One Acre Fund is increasingly interested in harnessing the power of mobile technology to better serve farm families across Africa and beyond. Mobile technology not only has the potential to help create real change for huge populations of rural farm families, but it could, potentially, revolutionize how we and key partners (governments and other MFIs) serve farmers. One Acre Fund wants to push innovation in this space and we need incredible people to help create this change. Example projects include:
- Field Staff Performance Enhancement: One Acre Fund has thousands of field staff. Governments have tens of thousands of extension agents serving farmers. We could harness mobile technology to drive improved performance of field staff in multiple contexts through a variety of applications.
- Mobile Payments: In some markets, One Acre Fund already allows farmers to make payments through the mobile phone network. There should be a huge opportunity to not only scale this work across our organization, but also explore opportunities to better enable all farm families to save and pay for extremely impactful products.
- Distribution and Collection of Information and Data: Despite a wealth of information in the world on agriculture, most farmers have very little access to this information. Mobile technology could not only serve as the gateway for farmers and others, but it could also facilitate the collection of critical data to improve services to farmers.
- Rapid prototyping and adaptation of existing field tools: As our field teams think of new potential applications for mobile technology, we need someone who can coordinate rapid prototyping and field testing of existing solutions, before more thorough roll-out.
The Mobile Tech Projects Associate/Manager need not be a software developer, but rather someone with a passion for leveraging technology to do good in the world, and serving as an overall coordinator of all of our work involving mobile tech. This will involve the following additional responsibilities:
- Identifying existing mobile tech solutions and helping to test and adapt them to serve One Acre Fund’s needs as well as dreaming up new applications and uses for mobile technology to serve farm families.
- Working with software and hardware contractors, including bulk SMS.
- Coordinating with many teams, including Tech, Field Operations, Finance, Logistics, and M&E.
- Building systems and protocols around the storage, maintenance, security, and charging of mobile/tablet devices.
- With success, building a team to scale the most promising applications and further explore new opportunities in current and new markets.
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