One Acre Fund
Program Associate
Wanted: Exceptional professional with 2-5 years of work experience to serve in a position that combines both field and management experience.
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 Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, or Nigeria.
Duration: Minimum 2 years commitment, full-time job.
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
How to Apply
CLICK HERE to
apply online