Decent Place To Start Your Career, But Leave ASAP
Pros
1. A Decent Opportunity for Young People: If you're just starting out in your career or perhaps only have a little work experience, this is a decent place to work on multinational projects with important global donors and learn on your feet. Your ceiling partly depends on your risk appetite and willingness to add stuff onto your plate, so if you'd like to fill out your CV with blue-chip donor projects and speaking engagements, go right ahead. 2. Fully Remote: If you're looking for a remote job where all you need is internet access (they'll give you a MacBook to use), not a bad option for this. They'll also reimburse a portion of your internet bill which can be helpful, but don't expect a work-from-home stipend/budget for office furniture (e.g. desk, chair) or additional work equipment (e.g. external monitors, printer, mouse). 3. World-Class Finance Dept: The most professional finance department I've ever worked with. Salaries paid bang on time every month, which indicates little to no cashflow problems and incredible payroll management. They put plenty of bigger and better capitalised organisations to shame here. 4. Creative Freedom: The caveat here being that this only applies to low stakes projects, in which case you'll have the opportunity to be creative and try out your own interesting and cool ideas with minimal pushback/bureaucracy. However, this definitely isn't the case if you're on a team working on a high-priority, big budget project from an important or fussy donor. 5. A Supportive Team: If you need help on a project, people are generally willing to pitch in and make things happen. With a few exceptions, egos don't get in the way of cross-team collaboration, and depending on your personal relationships and team dynamic you can expect your co-workers to have your back. 6. Relatively Generous PTO/Vacation Policy: You'll get around 21 days of annual leave, as well as any national & religious holidays and a three-week Christmas break. However, any untaken leave days from the 21 do not carry over into the next year, but you will be paid out for untaken leave days for the current calendar year if you resign by November.
Cons
1. Painful Top-Down Micromanagement: If you're staffed to a new or important project, expect death-by-a-thousand-cuts micromanagement from the CEO & COO via Slack and Google Doc comments. The CEO usually offers insightful suggestions and commentary but can come across as finicky and is often an immensely frustrating bottleneck, delaying projects by months. The COO has an incredible eye for detail and is very well-organised but will also overthink and overanalyse, frequently seeming more interested in pedantic fault-finding rather than practical problem-solving. 2. Constant Self-Imposed Crises: Like many nonprofits, nearly everyone on staff is spread far too thin, which means you should expect to be roped in during moments of crisis when contractual deliverables inevitably fall through the cracks. The CEO is extremely ambitious, which often leads to the org wildly overpromising in its project proposals and overworked teams then scrambling to get things done as deadlines loom. 3. Questionable Compensation Policies: Compared to non-profits of similar geographic scale, their salaries outside of a handful of senior roles are significantly lower than what you'd expect. They also offer no additional benefits (medical, matched pension contributions) even though many other non-profits provide generous benefits and stipends. And because they're very secretive about salaries, there are pay disparities between peers. Staff should try and unionise to solve some of these problems collectively. 4. No Diversity At The Top: Despite ostensibly being an African organisation, there are no Indigenous people of colour in any of the top jobs (CEO, COO, CDO, deputy CEO). So while they may claim to have a staff that's overwhelmingly POC, none of the people who make key strategic & policy decisions are people of colour. (They may also insist that their current "CTO" is a POC, but this individual has laughably little clout compared to the rest of the C-suite.) 5. High Staff Attrition/Turnover: As noted by multiple reviewers, this org suffers from very high turnover, with staff joining and leaving at an alarming rate for a variety of reasons, many of which point to larger systemic and structural issues at the org. Unfortunately this is unlikely to change, as management is as overworked as everyone else and will likely not commit the time and resources to overhaul the org's most contentious policies. 6. Very Little Local Ecosystem Impact: For a tech-focused org, they offer surprisingly little value to local tech ecosystems and instead concentrate on servicing big, foreign donors rather than improving or diversifying the in-country talent pool of developers and engineers. And because the org makes no effort to offer truly competitive salaries for exceptional talent, they often end up with lacklustre products executed at an utterly mediocre level.