Agricultural R&D Manager

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.

About the Role

This role  leads the country program Ag R&D strategy execution, trial execution, standardization of research designs and tools, implementation of FAIR data principles  across operating countries, Ag R&D efficiency metrics and KPI  tracking and driving Ag research dashboard. By optimizing the research pipeline from ideation to field adoption, the Regional Ag R&D Manager ensures that spatially and temporally tailored innovations directly improve smallholder farmer yields, profits, and long-term soil health.

This role also guides research-backed agricultural recommendations to program teams on optimized input choices, soil health, alternative fertilizers, and crop management decisions.  Additionally, this role designs and administers staff training in research in general.

Responsibilities

• Provide thought leadership and technical guidance for the development and implementation of strategies to deepen farmer impact through improved (e.g. spatially and temporally tailored) agronomy, for example: Variety recommendations - leadership and oversight of research to generate high-impact and adoptable seed recommendations at region to field level, and drive development of country-level strategies to diversify seed catalogs and encourage farmers to experiment with and adopt varieties that improve their productivity.
• Crop nutrition - Develop recommendations to improve profitability & sustainability of fertilizer use through improved rates, composition, timing or methods of application, or reduce fertilizer requirements through the use of organic or biological alternatives.
• Soil health  - Develop recommendations for adoption of erosion-mitigation practices, soil micro-ogarnisms build-up and soil structure improvement.This will be delivered through a combination of desk research, trial, survey and qualitative research. 
• Technical consulting - Serve as the regional technical expert, delivering rapid, evidence-backed advice for urgent field challenges or unexpected trial anomalies.
• Research strategy & trial design - provide technical leadership to ensure research methodologies and execution produce rigorous data for characterisation of technology performance and adoption potential, and that innovation pipelines are efficiently designed to generate the data and insights needed to inform program decision making and drive farmer adoption of improved technologies.   
• Research data analysis & interpretation - execute and provide oversight for analysis of trials, survey and other data to generate actionable recommendations for program decision-makers and farmers.
• R&D operations, efficiency metrics & KPI tracking - establish standardized efficiency metrics and KPI tracking systems across all operating countries to monitor trial progress, protocol compliance, data quality, and milestone achievement. Develop and manage routine reporting cadence and country-level dashboards to keep global and country leadership teams informed on Ag R&D execution and emerging  findings.
• R&D pipeline management - participate in stage-gate processes to evaluate innovations based on clear impact and adoption potential metrics and keep the pipeline up to date.
• Capacity Building - design training materials and conduct regional workshops on trial design, data analysis and management for country research staff.
• Outsight - Collaborate and share information with various other institutions and the private sector in agriculture research (universities, CGIAR, NARES, seed companies, donors) to ensure that their research priorities are influenced by field perspectives on key knowledge gaps or market opportunities, and to ensure that One Acre Fund is well-positioned to benefit from state-of-the-art applied agricultural research.

Career Growth and Development

We have a strong culture of constant learning and we invest in developing our people. You’ll have weekly check-ins with your manager, access to mentorship and training programs, and regular feedback on your performance. We hold career reviews every six months, and set aside time to discuss your aspirations and career goals. You’ll have the opportunity to shape a growing organization and build a rewarding long-term career.

Qualifications

Across all roles, these are the general qualifications we look for. For this role specifically, you will have:

• Fluency in agronomy, physiology, G x E x M, and major pests of crops widely cultivated in our operating areas, especially maize (and related cereals), solanaceae, beans (and other legumes) as well as high value crops (e.g. chilli)
• Ability to translate knowledge of technically optimal agronomy into simpler,  practical and prioritized recommendations for field teams and farmers
• PhD with 3 years or  MSc with 5 years experience in applied agricultural sciences
• Experience in designing and managing on-station and on-farm trials (with smallholder farmers)
• Knowledge of appropriate application and interpretation of parametric and non-parametric statistical analysis techniques and visualizations for agronomic trial data 
• Familiarity with predictive and classification machine learning algorithms and their potential applications to the development and delivery of agronomic recommendations (using relevant climate and soil data layers)
• Demonstrated track record of establishing project management frameworks, country-level KPI tracking, R&D efficiency metrics and executive status reporting.

Preferred Start Date

As soon as possible

Job Location

Flexible, Countries of Operations

Benefits

Health insurance, housing, and comprehensive benefits

Contract Duration

3 years

Eligibility

This role is only open to citizens or permanent residents of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Malawi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Nigeria

Application Deadline

08 January 2027. Please note that we hire on a rolling basis which means that applications are reviewed and processed on a continuous basis until a hire is made.

One Acre Fund never asks candidates to pay any money or pay for tests at any stage of the interview process. Official One Acre Fund emails will always arrive from an @oneacrefund.org address. Please report any suspicious communication here (globalhotline@oneacrefund.org), but do not send applications or application materials to this email address.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), and anti-racism are deeply connected to our organization’s mission and purpose. One Acre Fund aspires to build a culture where all staff feel consistently valued, represented, and connected – so that our team can thrive as professionals, and achieve exceptional impact for the farmers we serve.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.