Ethiopia Senior Avocado and Trials Coordinator (Fixed-term)
One Acre Fund
Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria
Role description
About One Acre Fund
About the Role
Responsibilities
- Central Nursery Oversight: Oversee the successful establishment, infrastructure setup, and daily operational workflows of central avocado nurseries in South and Central Ethiopia.
- Decentralized Nursery Oversight: Support the operational efficiency of avocado production across decentralized production contexts in South and Central Ethiopia
- Agronomic Best Practices: Ensure strict adherence to high-quality standards and agronomic best practices in seedling production, specifically targeting grafting operations, optimal watering schedules, and rigorous pest and disease control.
- Operational Agility: Apply quick thinking and adaptability to navigate operational bottlenecks in decentralized nursery environments, standardizing avocado workflows to streamline production metrics.
- Post-Grafting Follow-up: Implement structured monitoring systems and post-grafting verification routines to ensure high survival rates and maintain rigorous seedling quality metrics.
- Hands-on Trial Management: Directly manage the field execution, localized setup, and status tracking of non-avocado Product Innovation (INN) trials in the South (e.g., active shade net trials) hosted at INN’s research station or core tree nurseries.
- End-to-End Data Ownership: Modify existing data collection tools, or design context-specific data tools ensuring they accurately capture what is required for trial objectives.
- Data Collection Quality Control: Provide rigorous training, oversight, and auditing for temporary field staff and dedicated INN Tree Officers collecting data to ensure data quality is high enough to make concrete scaling recommendations.
- Analysis & Reporting: Synthesize, analyze, and report on qualitative and quantitative field trial data to capture localized performance metrics and drive strategic model improvements.
- Staff & Owner Training: Conduct technical training and capacity-building sessions for full-time Tree Officers (TOs), local tree nursery owners, and temporary field staff to institutionalize avocado production and trial tracking techniques.
- Documentation & SOPs: Author, refine, and update technical training materials, standardized toolkits, and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to guide seasonal and permanent field executions.
- Workstream Scope Management: Scope improvements within the immediate avocado and trial workstreams to resolve field challenges independently, while actively considering future team strategies and expansions into new regions.
- High-Mobility Field Presence: Execute intensive field travel, spending 50%+ of working hours in the field across South and Central Ethiopia to audit nursery sites, supervise teams, and manage localized operations firsthand.
- Organizational Alignment: Fluently articulate the current and future activities, targets, and milestones of the avocado program to cross-functional internal teams and external local stakeholders.
Career Growth and Development
Qualifications
- At least 3-5+ years of experience in avocado seedling production, grafting management, plant health diagnostics, and smallholder farming systems.
- Bachelor's Degree in Agroforestry/Horticulture.
- Background in project management.
- Field data collection/analysis.
- Google Sheets/Excel proficiency.