Global Agroforestry Operations Lead at One Acre Fund

About the Role

Planting trees is one of the most efficient actions to generate impact for rural families and improve the local environment. Growing trees can have many benefits for farm families - trees can improve land productivity and soil fertility. Trees can also serve as a critical economic resource for families. Additionally, they contribute positively to local ecosystems and reduce the effects of climate change.

As the Global Agroforestry Operations Lead, you will support our agroforestry programs across 9 countries to make them more impactful, efficient, and environmentally responsible. Through your technical experience and leadership, you will help farmers to plant 80 million trees in 2023 and 95 million trees in 2024. Your work will support our target of planting 1 billion trees by 2030. 

You will report to our Global Agroforestry Innovations Lead.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical support to country teams. You will lead efforts to achieve major improvements to our agroforestry programs. The goal of these improvements is to increase the number of trees we plant each year and the impact each tree generates. Examples of key initiatives include: 
• You will help increase survival rates in key markets. We don’t want to plant a lot of trees - we want to plant a lot of trees which will survive and generate benefits over time. You will work with field teams to understand the root causes affecting survival rates and identify solutions to increase seedling survival to maturity
• You will support field teams to identify appropriate species for each region where we operate. You will help us diversify the species we offer in many regions with a specific focus to increase the adoption of indigenous species
• You will help build robust supply chains to ensure we have a sufficient supply of high-quality seeds each season. You may also help improve regional and national supply chains to make high-quality seeds available to all actors.
• Support our field operations. We have very ambitious tree-planting targets in the next few years including rapid growth in a few key markets. Using your field and management experience you will support teams to solve operational and strategic challenges to help us achieve these targets. Examples of possible initiatives include:
• You help increase the number of trees we plant each year by identifying barriers to farmer adoption of trees and building solutions with country teams to increase trees per adopter and the number of farmers growing trees
• You reduce our long-term reliance on donor support by improving the financial efficiency of our tree programs. This could involve streamlining operational processes and identifying new efficiencies to scale.
• You improve the program's financial sustainability by increasing our focus on high-value tree varieties such as fruit, nut, and timber species.  
• Design and implement trials. You will work with country teams to design and launch innovations and trials to improve our programs through on-ground and remote support. You will test out leading ideas to scale any successful interventions to a regional and national level over multiple seasons.

Qualifications

Across all roles, these are the general qualifications we look for. For this role specifically, you will have:

• 5+ years working in smallholder agroforestry/agriculture with demonstrated managerial responsibilities including field and performance management
• Field experience working with smallholder farmers 
• A track record of implementation is preferred, taking projects from strategic to operational within a relatively short time
• Bachelor or advanced degree in Agroforestry preferred
• Language: English is required in all locations. Other local languages desirable