Jonas Restle-Steinert has supported SEED since 2017. He is in charge of overseeing SEED’s direct enterprise support activities with a particular focus on managing and implementing SEED’s Acceleration Programmes (SEED Accelerator and Catalyser). In his position as Senior Manager at SEED's hosting partner adelphi research, he focuses on sustainable private sector development, social and eco-inclusive entrepreneurship, capacity building, design thinking as well as green and climate finance topics.

Before joining adelphi, Jonas has coordinated and conceptualised diverse international development projects in a multitude of emerging and developing countries in West and Southern Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Beyond entrepreneurship, renewable energy, and financing models, his work was primarily focused on private sector, market, and financial systems development. Jonas managed a large multi-year post-Ebola economic recovery project in Sierra Leone funded by DFID and has worked on projects aimed at improving employment, economic structures and skills development in Northern Nigeria and Pakistan.

Jonas holds a postgraduate degree (MSc) in Development Management from the London School of Economics (LSE). For his dissertation, he conducted field research in rural Zambia on innovative, socially responsible financing schemes for small-scale entrepreneurs as alternatives to traditional microfinance. Previously, he studied Politics and Administrative Sciences (BA) at the University of Konstanz, and wrote his dissertation on determinants of trust in the granting process of microloans.