One Acre Fund Program Design Associate Job in Jinja, Uganda

One Acre Fund Program Design Associate Job in Jinja, Uganda

[Job Title: Uganda Program Design Associate

Location: Jinja, Uganda

Job Summary: Seeking a professional with 2-5 years experience of program design and implementation in rural contexts. Responsible for designing and crafting our farmer-facing program to help drive expansion and farmer adoption of products.

About One Acre Fund:

Founded in 2006, One Acre Fund supplies smallholder farmers with the agricultural services they need to make their farms vastly more productive. We provide quality farm supplies on credit, delivered within walking distance of farmers’ homes, and agricultural trainings to improve harvests.

We measure our success by our ability to make farmers more prosperous: On average, farmers harvest 50 percent more food after working with One Acre Fund.

We are growing quickly. We currently serve more than 800,000 farm families in Eastern and Southern Africa, with more than 7,500 full-time staff, and we aim to serve 1 million farm families by 2020.

Job Description

The first half of your job is to ensure our farmers understand our wide set of products, and are changing their behaviours accordingly through highly impactful trainings.

You work closely with:

Our M&E team to understand how we can maximize impact from existing products and behaviours and you update and innovate on our training content accordingly.

Our Product Innovations team to maximize impact from new products, services and practices
Our Field Operations team, who ultimately deliver all the content you are creating, to ensure strong understanding and buy in behind our products, services and impact strategy.

Success in your role is measured by our ability to optimize each season’s impact and thereby hit our impact targets.

The second half of your job is to help build our field-facing strategies, setting our Field Team up for success:

Work with Operations (Field Operations and Systems) to develop practical solutions to field challenges

Design and build the enrollment and repayment strategies for our field team and transform them into understandable training elements for our FIeld Leaders and Field Officers

As part of the Steering Committee for Uganda, help to build the long-term country programme direction and strategy

Undertake post-mortems at the end of each major programme phase and develop action-focused recommendations for future programme improvements

Manage the field team calendar and seasonal activities, support in price setting and product selection.

Sit on the impact working group

Success in these areas will be measured through Field Team performance, specifically repayment of our credit portfolio and hitting growth metrics such as overall farmer numbers.

Specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Creating, monitoring, executing and adjusting (if needed) an Annual Impact Strategy:

You will work with the Impact Lead, and in close collaboration with PI, M&E, Field Ops and our Systems Teams to create/update and present an outstanding Impact Strategy every season.

In addition to help creating the annual Impact Strategy, you also own the creation of an execution plan to ensure that this strategy is effectively implemented. This includes coordination of key stakeholders who may be implementing certain aspects of the strategy.

Once launched, you are responsible for monitoring how this strategy plays out in field and if needed adjust and respond to challenges and opportunities as they unfold
Optimizing our Impact Training Portfolio/Farmer
Training Uptake/Retention:

As we are growing our product portfolio and our program is becoming more complex and tackling a wider range of challenges such as income diversification, soil health, nutrition, etc.

you will need to explore new and innovative ways of delivering training content and/or techniques for better knowledge retention
We expect you to frequently spend a lot of time in the field with our farmers and with the field team to understand what works and what does not so that you constantly re-iterate and improve our techniques for behaviour change.

Lastly, it’s critical that you operate through the formal processes set up by the Field Team to ensure the right content goes out at the right time – in each and every district
Protecting our Farmers from External Impact Threats:

To minimize the time spent on responding to unforeseen impact threats, you will:

Work with our global/in country team to prevent/prepare our farmers for the biggest impact threat.

Work across our Field

and Systems team to ensure we have the systems/protocols build out to respond to risks with minimal disruptions

Keep a close eye on our Client Engagement database and foster ongoing dialogue with Field

Leaders to pick up challenges as early as possible.

In the event of unforeseen challenges, you will help:

Prioritize the response: Deprioritize and carefully weigh the cost of the response against the risk. You quickly and systematically quantify an impact risk and advise if/how we respond

Coordinate/optimize the response: Your leadership skills here could range from ‘only’ securing agronomic advice from experts and ensuring Field Ops update next week’s meeting agenda to rapidly aligning the organization behind a seed swap

Learning for the future: Ensure that lessons learned reach the team that can proactively prevent the risk in the future

Planning Field Activities

Building out detailed process and plans for each seasonal activity.

Monitoring and trading off activities for the field team where needed to prioritise tasks at the appropriate time.

Coordinating between different departments to feed into field based actions

Team Management

You manage the Programme Design team. You will be responsible for their professional development, performance, efficiency and team culture in accordance with One Acre Fund management principles and expectations.

Career Growth and Development: We have a strong culture of constant learning and we invest in developing our people. You’ll have weekly check-ins with your manager, access to mentorship and training programs, and regular feedback on your performance.



Qualifications

We are seeking one exceptional professional with 5+ year(s) of work experience and ideally a demonstrated passion for our mission.

Candidates who fit the following criteria are strongly encouraged to apply:

Strong educational background; degrees in Rural Development, Agronomy, or research in rural environments preferred.

5+ years of relevant work experience which includes qualitative and quantitative research on smallholder agriculture, with an emphasis on behavior change and adoption of improved technologies (products or practices), preferably including some work around agroforestry.

Experience of working in Extension Services, or implementing development programmes in rural locations preferred.

Demonstrated leadership experience at work, or outside of work, enthusiasm for learning, and openness to feedback.

Ability to build teams and collaborate with colleagues from diverse backgrounds.

Language: English required. Luganda and/or Lusoga strongly desired.

Prior experience with research and extension project design and management, ideally including participatory methods, on-farm trials, surveys and focus groups

Strong interpersonal skills to effectively collaborate and coordinate work across multiple teams

Ability to easily explain complex technical concepts in plain language

Strong ability to stay organized to simultaneously manage the complexity of our products, regions, calendars, effectively prioritising to meet short- and long-term deadlines

Analytical ability to effectively identify and prioritize impact opportunities

Passion for collaborating with and training others, with strong experience in contributing to capacity building and professional development of colleagues and direct reports

Humility. We have a fantastic and likeable team. We are looking for passionate professionals who combine strong leadership skills with good humor, patience, and a humble approach to service.

We place a lot of value on the ability to proactively respond to open and frank feedback in order to grow as individuals and a team as well as constructively and respectfully give feedback

Preferred Start Date: As soon as possible

Job Location: Jinja, Uganda

Compensation: Commensurate with experience

Duration: Full-time job.

Benefits: Health insurance, paid time off

Sponsor International Candidates: Yes. Uganda country nationals / East Africans are strongly encouraged to apply.

Application link: https://grnh.se/7ef9955d1

Closing date: January 11, 2020

One Acre Fund never asks candidates to pay any money or pay for tests at any stage of the interview process.

Official One Acre Fund emails will always arrive from an @oneacrefund.org address. Please report any suspicious communication here (globalhotline@oneacrefund.org).

One Acre Fund Program Design Associate Job in Jinja, Uganda

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