My old friend and traveling buddy from my Senegal days, Al, writes:
Hey Cyrus,
Thanks for the Canada Day shout out. Sounds like things are pretty awesome with you, and that you’re up to the old traveling quite a bit.
I thought I’d ask if you knew any potential candidates for a tech.-and development position I’m trying to fill. I’m spending the summer working for TechnoServe (poverty alleviation in agro-business, mostly) in Tanzania, where I focus on the cotton sector.
One of the things we’ve designed this summer is a fairly sophisticated SMS-based system that helps share information with cotton farmers — giving them access to market price info, trainings, Q&A service, etc. I’m leaving soon, however, and we’re looking for someone to come in and manage the pilot and implementation of this system in Northwestern Tanzania. I’m attaching a rough description of the project below. With your contacts in the area, I’m wondering if you could recommend any people with the relevant experience who are looking for an exciting 4-month project with lots of travel. FYI, we’re doing phone interviews with folks next week.
Thanks, man!
– Al
*Project Description:*
In a nutshell, TNS Tanz. works in a number of agricultural sub-sectors, including cotton, where we are trying to help farmers and ginners (the guys who process the raw cotton) improve their profits. The main way we do this is by moving the industry from an unproductive free-for-all to a “contract farming” model, where local ginners are responsible for supporting farmers throughout the growing season and receive the exclusive right to buy those farmers’ cotton in return. The support includes everything from training to supplying farmers with fertilizer, pesticide, etc. The idea is that this new model will help get farmers the inputs they need to farm properly and
productively.
Here’s where the ICT solution comes in. Because the contract-farming model is new, it has a lot of challenges. We have designed an ICT system this summer that does three main things:
– provide SMS-based services to farmers to help them out (e.g., Q&A service, trainings by phone, market-price informatin)
– allow ginners to keep track of their contracts with farmers and look at simple business analytics
– capture certain information along the way for the government’s agencies to better police the system
There are a lot of functions rolled into one, so it will be quite a sophisticated solution in the end. We expect to start rolling out a pilot of the system mid-August and would likely be looking to get someone for about 4 months. The main task of this person would be to implement the system, providing functionality to 2-3 ginners and rolling out SMS-based functionality to around 1,000 farmers (at a minimum). It will be exciting but challenging work with a lot of travel to the cotton-growing areas.
Ideally, we want the following:
– Experience with ICT system implementations a necessary (ideally 3+ years of actually implementing enterprise software solutions and/or custom technology solutions). Need not be with development-sector clients.
– Comfortable conducting trainings for low-sophistication software users
– Experience working with database technology (e.g., ORACLE), web apps and mobile apps very helpful
– No SMS-technology expertise required
– College or higher education required
– Some travel / work experience in sub-Saharan Africa a major plus
– Some development experience a plus
– Swahili skills a small plus
Interested? Contact Alastair Green ; alastaig [at] gmail [dot] com
