- Rubengera,
Western Province, Rwanda - Zomba,
Southern Region, Malawi - Kamuli,
Eastern Region, Uganda
Wanted
Exceptional
professional with 2-5 years of work ex
perience to serve in a position that
combines both field and management experience.
Job Location
Rural Rwanda,
Tanzania, Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Ethiopia 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
