One Acre Fund,Program Associate Jobs in Rwanda

Closing
date: 31 Jul 2016
Wanted
Exceptional
professional with 2-5 years of work experience to serve in a position that
combines both field and management experience.
Job
Location
Rural
Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, or Nigeria.
Duration

Minimum
2 years commitment, full-time job.
Job
Description
One
Acre Fund is growing quickly, and we plan to at least quadruple our farmer
impact in the next five years. Program Associates play a major role in driving
that growth and ensuring that this growth is stable and systematic – while also
adding major innovations and improvements to our program quality. This offers
Program Associates a strong career opportunity: the ability to learn from a
successful field operation, contribute to aggressive growth, and also make
improvements to our program.
We
are currently seeking Program Associates for a variety of teams within One Acre
Fund, including:
Operations: Our country
operation teams face a classic leadership and management challenge: how to keep
a large country operation growing at 40-75% per year while also making
significant improvements to our operating model. Program Associates first learn
from our organization’s deep knowledge on scaling rural field programs; then,
they are challenged to find new ways to stretch, grow faster, and increase our
quality of service.
  • Field
    operations staff focus on farmer-facing services. They start as
    generalists, with overall responsibility for executing our program in a
    region. Over time, they can continue to rise as a general leader, possibly
    growing to manage an entire country’s field operation. Or they may
    specialize, for example, in the creation and roll-out of staff development
    training for hundreds or even 1,000+ team members.
  • Support
    operations staff build the infrastructure required for growth. These teams
    proactively eliminate barriers to scale in a diverse range of areas –
    processing millions of farmer payments, communicating to farmers via tens
    of millions of SMS, hiring hundreds of new staff per year, and physically
    moving 20,000+ tons of farm inputs to thousands of drop sites. Program
    Associates also make steady improvements to accelerate growth – for
    example, setting up mobile money integration for a country.
Innovations: Our Innovations
teams discover new ideas for our programs and conduct dozens of trials to test
these ideas. As an organization, we constantly seek to learn and improve, and
our Innovations teams lead the way.
  • Product
    Innovations staff improve our core agricultural products or run new
    experiments in energy and health products. The ideas they discover may
    eventually scale to hundreds of thousands of households. Product
    Innovations staff design trials, execute trials together with thousands of
    farmers, synthesize trial data, and make constant revisions to the product
    offering. For example, our Product Innovations team is currently testing
    delivery of live chickens and preparing the product for full-scale
    rollout. One Acre Fund is also increasingly delving into energy and
    health, and we are currently one of the largest sellers of solar lights in
    Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Scale
    Innovations staff seek to improve our core operating model. By running
    trials with tens of thousands of farmers, they analyze targeted questions
    such as: does moving from a group liability loan to an individual
    liability loan improve repayment and customer satisfaction? Or they might
    investigate more radical ideas, such as setting up physical One Acre Fund
    shops to see if there are more efficient ways to deliver high-quality
    service to farmers. They try variations on our program with the goal of
    improving our scalability, impact, and financial sustainability.
On
a day-to-day basis, nearly all roles involve a mix of activities:
  • Understanding
    and solving problems: observing field operations, meeting with leaders of
    our field staff , running surveys, conducting desk research, analyzing
    KPIs, etc. Then creating simple and lasting solutions to complex problems.
  • Planning
    and executing large projects: identifying clear goals, creating project
    calendars, designing workflows, creating field tools and talking points,
    designing incentive systems and understanding stakeholders, following up
    and monitoring project execution in the field, etc.
  • Building
    teams: hiring staff using One Acre Fund’s unique “experiential hiring”
    system, mentoring key deputies, and steadily handing off responsibility to
    your team as you build it.
  • Communicating
    with other teams: working in coordination with One Acre Fund’s other teams
    on the ground to execute a smooth customer experience in the simplest way
    possible.
One
Acre Fund has deep operational experience running rural field programs at a
scale of 1,000+ full-time staff per country. Program Associates benefit from
this past experience, quickly building their skill-set through immersion in our
operating environment. At the same time, the main role of Program Associates is
to accelerate growth and to constantly stretch and improve our operations. This
presents an excellent career opportunity to both learn from One Acre Fund’s
accumulated experience and constantly improve and enable 40%+ program growth
per year.
Qualifications
We
are seeking exceptional professionals with 2 to 5+ years of work experience,
and a demonstrated long-term passion for international development. Candidates
who fit the following criteria are strongly encouraged to apply:
  • Strong
    work experiences. Examples include a demanding professional work
    experience, or successful entrepreneurial experience, e.g. starting a
    field program in a developing country, leading a conference, starting a
    business, solid Volunteer Service Organization accomplishments (VSO, Peace
    Corps, JICA, etc).
  • Leadership
    experience at work, or outside of work.
  • Top-performing
    undergraduate background (include final grade/marks/GPA).
  • Humility.
    We are looking for passionate professionals who combine strong leadership
    skills with good humor, patience, and a humble approach to service to join
    our growing family of leaders.
  • A
    willingness to commit to living in rural areas of East Africa for at least
    two years – this is a long-term, career-track role. The ideal candidate
    will have at least one year demonstrated experience working in the
    developing world, although this is not a strict requirement.
  • Language:
    English required in all locations. French required for Burundi placement.
    Other notable and useful languages are Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Chichewa,
    Amharic.
  • Ability
    to cook/laugh – desirable.
Preferred
Start Date
Flexible
Compensation
Starts
modest. However, this is a career-track role with fast raises for performance,
paying a meaningful salary for long-term placement in developing nations.
Benefits
Health
insurance, immunizations, flight, room and board.
Sponsor
International Candidates
Yes

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