Organization: One Acre Fund
Location: KE
Job Location: Western Kenya (English required)
Organization Description
One Acre Fund is a start-up initiative in Kenya which works with persistently hungry farm families. Instead of giving handouts to families, One Acre invests in farm families to generate a permanent gain in farm income. Our "investment bundle" includes education, financing, inputs, and export market access. Our program is designed to be usable by the extreme poor, and generates a lasting, 100%+ gain in farm income.
We have been operating since January 2006, and we currently serve 22,000 farm families (88,000 children). Our target is to change the lives of 50,000 families (200,000 children) within 18 more months, scaling at a 50-100% annual growth rate thereafter. One Acre Fund is one of the most externally-validated social start-ups of 2006, winning grants from the highly competitive Echoing Green and Draper Richards Foundations, and first place wins at the Stanford and Yale social venture competitions. Website: www.oneacrefund.org
Job Description
We are seeking exceptional professionals with 2-4 years work experience, and a demonstrated long-term career interest in international development. They will serve in a career-track position that combines both field and management experience in Africa. As a young organization, we are ready to hand over large responsibility for specific, well-defined work modules, with similar structure to an operations consulting role.
Projects will be focused on improvements to One Acre Fund's program model - as opposed to day-to-day operations, which are operated by our country staff. The typical program associate leads three major projects, and several smaller ones. Example projects include:
- Operations projects. We recently started large-scale purchase and sale of bean seed. The program associate devised a protocol for purchasing seed from farmers, worked through field staff to enroll hundreds of farmers in the program, created financial protocols for payment processing, and set up a warehouse receiving/ processing operation.
- New model configuration experiments. One Acre Fund is currently experimenting with several different program model configurations, led by a program associate. He is setting up the infrastructure to set up a fertilizer savings program with a bank, and field-trialing the program with 200 farmers in two sites, in cooperation with two of our managers.
- Financial processes. We have a program associate who is leading up an effort to rationalize our financial processes. As a result of his work, we will now have monthly data on actual expenses vs. budget across all budget line items and five different operating units. He will gradually hand this off to two office staff that he is managing. Having this data will lead us into the next phase of the work, which is to design and implement a wide variety of cost-cutting programs.
Qualifications
We are looking for somebody truly extraordinary for the program associate role. This is an extremely competitive posting for a career-track role. Only 3% of applicants make it to a phone screen. Therefore, please do NOT respond unless you fit these criteria:
- Strong work experiences. Examples include a high-level professional work experience, or some kind of successful entrepreneurial experience (e.g. starting a field program in a developing country, leading a conference, starting a business, solid peace corps accomplishments)
- Leadership experience at work, or outside of work.
- Top-performing undergraduate background (include GPA and test scores on your resume)
- No ego or drama. We are all stable people who are fun to be around. We are looking for others that combine strong leadership skills with a humble approach to service
- 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. Ideal candidate will have at least one yeardemonstrated experience working in the developing world
- Nice to have: Kiswahili or Kinyrwandan a plus. English required, and French required in Rwanda.
- Ability to cook/ laugh/ extraordinary patience - all desirable
Preferred Start Date: Flexible
Compensation: Starts very modest. However, this is a career-track role eventually paying a real and livable salary for a long-term placement in developing nations.
Benefits: Health cover, immunizations, flight, room and board. 2 annual home flights provided - home trips include some speaking and fundraising duties
Career development: Quarterly management consulting-style career reviews, and significant investment in career development. Your manager will invest significant time in your career development.
Sponsor International Candidates: Yes
To Apply
Email cover letter and resume to jobs@oneacrefund.org (Subject line: Program Associate Search + name of the site that referred you)
Mr. Paul Youn
One Acre Fund
330 Myrtle Street, Redwood City, CA 94062
Email: jobs@oneacrefund.org (Subject line: Program Associate Search + name of the site that referred you)
Read more...
Organization: One Acre Fund
Location: RW
Job Location: Southwest Rwanda (French required)
Organization Description
One Acre Fund is a start-up initiative in Kenya which works with persistently hungry farm families. Instead of giving handouts to families, One Acre invests in farm families to generate a permanent gain in farm income. Our "investment bundle" includes education, financing, inputs, and export market access. Our program is designed to be usable by the extreme poor, and generates a lasting, 100%+ gain in farm income.
We have been operating since January 2006, and we currently serve 22,000 farm families (88,000 children). Our target is to change the lives of 50,000 families (200,000 children) within 18 more months, scaling at a 50-100% annual growth rate thereafter. One Acre Fund is one of the most externally-validated social start-ups of 2006, winning grants from the highly competitive Echoing Green and Draper Richards Foundations, and first place wins at the Stanford and Yale social venture competitions. Website: www.oneacrefund.org
Job Description
We are seeking exceptional professionals with 2-4 years work experience, and a demonstrated long-term career interest in international development. They will serve in a career-track position that combines both field and management experience in Africa. As a young organization, we are ready to hand over large responsibility for specific, well-defined work modules, with similar structure to an operations consulting role.
Projects will be focused on improvements to One Acre Fund's program model - as opposed to day-to-day operations, which are operated by our country staff. The typical program associate leads three major projects, and several smaller ones. Example projects include:
- Operations projects. We recently started large-scale purchase and sale of bean seed. The program associate devised a protocol for purchasing seed from farmers, worked through field staff to enroll hundreds of farmers in the program, created financial protocols for payment processing, and set up a warehouse receiving/ processing operation.
- New model configuration experiments. One Acre Fund is currently experimenting with several different program model configurations, led by a program associate. He is setting up the infrastructure to set up a fertilizer savings program with a bank, and field-trialing the program with 200 farmers in two sites, in cooperation with two of our managers.
- Financial processes. We have a program associate who is leading up an effort to rationalize our financial processes. As a result of his work, we will now have monthly data on actual expenses vs. budget across all budget line items and five different operating units. He will gradually hand this off to two office staff that he is managing. Having this data will lead us into the next phase of the work, which is to design and implement a wide variety of cost-cutting programs.
Qualifications
We are looking for somebody truly extraordinary for the program associate role. This is an extremely competitive posting for a career-track role. Only 3% of applicants make it to a phone screen. Therefore, please do NOT respond unless you fit these criteria:
- Strong work experiences. Examples include a high-level professional work experience, or some kind of successful entrepreneurial experience (e.g. starting a field program in a developing country, leading a conference, starting a business, solid peace corps accomplishments)
- Leadership experience at work, or outside of work.
- Top-performing undergraduate background (include GPA and test scores on your resume)
- No ego or drama. We are all stable people who are fun to be around. We are looking for others that combine strong leadership skills with a humble approach to service
- 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. Ideal candidate will have at least one yeardemonstrated experience working in the developing world
- Nice to have: Kiswahili or Kinyrwandan a plus. English required, and French required in Rwanda.
- Ability to cook/ laugh/ extraordinary patience - all desirable
Preferred Start Date: Flexible
Compensation: Starts very modest. However, this is a career-track role eventually paying a real and livable salary for a long-term placement in developing nations.
Benefits: Health cover, immunizations, flight, room and board. 2 annual home flights provided - home trips include some speaking and fundraising duties
Career development: Quarterly management consulting-style career reviews, and significant investment in career development. Your manager will invest significant time in your career development.
Sponsor International Candidates: Yes
To Apply
Email cover letter and resume to jobs@oneacrefund.org (Subject line: Program Associate Search + name of the site that referred you)
Mr. Paul Youn
One Acre Fund
330 Myrtle Street, Redwood City, CA 94062
Email: jobs@oneacrefund.org (Subject line: Program Associate Search + name of the site that referred you)
Read more...
Authored by: Maria Zheng
Dear NextBillion Reader:
Since 2005, NextBillion has strived to provide news, analysis and information on the "base of the pyramid" (BoP) sector. We are now the most-visited BoP site on the web, with more than 40,000 unique visitors per month- thanks to you. And we don't want to stop there. In an effort to improve our editorial coverage and our technical functionality, we ask that you spend 5 minutes to complete this short survey. We will use your responses to improve NextBillion so that it can better serve you.
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Organization: Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)
Location: Cali, CO
Opportunity for internships and jobs for recent graduates to gain international experience
The Decision and Policy Analysis Program (DAPA) of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) is seeking English speaking recent graduates for 6-12 month internships. CIAT is an international research center, one of the fifteen global centers of the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research. Located in Cali, Colombia and working on international projects in Africa, Asia and Central and Latin America, the DAPA program evaluates the effects of climate change, evaluates technology and knowledge gaps, critically analyses environmental and agricultural policy in Latin America, and considers barriers to market access for small, rural producers in developing countries.
The interns will gain experience in international research for development, and will be actively encouraged to use the internship as a stepping stone to further education at the masters or PhD level.
Expectations:
The interns are expected to work on a range of tasks from project and report writing, to analysis of data and publication of peer-reviewed journal articles. We seek young, enthusiastic and energetic people with solid English skills, to spend a 6-12 month period of time in our head office in Cali, Colombia. We provide the cost of tickets to and from Colombia, plus a monthly stipend of US$750 (sufficient for basic living in Colombia).
Requirements:
- Excellent English skills, including strong capabilities in writing. Knowledge of Spanish is a bonus, but not essential
- Recently graduated at undergraduate or masters level in any of the following disciplines: Economy, Geography, Agricultural Science, Environmental science, Development Studies, Biology, Sociology, Social Communication, Business or other related subject matters
- Interest in applied research for developing countries
- Open to experiencing new cultures and perspectives
This is an open call with no deadline. Applicants should send an email to Andy Jarvis (a.jarvis@cgiar.org) with a CV and application letter outlining your motivation, research interests and medium term career plans. Also be explicit about your potential areas of interest with respect to the Decision and Policy Analysis program’s work. For further information on the Decision and Policy Analysis Program, see http://gisweb.ciat.cgiar.org/dapablogs/
For further information about CIAT, see http://www.ciat.cgiar.org.
Read more...
Authored by: Francisco Noguera
The last few weeks have been unusually busy at NextBillion. You've seen several new names, topics discussed, and the diversity of perspectives represented in our pages continues to expand. Moreover, the site's managing partners (Acumen Fund, WDI and WRI) recently met for a planning session where we discussed several ideas that get to the heart of our site's goal: bringing value to our readers and being the web's primary resource for analysis, news and opportunities related to market-based approaches to poverty alleviation.
Lots of exciting ideas and lots of work, to be sure, but all of this has been accompanied by several conversations with a growing base of contributors. Today I'd like to introduce you to four new members whose name you'll see more and more often in NextBillion: Maria Zheng, from the University of Michigan, Adeena Schlussel from Acumen Fund, Andrew Eder from NextBillion's partner Technoserve, and Bryan Farris from Bain & Co.
While Maria will join as Editor, Andrew, Adeena and Bryan join as Staff Writers. For more information about their backgrounds and interests I encourage you to visit their profiles. Please join me in welcoming all of them!
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