Program Manager Jobs at One Acre Fund NGO

Job Location: Kakamega, Kenya

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.
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.

Mid-career professionals with 4 – 6 years work experience for a role that combines both field and management experience in Africa.

Responsibilities for the Program Manager Job

• Rapid organization growth translates into great career opportunities for our staff. We invest heavily in careers – we want to develop our next group of country directors, R&D directors, and partnership leaders. Example projects include:
• Program associate management: Program managers directly manage 1-3 program associates and 10-100 local staff. Managers invest in the growth of their direct reports through frequent project feedback, skills-building and mentorship.
• Government partnerships development: One Acre Fund receives frequent requests from African governments to jointly implement nationwide agricultural training, fertilizer distribution programs, and credit programs. A program manager took the lead in setting up our newest government partnership operation, initially to pilot one project. Within a year, this operation had fifty staff and is likely to at least quadruple in the coming two years, to hopefully 2-3 nationwide partnerships.
• Sweet potato vine production: One Acre Fund farmers needed high-quality sweet potato vines in the 2013 season to avoid crop loss due to a maize disease. When these vines were unavailable in the quantity necessary, a program manager started a sweet potato multiplication farm to ensure all farmers received quality inputs on time. This included designing farm operations, hiring staff, negotiating contracts, coordinating logistics and managing more than 600 seasonal employees.
• Department leadership opportunities: In their second year of service, top performing program staffers are often given the responsibility of running an internal One Acre Fund department like “Scale Innovations.” This department runs dozens of test-and-control trials with 10,000+ farmers that radically tweak our program model, with the goal of significantly increasing our scalability.
• New markets: One Acre Fund has ambitious plans to launch one new country per year. In 2011, a program manager moved to Burundi to direct field operations for an initial 400-farmer pilot. Three years later, One Acre Fund’s Burundi operation serves 21,000 farmers with 110 staff.
• This is a career-track role that is intended to eventually transition into a role such as country director, innovation director, etc. This is also a role that is eventually tracked to transition to “general partner,” the core leadership group of One Acre Fund.

Program Manager Job Qualifications

• Demonstrated interest and experience in international development, requiring at least one year of living in a developing nation.
• A willingness to live outside of a capital city, close to our customers for at least two years, minimum.
• Top-performing undergraduate background (include GPA and test scores on your resume).
• Strong work experiences. Examples include 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, Peace Corps).
• Leadership experience at work, or outside of work.
• 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.
• Language: English required in Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda. French required in Burundi.

How to Apply

Apply here for the Program Manger Job.