idealist.org

Career track role for a self-managing person interested in management and business. Previous technical experience not required – we will train – but a strong interest in software and technology required.

Organization Description
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One Acre Fund is a start-up initiative in Kenya that 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 permanent, 100%+ gain in farm income.

We have been operating since January 2006, and we currently serve 12,000 farm families (48,000 children). Our target is to change the lives of 40,000 families (160,000 children) within two more years, scaling at a 50 - 100% growth rate thereafter. One Acre Fund is one of the most externally-validated recent social start-ups, 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
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One Acre Fund relies on several key home-grown software systems to help us manage a lot of information. As we grow our organization to 40,000 farm families, with 500+ staff, across 2 (soon to be more) countries, we need to continually improve the features of these software systems. We have three key systems in Microsoft Access – client roster, books, and payroll – that help us to manage a wide variety of operations. Our roster tool for example handles the enrollment of clients, taking farm supply orders from them, tracking hundreds of thousands of payments, creating a wide variety of business intelligence reports, etc. We will also be building new computer systems, such as logistics management, in the future.

We are not necessarily seeking someone with a lot of programming experience, although that is a plus. We are more focused on finding somebody with long-term management ability who can understand the real business needs of our organization. We can train the software and technology side of things. They will start off doing heavy amounts of software development, but over time will hopefully transition into managing local staff in this task.

The Technical Lead will be based in Western Kenya. They will:

* Africa-facing mission-critical databases: Lead the continued development of mission-critical, custom MS Access databases that touch every aspect of operations. These include books, client roster, monitoring and evaluation, payroll – and kick-off development on new data tools such as logistics and inventory management. These systems touch many different field departments, and this is a great opportunity to build exposure to a wide variety of business processes

* IT: Manage one Kenyan IT staff for routine computer maintenance and purchase, with potential for growth in number of staff managed. The Technical Associate will be managing the IT staff, and will hopefully do as little actual IT work as possible.

* Technology experimentation: Experiment with a variety of technologies (e.g. Frontline SMS, mobile phone reporting) to improve operations

* Build a software team: Over time, there is a possibility of building a broader, local software team for One Acre Fund

* Other: There is lots of "Other" in a startup

Preferred Start Date: January 1, 2010 or earlier – as soon as possible

Compensation: Entry-level nonprofit position

Benefits: Modest health cover, 1-2 annual home trips to US

Career development: Quarterly management consulting-style career reviews, and significant investment in career development. This post reports to the executive director, who will spend significant time on your career development, and assist top performers with future placements in either the private sector or in the developing world.

A successful candidate will have these traits:

* Very strong self-manager, very well-organized. After an initial six-month period of heavy mentorship, supervision will consist of 1 weekly check-in. We need someone who is very well-organized and can manage their work independently

* Top-performing undergraduate background (include GPA and test scores on your resume)

* Work experience, or internship, in some professional environment – ideally 2+ years of work experience

* Willingness to commit to the position for at least 2 years, with ideally some experience living in a developing country

* Mentorship ability: this post will likely involve training and mentorship of Kenyan staff

* No ego or drama. We are looking for others that combine strong leadership skills with a humble approach to service. Our expatriate team lives in rural Kenya together in a group of houses, and so we are looking for emotionally stable and happy people

* Cooking skills, high propensity to laugh and be happy: always desired!

Email cover letter and resume to paul.youn@oneacrefund.org (Subject line: Technical Lead + Idealist)