion of capital from local and international insurance markets for climate risks since we started in 2015 and paid out $40.8 million to our client farmers. 

According to the UN’s InterGovernmental Panel for Climate Change more than 3.3 billion people globally live in hotspots with high vulnerability to climate change and are now already feeling the impact of climate change through increased temperatures and increasingly erratic rainfall. Insurance is a tool for vulnerable households in these affected regions to adapt to the effects that climate change is already having today on these households. It is a tool that enables for compensation payment for losses and damages that these households had no part in causing. Insurance compensation enables these households to make adjustments to their day to day livelihoods and practices and therefore allows for an equitable and just transition.

We are a for profit organisation, and have raised over $10 million from leading venture and institutional investors as well as developed philanthropic relationships with private foundations and bilateral donors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and German Insure Resilience Solutions Fund that have accelerated investments in our target markets.

At Pula, our values are: 

• Obsessed with results: We are responsible for our future and therefore we get things done!
• Connect the Dots: We continuously identify different customer needs & business problems and build solutions that deliver value.
• Have a Can do Attitude! We dare to do things differently to make things work.
• We have each others’ back: We look out for each other & we share high quality, timely feedback that makes us better. 

Pula is proudly fast paced, constantly learning from the challenges we face and overcome. We are proudly culturally diverse but united in our ambition of continuous high-performance. By challenging ourselves we believe that we can overcome the hard problems we love solving. 

Pula is seeking an experienced Project Manager. She/he must have a love for building partnerships across commercial and public sector, profits and non-profits, probing into data, solving challenging problems, and structuring complex processes, while also being comfortable building a cutting-edge ag-tech start-up. 

She / he will have full accountability for a set of projects and works with the Pula business units and external stakeholders to ensure the timely, successful and high quality delivery of grant-funded projects and initiatives at Pula. Such initiatives are supported and supervised by non-commercial partners, such as NGOs, IGOs, UN agencies, government bodies, research organizations and other third sector stakeholders, to expand Pula’s market reach and impact, create growth and revenue opportunities and meet business and social impact goals. The Project Manager will report to the Senior Partnership Manager, and work in close collaboration with the partnerships, product, commercial, actuarial and operations teams. 

A detailed job description and roles & responsibilities for the position is as follows:

Project planning and execution (35%) 

• Lead the planning, scheduling and implementation of Pula’s grant-funded projects. 
• Define project scope, goals, deliverables, tasks and resource requirements. 
• Develop full-scale project plans, including task sequences and interdependencies. 
• Track project deliverables and performance of teams using appropriate tools e.g. Gantt charts, task lists, workflow management software. 
• Keep relevant staff informed about upcoming deadlines, milestones and deliverables.
• Proactively discuss project prioritization, business drivers, and potential or actual risks with the Partnerships team and senior management. 
• Host project meetings and drive task completion to meet delivery timelines with project teams (Tech, Sales, Actuarial, Operations), including progress tracking, risk management, initiating changes to the original scope of work and reviewing checkpoints or milestones.

Reporting and budget management (35%) 

• Oversee invoicing, accounting, financial reporting, paperwork, grant records and other administrative func