Title: Agriculture Technical Expert
Location: Masasi, Tanzania
Report to: Impact and Training Manager
Language Requirement: Fluency in English and Swahili
Contract: 6 months with possibility to renew
About myAgro
myAgro is an award-winning non-profit social enterprise based in West Africa. myAgro has pioneered a mobile savings model that allows farmers to invest their own funds in high-quality seed, fertilizer, and training and increase their harvest and income by 50-100%. myAgro’s North Star is to help 1 million farmers increase their incomes by $1.50 per day by 2025 and lift themselves out of poverty. Learn more from myAgro’s founder here.
About the Agricultural Technical Expert role:
You are myAgro’s Tanzania’s internal agriculture technical expert!
You take your agricultural knowledge and make appropriate recommendations to increase farmer ROI balanced with myAgro’s business model, the supply chain, the field team capability, and farmer behavior. You are responsible for establishing and managing a local agricultural team, contributing to myAgro’s agricultural strategy and heavily collaborating on key seasonal activities. This is an extremely collaborative role – agriculture is a “team sport” at myAgro heavily involving the impact and training managers, the regional M&E manager, Field Operations, Logistics, and myAgro Leadership.
Responsibilities include but are not limited to the following:
- Prioritize and manage competing projects with overlapping deadlines
- Technical research and package design:
- Stay up to date on new seed varieties, planting methods and research on myAgro’s portfolio of crops - use this insight to suggest trials for further research.
- Desk research on new crops/varieties/products to improve our package offerings with or specific projects (ex: maize seed storage, Groundnuts Trials etc)
- Work with Logistics/Procurement to facilitate and evaluate new products and inputs.
- Provide agriculture knowledge and feedback from farmers to propose packages that maximize ROI for the farmer
- Be a resource to the agricultural team, answering questions in a timely manner and providing distilled, user-friendly research / information as needed to create content or make program decisions.
- Management of level 1 pilots ( Trial stations)
- Propose new crops/varieties to test in alignment with myAgro’s business model and North Star
- Develop sound trial protocols with great attention for detail
- Manage trials effectively (training team, solving problems, ensuring we have usable results)
- Management some level 2 pilots (Farmer trials)
- Identify high potential product (from trial station phase)
- Design pilot projects
- Select, hire and supertrain dedicated trial teams
- Implement pilots and collect qualitative feedback from farmers
- Note: a portfolio of level 2 pilots will be divided between you and the R&D associate
- Quality control seed and fertilizer
- Set up quality standard and control process with logistics for seed contracts
- Execute quality control for seeds on ime
- Advise logistics on fertilizer testing
- Document quality control processes in SOP
- Approve seeds and fertilizer respond to quality standards
Required Skills
- End-result focused, problem solving
- Good time management, follow through until completion
- Great communication with team, external stakeholders
- Team collaboration
myAgro provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, marital/parental status, national origin, age, disability, political opinion, social status, veteran status, and genetics. myAgro complies with all applicable federal, provincial and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment.
