About

Jonathan Waita is a highly motivated professional with hands on experience in enterprise development and livelihoods work. Worked as employee and consultant in different sectors in designing and managing development initiatives, financial intermediation and inclusion in East Africa based on international best practices. Over 70% of assignments involved working with partners who were individuals and organizations with mandate to provide leadership to their teams to improve delivery, increase synergies, sharpen skills, share knowledge and lessons, improve the impact through evidence-based analysis, strengthen communications and cement foundations for new interventions and initiatives that support progress towards improvements in quality of development work and financial access intermediation support.

Skills

  • Microsoft Office
  • Customer service
  • Project Management

Experience

Jonathan Waita

Work experience
  • September, 2022 - January, 2024
  • Fulltime
  • Overseeing the effective implementation and delivery of project activities; ensuring quality delivery and performance in line with project objectives and the broader organizational strategic business plan and in close coordination with project partners and other project staff.
  • Serve as the budget holder for the project, manage and support delegated sub-budget holders for grants and individual contracts where applicable.
  • Contributing to development of tools and methodologies to ensure gender responsive approaches are incorporated in project delivery including capacity building activities for project staff and partners.
  • Work with the support team to ensure that the project activities are implemented in line with the grant agreement and work schedules in a timely manner and within the budget.
  • Managing project partnerships, including ensuring sufficient capacity building for the partners to deliver effectively.
  • Lead and champion advocacy and influencing work with the national and County Governments, CSOs and the private sector to ensure the achievement of enabling energy markets and policy environment for a just and inclusive energy transition.
  • Take lead in preparation of annual, biannual, quarterly, and monthly work plans (narrative and financial) for effective execution of the project activities.
  • Lead in the execution of work plans, budget plans, monitoring, evaluation and learning plans, procurement plans, communication plans, and documentation plans.
  • Work closely with Impact and Influence team to ensure systematic and gender sensitive monitoring and evaluation and ensure findings are recorded and escalated to guide the continued successful implementation of the project and inform the development of new initiatives.
  • Work towards Identifying project risks, monitor and update the risk register, as well as execute mitigation plans to minimize the effects of the identified risks.
  • Leading in financial inclusion programming and linkages for women in clean cooking space.
  • Working in collaboration with the business development department in identifying and monitoring funding opportunities, as well as lead in concept notes and proposal development to scale up women economic empowerment work.
  • Take the lead role in project reporting, ensuring that timely project reports are prepared and shared as per donor requirements.

Jonathan Waita

Work experience
  • Build capacities of women Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises (MSMEs) in energy and PUE to improve their operations, systems, management, access to finance to stimulate growth and profit by identifying capacity gaps and solutions.
  • Undertake business and market access activities including conducting SME value chain analysis and energy market/needs and support development of capacity building strategies, plans and tools.
  • Strengthening financial access initiatives through Village Savings and Loaning Associations (VSLAs) and financial providers linkages. Serving over 300 savings groups in energy businesses.
  • Take lead in designing and delivery of business development services, agency empowerment for women and energy technology training for the entrepreneurs including adapting and developing customized training curricular to address entrepreneur specific capacity needs.
  • Support mapping out, development and implementation of strategies to enable MSMEs to access affordable business credit from Business Development Service (BDS) providers including both formal and non-formal financing and insurance institutions.
  • Advise and guide the project and both energy & PUE enterprises in business performance monitoring and management systems/tools and support collection of key entrepreneur performance data.
  • Gather market intelligence to inform and support the project. This includes understanding of new products, business models and financing arrangements.
  • Facilitate linkages between women entrepreneurs and technology providers to build the energy supply chain and PUE businesses.
  • Participate as a member in the organizational Gender and Energy sub hub and interact with any other organizational Change Ambition Hubs and working groups, as appropriate and create synergies between our organization-wide change ambitions and our gender and energy work in country.
  • Keep abreast of information and knowledge in the areas of enterprise development, Energy, PUE and women economic empowerment and share with other Practical Action staff for programming.

Jonathan Waita

Work experience
  • Designed training packages, facilitated trainings, led marketing functions, identified and developed livelihoods enterprises that have potential for income generation, job creation and improvement of living standards.
  • Helped to design credit products for MFIs and SACCOs which ranged from SMEs (trade, agriculture, energy, mortgage and insurance)
  • Providing market information and technical support to NGOs, SACCOs, MFIs, Government bodies and Self-help groups who support SMEs, farmers and other community members to access new or enhance market opportunities.
  • Promoting relationships with business partners, including with financial institutions to support the extension of credit to smallholder farmers; Designing and implementing micro-finance and other rural credit options to support the establishment and expansion of business enterprises.
  • Helping to design and implement practical training programs to build community capacity in social business enterprises. Specific intervention focus will be on practical site and sector-specific training, introduction of innovative technology, entrepreneurship and communication.

Jonathan Waita

Work experience
  • Specific roles
  • Operation oversight: Directly managed operations of the Habitat for Humanity programmes in Kenya including ensuring outstanding program performance, i.e. maintaining high adoption of the program by other players in the sector.
  • Program implementation: Worked with all field staff to roll out implementation work plans as agreed. Led and provided hands on advice and technical assistance to the field team to ensure successful implementation of the Habitat for Humanity programmes.
  • Field Support function and coordination: Supporting Regional managers, coordinated closely with other departments to support functions in the field, including Monitoring & Evaluation, Finance, Human Resource teams.
  • Sustainability: Thought through all implementation process , identify and pilot the use of new technologies in housing, SMEs development and financial access which targeted structures developed to poster sustainability like self-help groups, cooperatives etc. to generate additional revenue to support the program’s ongoing costs and leverage emerging opportunities.
  • Financial management: In collaboration with Sections heads and field functions, I took the lead in developing and managing the annual program budgets.
  • Communication: Coordinated and closely supported communications teams in generating habitat for humanity contents for use in external and internal communication, lessons learnt and program visibility information.
  • Fundraising: Coordinated closely with the fundraising team in fundraising efforts, including proposal development, proposal writing and ongoing donor engagement (e.g. donor reporting).

Jonathan Waita

Work experience
  • September, 2008 - April, 2011
  • Fulltime
  • Main roles; I was responsible for micro finance program management, financial planning and monitoring, and human resource management in my area. I provided primary leadership to the program toward the achievement of its vision, mission, strategy, annual goals and objectives.
  • Planning; Develops the area business plan and annual work plans and submits plan for further deliberations at the wider Operations team, Proposes adjustments to the area business plan as and when needed.
  • Marketing; Plans and initiates promotional measures within the target markets of the area, “Champions” the deposit mobilization efforts within the area of coverage, Implemented a customer driven area approach Proposing and facilitates market research and survey activities.
  • Strategic direction management; Led and provided strategic direction and adequate supervision in the management of sales functions.
  • Collaborations; Collaborated with suppliers of water tanks, renewable energy, and agricultural inputs to provide leadership logistics and distribution of these materials which we gave as loans to our clients.
  • Customer Care; Built and promoted strong, long-lasting customer relationships by conducting discussion forums with them and understanding their needs.
  • Product development and gender mainstreaming; led a task force to design and development women related products who used women fund awarded by the Government of Kenya.
  • Sales promotions; Presented sales, revenue and expenses reports and realistic forecasts to the management team, Identified emerging markets and market shifts while being fully aware of new products and competition status.
  • Training; I coordinated SMEs training programmes and youth business mentorship program.
  • Improved program performance; during the period I was working with ECLOF I continually increased my sales and on average I did over 20,000 loans amounting over Kes 400 millions. I reduced the portfolio at risk from 38% when I was joining to 7.5%. Increased profitability by over 50%.

Jonathan Waita

Work experience
  • Universal Traders Sacco (UTS) is a co-operative society which addresses financial needs of the populace in lower eastern province of Kenya through 6 branches. The mission of cooperative is to provide financial access and credit facilities to population which is not served by mainstream financial institutions due to lack of collateral and other conditional ties. As the Credit Manager, I led in managing all businesses and staff from the credit department of cooperative. During this time I led tracking system upgrade, hit 100,000 clients mark, USD 5 million loan-books and 5% portfolio at risk.
  • Credit Management
  • Develop and execute integrated sales and credit strategies that are aligned with the business plan to achieve desired revenue, expense and service goals.
  • Build and maintain meaningful symbiotic relationships with customers to the mutual benefit of both the customer and the SACCO.
  • Set expectations for branch staff, fostering an environment in which teams work together to achieve business goals.
  • Ensure Compliance with the SACCO’s policy, control guidelines and procedures.
  • Develop new business opportunities by proactively marketing for lending/deposit opportunities from current & prospective clients.
  • Maintain an active role through partnerships with community, coffee development fund, Government and financial organizations.
  • Implement identified opportunities to increase profit of existing SMEs by providing innovative campaigns while maintaining risk within suitable boundaries
  • Review and evaluate regular reports of branch activities, including staffing, loans, deposits, charge-offs, and audits to meet SACCO sustainability and performance objectives.
  • Finance different value chains including trade, agriculture, housing and asset

Jonathan Waita

Work experience
  • KREP Development Agency (KDA) came in to integrate loan recoveries with its branch networks to create an avenue for farmers to pay their loans and borrow new loans from the fund in future from those branches. With KDA we financed several value chains including; horticulture, dairy, fruits, coffee, maize and woodlot.
  • Innovations Integration into Field Operations.
  • o Worked with Field Operations, Logistics, Business Operations, and M&E to integrate the new products, services, or trainings into KDA’s program.
  • o Ensured timely and high-quality sourcing of project inputs (mostly), like banana suckers, bean seed, potato seed, sweet potato cuttings, bee hives, mangoes seedlings, woodlot seedlings, irrigation kits etc.
  • Needs assessment:
  • o Conduct participatory research into the needs and preferences of the farmers that project serves in order to identify new opportunities for impact.
  • Product pilot and Trial Support:
  • o Supported a team of 40 staff running pilots and project integration with KDA’s programs
  • o Improved product pilot and trial protocols and plans.
  • o Designed women and youth related financial credit programs and piloted.
  • o Analyzed data and compile activities’ reports.
  • Agriculture training
  • o Refined agriculture funding trainings that was disseminated to over 200,000 farm families.
  • o Developed new training materials based on research, new partner’s requirements and trials.
  • o Improved training delivery and assessment through a team of trainers and evaluators.

Jonathan Waita

Work experience
  • INRMU Project was an agricultural financing initiative made to provide farming interventions geared to improve food security and income generation activity for the community. The project created enterprises which were later linked to financial service providers for bigger funding to make big impacts. The project was funded by the Belgium Government and first phase of implementation was done by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources in conjunction with BTC. The interventions were in form of credit/loans to be repaid from sales of the produce. Also it worked on access to finance and market linkages to the farmers groups. The products ranged from irrigation, forestry, fruit culture, beekeeping and water & sanitation funding
  • Responsibilities
  • With staff from ministry of environment and natural resources, ensure the agriculture programs’ strategic objectives and results are fully accomplished and meet expected technical quality standards.
  • Ensured that the vision and plans for projects are innovative and are in line with Belgium technical cooperation and country program strategies, as well as Ministry of environment and natural resources strategies.
  • Ensured integration of farming interventions with existing farming programs, especially irrigation, fruit culture, beekeeping, microfinance and health, through regular meetings, communication and sharing.
  • Oversaw program’s monitoring and evaluation, using data analysis as the basis for measuring performance.
  • Lead on the identification of new business development areas, train clients on enterprise development and doing financial services and market linkages.
  • Manage project budgets, including tracking of collection, financial and material resources using established budget management tools and systems.
  • Ensured accurate and timely reporting of program finances and progress status; review actual financial performance against the budget; and explain variances on a regular basis.

Jonathan Waita

Work experience
  • February, 2001 - January, 2005
  • Fulltime
  • BIMAS is leading microfinance institution in Kenya. My role here was community mobilizer, trainer and gave loans, monitored repayments and reports to the organization. During my employment I was promoted twice from excellent job.
  • Responsibilities
  • Identification of potential clients, recruitment, screening and training potential clients on business development, policies and procedures and make recommendations on extending credit.
  • Conduct due diligence to determine feasibility of extending credit to potential clients in business, agriculture, service businesses and manufacturers.
  • Completed loan applications by explaining provisions to applicant; obtaining signatures and notarizations; collecting fees.
  • Did outreach and Promotion, Sales of financial products credit and savings, Assessment and Intake, Orientation, training and technical assistance. Also did savings mobilization, Loan disbursement and maintaining of quality portfolio.
  • Provide easy access to credit, train people on how to make some savings, inspire women to be economically independent, promote their talents.
  • Efficiency and productivity: 1. Maintain high loan approval rates; and 2. Achieve and exceed required case load.
  • Delinquency management and recovery: 1. Maintain a PAR rate of less than 5%, good PAR follow up, and recovery record; 2. Good compliance of policies and procedures.

Related persons

josephine osengoCommunications & Marketing Officer at Practical Action