Hiring: Director of Agro-Forestry Operations
Wanted: An exceptional operations manager to lead and grow Komaza’s core activities. This exciting role combines team leadership, logistics, and capacity building to enroll, train and support thousands small farmers to plant and maintain millions trees.
Location: Kilifi, Kenya – a growing coastal town, one hour from Mombasa, Kenya’s 2nd largest city.
Languages: English required, Swahili a plus.
Start Date: As soon as possible.
Duration: Minimum 3 years, for individuals seeking a serious career opportunity. We seek a leader to take our agro-forestry operations to the next level of scale and performance.
Wanted: An exceptional operations manager to lead and grow Komaza’s core activities. This exciting role combines team leadership, logistics, and capacity building to enroll, train and support thousands small farmers to plant and maintain millions trees.
Location: Kilifi, Kenya – a growing coastal town, one hour from Mombasa, Kenya’s 2nd largest city.
Languages: English required, Swahili a plus.
Start Date: As soon as possible.
Duration: Minimum 3 years, for individuals seeking a serious career opportunity. We seek a leader to take our agro-forestry operations to the next level of scale and performance.
Company: Planting millions of trees with poor farmers to sell as high-value wood products.
Komaza is a social business working to generate life-changing income for poor farmers by growing trees for sale as diverse wood products. Since 2008, we have planted 3,000 acres with over 5,000 farmers in coastal Kenya; we continue to plant more each season, with plans to accelerate. We see “micro-forestry” as the disruptive solution to meet East Africa’s growing wood deficit – with strong projected profitability, we aim to grow into one of East Africa’s leading forestry and wood product companies over the next decade, generating income for many thousands of farmers. Komaza has earned many awards for our innovative business model, plus recent articles in Forbes and Fast Company.
The Role: Lead, improve and scale up Komaza’s core agro-forestry operations.
Every rainy season, twice a year, we help farmers plant trees. Our Director of Agro-Forestry Operations will responsible for leading all operations across this value chain: recruit and train farmers; distribute inputs and tools; supervise planting and maintenance; intercrop agricultural crops; monitor key performance indicators. You will inherit an existing team that has grown and performed relatively well over the past several years; your job is to make this team and operation great, and then grow it significantly. With a big nursery expansion underway, we will increase plantings from ~250,000 to 2 million trees annually in 2016. A top priority is thus building the capacity to support this growth.
· Team Leadership: Lead all field extension staff – start with 6 Field Manager direct reports (who oversee 80+ Field Officers and Facilitators working in villages across Kilifi County); after a few months, hire and begin developing a Field Coordinator to eventually take over all day-to-day operations. We expect this field extension network to nearly double in the next three years. Engage this field team daily to help make decisions and solve problems.
· Capacity Building: Develop, implement and optimize the management systems, training materials, and SOPs to enable growth of agro-forestry operations in the years ahead. Invest in coaching your team of direct reports to take on more responsibilities over time.
· Last-Mile Quality Control: In addition to high-level management, our Director of Agro-Forestry Operations must be fanatically focused on ensuring our scores of frontline field staff (and the thousands of farmers they serve) deliver strong performance outcomes.
Ultimately, success will be measured by forestry performance (tree survival & growth), farmer satisfaction (long-term commitment), and cost-efficiency (planting trees as cheaply as possible).
About the Job: The Director of Agro-Forestry Operations must show excellence in the following areas:
· Strategic Planning: Work closely with company leadership to develop and refine the strategic vision for this department for the next 3-5 years; prioritize activities to achieve this vision.
· Business Intelligence: We’ve spent the last year overhauling our IT capabilities for rigorous performance monitoring (i.e. a Salesforce database fed by forms on smartphones and tablets). Work closely with our IT Director to implement and continuously improve these tools for the field, to develop strong data-driven operations and improve key performance outcomes.
· Project Management:Strong planning and implementation across the agro-forestry value chain, from farmer land preparation and planting, to maintenance and performance monitoring.
Essential Traits: We want an exceptionally talented generalist who can get things done:
· Self-starter: Strong initiative, focus, project management, hands-on execution, perseverance.
· Excellent “hard skills”: Deeply proficient with strategic business planning, critical thinking, problem solving, quantitative analysis, MS Office, etc. Interest to quickly learn new skills.
· Excellent “soft skills”: Our small cross-cultural team is looking for other good communicators with high emotional intelligence, a positive attitude, and respect for others. Humor also helps.
· High energy & standards, plus persistence:We need someone to pour significant energy and enthusiasm into this department, eager to work long hours to build something truly great.
Nice to Have: We’ll be pleasantly surprised if you can tick all of these, but a handful would be ideal:
· Agro-forestry experience: While not mandatory (we have in-house knowledge, with consultants for technical assistance as needed), experience with agriculture and/or forestry is a strong plus.
· Extension network experience:You’ve managed and grown a large network of field staff, sales agents, health workers, trainer of trainers, or other service extension staff.
· Small farmer experience: You’ve worked with rural subsistence farmers in some capacity, preferably in East Africa, with some basic insights of their lives and the challenges they face.
· Operational systems-building experience: Experience developing and continuously improving operational systems, e.g. training materials, SOPs, work plans, calendars, KPI dashboards, etc.
· Developing-world passion: We seek someone who has worked at least 1 year in the developing world (preferably East Africa), who is excited to work in Kenya for at least 3 years.
· Good education: Strong undergraduate performance (include GPA and test scores on CV). A Master’s degree is preferred but not required. We highly value real world experience.
Compensation & Benefits:Salary will start at reasonable level for good quality of life in Kilifi, with opportunities for raises and bonuses with strong performance. Health insurance, immunizations, and two return flights to home country per year are included. Possibility for future equity participation after demonstrated strong performance and a long-term commitment.
HOW TO APPLY:
To Apply: Please apply through Komaza’s website: www.komaza.org/recruiting/, where you can submit your CV and a brief cover letter explaining why this opportunity inspires you, why you are confident you are the right leader to take Komaza’s core agro-forestry operations to the next level of scale and performance, and your top three questions for us.
