Technical Assistance Success Specialist

Job Summary

The Technical Assistance (TA) Success Specialist will ensure that OAV’s technical assistance frameworks align perfectly with investee growth paths and smallholder farmer realities. This role focuses heavily on three pillars: executing comprehensive TA needs assessments, driving hands-on implementation of gender and youth-inclusive agricultural projects, and coaching investee staff to transition manual field records into light-digital, impact-reporting dashboards.

Qualification

• Educational Foundation: Possession of a formal Bachelor’s degree in Agribusiness, International Development, Economics, Project Management, Social Sciences, or a directly relevant technical field.
• Technical & Digital Literacy: Strong capabilities in data handling, template architecture, and manual-to-digital data migration workflows.
• AI Productivity Fluency: Working knowledge of artificial intelligence concepts and applications, with a demonstrated ability to leverage AI-powered tools to improve operational productivity, enhance decision-making frameworks, and streamline reporting workflows.
• Core Behavioral Competencies: Deep empathy for rural communities, cultural awareness, exceptional active listening skills, strong conflict mitigation habits, and an ability to work effectively with stakeholders ranging from corporate executives to smallholder farmers.
• Nationality Requirement: This role is strictly open only to citizens or permanent residents of Rwanda.

Experience

Project Management & Capacity Assessment

• Field Tenure Alignment: Proven professional track record in project management, monitoring and evaluation, or organizational capacity building—ideally within the agricultural development or social enterprise space.
• Diagnostic Execution: Demonstrated experience conducting formal baseline assessments or programmatic gap analyses, translating complex field findings into clear, actionable corporate interventions.
• Stakeholder Management: Experience liaising between internal strategy managers, investment portfolios, field agents, and external implementation partners to align incentives and keep project schedules on track.

Youth/Gender Integration & Data Coordination

• Inclusive Program Design: Experience scoping, designing, and launching community-level or agricultural initiatives addressing specific socio-economic barriers faced by youth and women.
• Data Coaching & Digitization: Background in field data collection, data quality verification, and training non-technical staff or field agents on digital reporting tools, surveys, and structured templates.

Key Responsibilities

TA Needs Assessment, Gap Analysis & Progress Tracking

• Refine TA Assessments: Support the Technical Assistance Manager in diagnosing investee vulnerabilities and operational constraints by gathering real-time feedback from promoters, field teams, and management.
• Map Graduation Pathways: Synthesize organizational findings to structure phased TA delivery timelines across critical growth themes, including corporate governance, system setups, reporting, and youth/women inclusion.
• Govern Progress Trackers: Maintain detailed project dashboards and implementation trackers, following up on milestones with investees and flagging potential delays or bottlenecks early.

Onsite TA Implementation & Youth/Women Initiatives

• Act as Primary Field Partner: Spend significant time onsite with portfolio companies to align execution expectations, coordinate task handovers, and guide project deployment.
• Design Targeted Gender Modules: Deploy surveys, questionnaires, and direct field visits to diagnose structural barriers impacting youth and young women farmers, engineering localized initiatives to counter them.
• Build Long-Term Local Capacity: Deliver targeted demos, coaching tracks, and one-on-one training sessions for investee staff, ensuring complete ownership of programs and systems post-OAF intervention.
• Document Impact Case Studies: Compile debrief reports and qualitative case studies capturing project outcomes, focusing heavily on youth and women empowerment metrics.

Farmer Data Collection, Coordination & Digitization

• Migrate Ledger Records: Work hands-on alongside investee staff to clean and translate manual or paper-based farmer registries into OAV's standardized impact reporting templates.
• Coach Data Collectors: Provide continuous workflow guidance, technical troubleshooting support, and data-entry training to field agents and metrics managers to enable reliable self-reporting within two quarters.
• Cross-Align Internal Teams: Coordinate closely with OAV’s Impact, Environmental & Social (E&S), and country-level teams to ensure corporate data demands match field realities.
• Deploy Light-Digital Tools: Guide willing and prepared portfolio companies away from manual reporting sheets toward digital collection software, executing validation trips to reconcile discrepancies.

Expected Outputs & Deliverables

• Fully operational, updated project progress dashboards and technical assistance milestone trackers.
• Custom-designed survey mechanisms, diagnostic readouts, and operational blueprints for youth and women inclusion initiatives.
• Successful structural migration of investee registries into digital OAV impact reporting templates.
• Documented training completion logs and independent performance evaluations for investee data personnel.
• High-quality qualitative case studies and comprehensive end-of-project debrief summaries mapping TA results.

Skills Required:

• Agricultural / Studies
• Economics / Statistics
• Social / Science / Project / Management / Development