Market Access Lead at One Acre Fund
Job Description
Job Summary
The Market Access Lead will have a unique opportunity to own one of the key pillars of One Acre Fund’s vision by owning the development of high-value cash crop chains in Malawi. If successful, this role will enable a scalable number of smallholder farmers to consistently grow more cash crops, getting higher profit in their pockets, while building export channels bringing sustainable USD revenue critical to our programs’ growth.
Key Duties & Responsibilities
Market Access Strategy and Execution
- Lead Malawi Market Access (MKT) Strategy, including long-term vision, seasonal target setting, work planning and delivery from start to end.
- Steer the MKT team’s rapid development, including structuring and hiring of additional HQ and field staff to successfully support ambitious buyback expansion.
- Own all critical buyback activities from timely planning to timely execution, without fearing getting your boots muddy. As part of FOPs, this role will be assessed by execution success, not just strategy setting, with full ownership of the implementation, from farmers’ crop adoption and production to aggregation and commercialization.
Expansion and iteration of existing value chains
- Strengthen chili buyback to expand both its impact and scale, with an ambitious yet achievable 3-year strategy for chili to become a “value chain winner” in 2030, in line with Global Market Access (MKT) criteria and international market demand.
- Revamp soya buyback, challenging and improving the current set up where OAF aggregates and sells to a local buyer with no margin.
Develop new high value chains and transformation services
- Start new buyback value chains from scratch subject to thorough analysis of impact potential for smallholder farmers and market needs.
- Contribute to setting up processing services (e.g.: solar dryers to dry fruits) to enable smallholder farmers to get higher value from their harvest while contributing to building more crop transformation capacity in Malawi, leveraging dedicated funding for “big bet” investments.
Educational Qualifications, Experience, & Skills Required
- Passionate, Impact-Driven, Hard-Working, Result-Oriented individual who can 100% align with OAF’s values:
- Entrepreneurial profile: This role requires a high level of innovation and ambition, with ad hoc risk assessment and mitigation, clear bias towards action and strong capacity to keep moving despite complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties.
- Team & project management:
- Nurture high accountability on results across the HQ and field impact team, ensuring people are being celebrated and challenged as needed to maximize program impact, practicing radical candor with care
- Design and lead in parallel multiple medium to large projects with a high degree of independence and ability to navigate ambiguity with little manager support
- Analytical decision-making: ability to collect and analyze KPIs autonomously and critically, leading to data-based and impact-driven decisions.
