Head of Supply Chain

• Basic: c$150,000 USD
• Package

Location: Nairobi, Kenya (supporting regional operations across East Africa and Middle East)
Industry: Agribusiness

The Uncomfortable Truth

While executives in London and New York debate supply chain resilience over coffee, millions of people wake up wondering if food will reach their markets today. You’ll be managing the difference between those two realities.

This isn’t a role where you optimise delivery times by 2% and call it innovation. This is supply chain management where a delayed shipment means farmers don’t get paid, families don’t eat, and entire communities feel the ripple effect of your decisions.

What You’ll Actually Do

You’ll build and manage agricultural supply chains across some of the world’s most challenging and dynamic logistics environments. Not challenging because of complexity for complexity’s sake, but because infrastructure fails, borders close unexpectedly, weather destroys roads, and political realities shift faster than your ERP system can update.

You’ll coordinate the movement of products from smallholder farms to factory and across regional and Middle Eastern markets, ensuring that:

• Farmers receive fair payment, on time
• Products reach markets while still fresh
• Costs remain competitive without exploiting the people who grow the food
• Your supply chain builds economic resilience, not just efficiency

You’ll negotiate with everyone from cooperative leaders to port authorities. You’ll make calls about whether to reroute a shipment through three countries or risk a direct route with uncertain access. You’ll decide whether to invest in a relationship with a new supplier or optimise the vendors you already have.

What We Don’t Need

We don’t need someone who thinks Africa is “the next frontier” to be conquered with Western supply chain orthodoxy. We don’t need someone who sees smallholder farmers as problems to be solved rather than partners to be empowered. And we definitely don’t need someone who believes supply chain management is about making dashboards look impressive for board meetings.

If you need certainty, clear hierarchies, and problems that resolve neatly in quarterly cycles, this role will break you.

What We Actually Need

Someone who understands that supply chain management in agribusiness is fundamentally about people, not just products. Someone who can design for resilience when infrastructure is unreliable, who can build trust across cultures and communities, and who gets genuinely energised by solving problems that matter.

You need to be:

• Pragmatic and adaptable – Your perfect plan will meet reality and lose. Every time. Can you improvise without chaos?
• Culturally intelligent – You’ll work across multiple countries, languages, and business practices. Respect and curiosity aren’t optional.
• Commercially savvy – Margins are thin. Every decision has trade-offs. You need to balance social impact with commercial viability.
• Technically competent – Logistics, procurement, inventory management, trade compliance, quality control. You know this landscape.
• Comfortable with discomfort – Plans change. Infrastructure fails. You’ll need to stay calm and creative when everything’s on fire.

The Reality Check

This role offers the chance to build something meaningful in markets that are often overlooked or exploited. But it’s not a charity. It’s a business. You’ll be measured on margins, delivery times, quality metrics, and growth – just like any supply chain role. The difference is that your work directly impacts food security and rural livelihoods at scale.

You’ll spend time in offices and warehouses and on terrible roads visiting farming cooperatives. You’ll deal with brilliant people and frustrating bureaucracy, often in the same meeting. You’ll have resources to build something impactful, but never as many as you’d like.

What Success Looks Like

In two years, you’ll have built a supply chain operation that moves agricultural products efficiently across the region while strengthening, not extracting from, the communities you work with. Farmers will prefer working with your supply chain. Buyers will trust your reliability. Your team will know they’re part of something that matters.

How to Apply

Send us a letter (not a cover letter—an actual letter) explaining:

1. A supply chain decision you made that had consequences beyond the spreadsheet
2. Why you’d leave wherever you are now to do this work
3. What you think we’re getting wrong in this job advert