Agronomist Consultant, High Value Crop (HVC) Production

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.

Our Kenya program, founded in 2006, operates under the local brand Tupande. Close to 500 staff in our Kakamega headquarters support 1,747 field staff and serve more than 1 million farmers. In Nairobi, around 50 staff support global functions like procurement, recruitment, government relations, and communications.

About the Consultancy Engagement

ProgrammeHVC Production, Long Rains 2027 (LR27)

CropChilli, Groundnut, Sunflower, Soybean and Chia

EngagementIndividual consultant, part-time and deliverable-based

Level of effortUp to 15 days in total (up to 10 days of core work, plus up to 5 days of as-needed in-season support)

TimingCore work over about 3-4 weeks, ahead of the LR27 season

Reports toHVC Production Lead (or designated representative)

Tupande is preparing to scale up its HVC Production programme for the Long Rains 2027 season. We are looking for an experienced agronomist with deep, hands-on expertise in Chilli, Groundnut, Sunflower, Soybean and Chia.  You will bring the crop-specific knowledge our team needs to produce a technical reference, strengthen our extension materials and build field-staff capability.

This is an assignment for one individual consultant not a firm or consulting team.

Terms of Reference

Crop technical production manual (up to 5 days). This will be Asili’s single technical reference for the crop. It will cover:

• crop overview, varieties, planting windows and yield benchmarks;

• site selection, soil requirements and rotation;

• crop stages, with what good and poor performance look like and how to recover;

• the standard input package;

• a pest and disease library with management guidance;

• harvest and quality standards;

• a consolidated thresholds and decision table, structured so it can be built directly into a monitoring dashboard.

Recommendations must be evidence-based and must clearly separate established evidence, local experience and provisional judgement. Any chemical recommendations must comply with current Kenyan registration and label requirements, including rates, PPE, PHI/REI and MRLs.

Extension materials review (up to 3 days). You will review our planting cards, farmer guides, staff training presentations and quizzes against the manual. You will return them with tracked changes or comments, plus a summary of the main changes needed.