One Acre Fund Program Associate (Multiple Locations) Job Vacancy in Uganda

Job
description

Wanted Early-career professionals
with 2 – 5+ years work experience to serve in a position that combines both
field and management experience in Africa.

Job Location

Rural Rwanda or
Burundi (French required); Rural Kenya, Ethiopia, or Malawi (English required);
Tanzania Regional Capital (English Required).

Duration Minimum 2 years commitment,
full-time job.

Job
Description

Rapid organization
growth translates into great career opportunities for our staff. We invest
heavily in careers – we want to develop our next group of country directors,
R&D directors, and partnership leaders. In their first year, our program
associates lead 3-5 internal consulting projects, such as:

District
partner: Most program associates are initially partnered with a local
field director. Program associates are immersed in One Acre’s operations
and learn from their local counterpart how to grow an operation of 20+
staff, serving 5,000-20,000 farmers. They in turn also transfer management
and computer skills to their counterpart. By working hand-in-hand with
country national staff in a regular field operation, our program
associates get a feel for operations in the field.
New
operation creation: A program associate in Kenya created and manages the
One Acre Fund Customer Engagement team, which is tasked with fielding
error claims from farmers, investigating claims, and solving them fairly.
Started in 2012 with one part-time employee, the Customer Engagement team
has grown rapidly to seven full-time staff members. The team investigated
and resolved more than 3,000 cases in 2013.

Impact
innovation: A program associate designed several configurations of a
harvest storage product and farmer training, and tried it with a few
hundred farmers. The most successful trial demonstrated an increase in
harvest profits by more than 10%. The following year, the product was sold
to 40,000 farmers.
Growth
innovation: A staffer designed a new viral marketing initiative. She
identified our best and most enthusiastic farmers, and turned them into
volunteer “replication agents” who are empowered to recruit new
groups of farmers. Our staff person designed the trial protocols, trained
10 field staff to test the idea, and observed the trial in-field,
resulting in 25% higher client enrollment. This program was subsequently
rolled out to 200 field sites and became the foundation of our current
farmer recruitment model.

As staff grow into a
program manager role, our strongest performers take leadership over a
relatively independent pilot, country, or department within the One Acre Fund
network, while earning a significant and sustainable salary increase. Examples
includes:

Government
partnerships development: One Acre Fund receives frequent requests from
African governments to jointly implement nationwide agricultural training,
fertilizer distribution programs, and credit programs. A program manager
took the lead in setting up our newest government partnership operation,
initially to pilot one project. Within a year, this operation had 50 staff
and is likely to at least quadruple in the coming two years, to hopefully
2-3 nationwide partnerships.
Department
leadership opportunities: In their second year of service, top performing
program staffers are often given the responsibility of running an internal
One Acre Fund department like “Scale Innovations.” This
department runs dozens of test-and-control trials with 10,000+ farmers
that radically tweak our program model, with the goal of significantly
increasing our scalability.
New
markets: One Acre Fund has ambitious plans to launch one new country per
year. In 2011, a program manager moved to Burundi to direct field
operations for an initial 400-farmer pilot. Three years later, One Acre
Fund’s Burundi operation serves 21,000 farmers with 110 staff.

Career
Growth and Development

One Acre Fund
invests heavily in building management and leadership skills. Your manager will
invest significant time in your career development. We provide constant,
actionable feedback delivered through mentorship and through regular management
consulting-style career reviews. We also have regular one-on-one meetings,
where we listen to and discuss career goals, and work collaboratively to craft
roles that each person can be passionate about. Because of our rapid growth, we
constantly have new high-level roles opening up and opportunities in many
functions. This results in fast career growth for our staff.

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 Peace Corps accomplishments).
Leadership
experience at work, or outside of work.
Top-performing
undergraduate background (include GPA and test scores on your resume).
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.
Ability
to cook / laugh – desirable.
Language:
English required in Kenya, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania, and French required
in Rwanda and Burundi. French and Swahili-speakers are particularly
encouraged to apply.

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