One Acre Fund,Program Associate Jobs Vacancy

ay 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.