Job Opportunities at One Acre Fund

Job Location

Kakamega, Kenya  (English required)

Job Description

One Acre Fund’s Kenya program grows in scope and complexity each year. We add new products, services, and input distributions; new ways of collecting repayment and enrolling clients; and new policies and procedures to incentivize and enforce good performance. Our program size roughly triples every two years.

The Operations Division – a collection of back-office functions including Logistics, Customer Engagement, Orders, Collections, Print, and Internal Investigations – works to (re)design and execute the processes necessary to keep up with program change, growth, and innovation. We live on the edge of what’s possible, and accept significant executional risk and technical debt to increase the total amount of social good that we produce, through more impact per client and more total clients. The result is a fast-paced, constantly evolving and growing work environment. We seek individuals who are excited by BIG challenges and comfortable building structure where we haven’t yet placed it.

We place a heavy emphasis on both execution and staff growth and development. We strive to create a safe learning environment that is forgiving of internal mistakes, with safety mechanisms to catch any errors before they ripple outside of our division. Simultaneously, we offer stretch-projects to all staff because we believe that growth comes through practice. We seek team members who are eager to embrace both of these important priorities.  

As the Kenya Operations Associate/Manager, your duties will include:

• Supporting one or more teams within the operations division.
• Mentoring and developing key team leaders.
• Working closely with our Field Program and Innovations teams to support program impact assessments – For each proposed programmatic change, what existing processes will shift and what additional short and long-term support is needed.
• Managing operations projects – Some examples include:
  • Identifying, codifying, and documenting mature processes – How we execute the routine stuff to run our program, like servicing product warranties, allocating field staff to operational geographies, disbursing refunds, issuing client repayment incentives, etc. etc. etc.
  • Formalizing QC processes and checklists to deskill our entry-level roles.
  • Supporting the development and maintenance of a simple country-wide “Service Catalog” that outlines the services each One Acre Fund team offers.
• Managing operations innovations – some examples include:
  • Migrating existing paper processes to tablets, speeding the flow of data from field to office and back.
  • Professionalizing our Customer Service team’s call routing, call volume projections, case tracking, and associated reporting.
  • Preparing for “rolling” program enrollment and deliveries if and as we move away from a highly seasonal program.
• Building bridges between our Field Program leadership and our back-office.
• Humbly and cheerfully doing whatever unexpected work is necessary to keep the ship afloat and strengthen it against future unexpected icebergs.

Career Growth and Development

One Acre Fund invests heavily in building management and leadership skills. Your manager will invest significant time in your career development. We provide constant, actionable feedback delivered through mentorship and through regular management consulting-style career reviews. We also have regular one-on-one meetings, where we listen to and discuss career goals, and work collaboratively to craft roles that each person can be passionate about.

Qualifications

We are seeking exceptional professionals with 2-5+ years of work experience. Candidates who fit the following criteria are strongly encouraged to apply: 

• Humble, clear, deft verbal and written communicator; comfortable saying “no” and making complicated ideas simple for a wide range of audiences
• Calm, positive, and collaborative under fire
• Demonstrated passion for designing and re-engineering operational processes
• STEM background a strong plus
• A willingness to live outside of a capital city, close to our customers, 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; Swahili-speakers are particularly encouraged to apply.

Preferred Start Date

As soon as possible.

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

East Africans strongly encourage to apply.

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Job Location

Kakamega, Kenya; Rubengera, Rwanda; Muramvya, Burundi; Iringa, Tanzania; Jinja, Uganda; Zomba, Malawi; Kabwe, Zambia

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.

Career Growth and Development

One Acre Fund invests in building management and leadership skills. Your manager will invest significant time in your career development. We provide constant, actionable feedback delivered through mentorship and through regular management consulting-style career reviews. We also have regular one-on-one meetings, where we listen to and discuss career goals, and work collaboratively to craft roles that each person can be passionate about. Because of our rapid growth, we constantly have new high-level roles opening up and opportunities in many functions. This results in fast career growth for our staff.

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. 

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

East Africans strongly encouraged to apply.