New Job Vacancy At One Acre Fund | Tanzania Impact and Behavior Change Associate, November 2019
OVERVIEW: 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
Your job is to optimize the impact generated by our products and services by ensuring that our farmers understand our wide set of products and services, and are changing their behaviors accordingly through highly impactful trainings. You work closely with:
- Our M&E team to understand how we can optimize impact from existing products, services and behaviors and you update and innovate on our training content accordingly
- Our Product Innovations team to maximize impact from new products, services and practices
- Our Expansion Team to maximize impact in new regions by proactively adjusting our training content/marketing for various agronomic needs, calendars and cultural context
- 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
In addition, you are constantly keeping an eye out for external seasonal threats to our farmer’s income (e.g. pests, climate change). If faced with a challenge you coordinate a timely and accurately response and you own that we respond effectively (i.e. trigger an immediate behavior change). Success in your role measured by our ability to maximize each season’s impact and thereby hit our impact targets.
Specific Responsibilities Include, But Are Not Limited To
Creating and monitoring our Annual Impact Strategy:
- You are responsible for creating/updating and presenting an outstanding Impact Strategy every season - created in close collaboration with PI, M&E, Field Ops and our Systems Teams
- This strategy should be based off our 5 Year Impact Plan and boil down our most important impact priorities for the year and set us up to meet our annual Impact Targets across regions
- It is rolled out to our Field Team through an inspirational and well prepared Impact Boot camp
- It also needs to be created prior to our marketing for the new season to ensure that we successfully market and sell the right mix of products and services
- 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 One Acre Fund works today, after our Enrollment/Marketing window and after the Impact Boot camp, our Impact Strategy largely comes to life through our bi-weekly training program
- You/your team trains our Field Leaders every two weeks, who train our Field Officers, who train their Group Leaders in their village, who train their group members...
- As such, you have a limited number of hours/year for training content and the content needs to travel through several people before it reaches our clients. Hence, you are responsible for:
- Optimizing these hours to ensure we optimize impact from new and existing products/services (incl. complex products such as insurance, seed types, warranties)
- Ensuring that the content is simple, inspirational and on point so that it smoothly travels from the Field Leaders all the way to each and every one of our 60,000 farmers
- Ensuring that the content effectively triggers behavior change. You have a small team who you should use effectively to test content and messaging before rolled out
- As we are growing our product portfolio and our program is becoming more complex (i.e. tackling a wider range of challenges such as income diversification, soil health, nutrition, risk management (e.g. insurance), quality of life and asset accumulation), you will need to explore new and innovative ways of delivering training content (shorter trainings, SMS, tablets, campaigns, etc.) and/or techniques for better knowledge retention
- We expect you to frequently “Go To Gemba” - that is - spend a lot of time in the field with our clients and with the field team to understand what works and what does not so that you constantly re-iterate and improve our techniques for behavior 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 To External Impact Threats
- First and foremost - we want you to minimize the time you spend on responding to unforeseen impact threats! Therefore you should:
- Work without 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
- We expect you to constantly have an ear to the ground to pick up challenges as early as possible - this is mainly done by keeping a close eye on our Client Engagement database and through fostering ongoing dialogue with Regional Leads and District Coordinators
- Once a problem does hit, we lean on you to help us:
- Prioritize the response: As we said - we have a limited number of hours to train our team - if something comes in - something else needs to be deprioritized. We also need to carefully weigh the cost of the response against the risk. We expect you to quickly and systematically quantify an impact risk and advise if/how we respond
- Coordinate/optimize the response: Your leadership skills here as this 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 (e.g. ensure Inputs/Logistics acts on seed quality issues).
Team Management
Our Agronomist and our Behavior Change Coordinators report into you and you are 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. We hold career reviews every six months, and set aside time to discuss your aspirations and career goals. You’ll have the opportunity to shape a growing organization and build a rewarding long-term career.
Qualifications
Specific qualifications include, but are not limited to:
Therefore, Please Only Submit An Application If You Fit These Criteria
We are looking for a candidate with a proven track record of tackling complex agricultural technology adoption and behavior change challenges in a systematic and efficient way.
- 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
- Prior experience with research and extension project design and management, ideally including participatory methods, on-farm trials, surveys and focus groups
- Postgraduate degree in behavior science, rural development agriculture or a related field
- 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 prioritizing 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 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
- Willingness to travel. The role requires up to ~30% travel across regions every year
- English and Kiswahili required
Preferred Start Date
As soon as possible
Job Location
Iringa, Njombe and/or Mbeya, Tanzania (with frequent travel to all regions)
Compensation:Commensurate with experience
Duration: Full-time job.
Benefits: Health insurance, paid time off
Sponsor International Candidates: Yes.Tanzania country nationals / East Africans are strongly encouraged to apply.
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).
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