Tanzania Agroforestry Specialist (Fixed-Term)

Job Description

About One Acre Fund

Founded in 2006, One Acre Fund equips 5.5 million smallholder farmers to make their farms more productive. Across nine countries that together are home to two-thirds of Africa’s farmers, we provide high-quality farm supplies, tree seedlings, accessible credit, modern agronomic training, and a wide range of other agricultural services. On average, this model enables any farmer to increase their income and assets on supported land by more than 35 percent, while permanently improving their resilience. This is all made possible by our team of 9,000+ full-time staff, drawn from diverse backgrounds and professions.

To learn more, please see our Why Work Here blog post.

Job Summary

As an Agroforestry Specialist, you will oversee the delivery of One Acre Fund’s agroforestry program across designated sites while driving impact, financial sustainability and customer service through the districts that you manage. The main purpose of this role is to oversee the seedlings production and distribution work and identify areas for innovation and process improvement within the department.

You will report directly to the Agroforestry Associate/Manager, and manage a team spread across 100 – 150 villages and 1 – 2 centralized nurseries.

This is role requires 60% field work and 40% office work. Your location will be determined based on the location of your team members within the Iringa, Njombe, Mbeya and Songwe regions

Key Duties & Responsibilities

• Tree Management
  • You will lead seedling cultivation by managing a team of Nursery Officers (Outgrowers) who produce seedlings at the villages or in centralized nurseries. Ensure the seedlings grow healthy and are ready at the ideal planting time by creating implementation and contingency plans. Oversee the seedlings production by external suppliers
  • You will design and implement trials to test the production of soil improving, timber and fruit species
  • You will understand barriers to higher seedling survival and tree growth and implement practical and scalable methods to improve the metrics among farmers
  • You will manage a big field team to constantly meet their performance expectations
• Agroforestry Expansion
  • You will scope new sites for inwards and outwards program expansion
  • You will promote financial sustainability by implementing cost controls.
  • You will create the seedling marketing and distribution strategy and lead its implementation
  • You will create surveys, train enumerators, support data collection, quality assessment and analysis to inform departmental decisions and provide actionable recommendations.
• Stakeholder Engagement
  • You will present our work to government officials at different levels to ensure program buy-in
  • You will collaborate in inter-departmental teams to develop and implement current and new projects.

Minimum Qualifications

• A Bachelor’s degree in Forestry, Agroforestry or related fields
• Experience with data collection and analysis for decision-making (Proficiency in SPSS, STATA or R statistical software would be a bonus)
• People management experience
• 2+ years of experience managing nursery production or tree planting projects
• Technical knowledge around sourcing quality seed
• Fluent professional proficiency in English and Swahili