Agricultural R&D Manager (Fixed-Term)

One Acre Fund is a nonprofit organization that supplies smallholder farmers in East Africa with asset-based financing and agriculture training services to reduce hunger and poverty.

Agricultural R&D Manager (Fixed-Term)

About the Role

• This role  leads the country program Ag R&D strategy execution, trial execution, standardization of research designs and tools, implementation of FAIR data principles  across operating countries, Ag R&D efficiency metrics and KPI  tracking and driving Ag research dashboard. By optimizing the research pipeline from ideation to field adoption, the Regional Ag R&D Manager ensures that spatially and temporally tailored innovations directly improve smallholder farmer yields, profits, and long-term soil health.

• This role also guides research-backed agricultural recommendations to program teams on optimized input choices, soil health, alternative fertilizers, and crop management decisions.  Additionally, this role designs and administers staff training in research in general.

Responsibilities

• Provide thought leadership and technical guidance for the development and implementation of strategies to deepen farmer impact through improved (e.g. spatially and temporally tailored) agronomy, for example: Variety recommendations – leadership and oversight of research to generate high-impact and adoptable seed recommendations at region to field level, and drive development of country-level strategies to diversify seed catalogs and encourage farmers to experiment with and adopt varieties that improve their productivity.

• Crop nutrition – Develop recommendations to improve profitability & sustainability of fertilizer use through improved rates, composition, timing or methods of application, or reduce fertilizer requirements through the use of organic or biological alternatives.

• Soil health  – Develop recommendations for adoption of erosion-mitigation practices, soil micro-ogarnisms build-up and soil structure improvement.This will be delivered through a combination of desk research, trial, survey and qualitative research.

• Technical consulting – Serve as the regional technical expert, delivering rapid, evidence-backed advice for urgent field challenges or unexpected trial anomalies.

• Research strategy & trial design – provide technical leadership to ensure research methodologies and execution produce rigorous data for characterisation of technology performance and adoption potential, and that innovation pipelines are efficiently designed to generate the data and insights needed to inform program decision making and drive farmer adoption of improved technologies.

• Research data analysis & interpretation – execute and provide oversight for analysis of trials, survey and other data to generate actionable recommendations for program decision-makers and farmers.