Project Associate

Role Overview

This is a hands-on, field-based position on the Emerging Trends team, built around designing and running agricultural trials and demos from the ground up and turning what happens at those sites into evidence the wider organisation can act on. You will spend your time moving between active project locations — currently a rotating mix of Kirinyaga, Nakuru, Nyandarua and Kakamega — standing up new pilots, keeping existing ones on track, and reporting back on what the data is actually saying. The work matters because the team's ability to test new measurement methods and technology-enabled approaches depends on someone being physically present, disciplined about process, and rigorous about what gets recorded and reported.

Key Responsibilities

• Trial and demo set-up: Build pilots and trials from a blank page — defining site criteria, timelines, participant requirements and input needs, then getting everything operational on schedule.
• Site and participant recruitment: Identify and bring on board host sites, participants, interviewers and local partners, including sourcing large participant cohorts when a trial or demo has to run at scale.
• Ongoing site monitoring: Visit active sites on a regular cadence through the entire project lifecycle, watching for deviations, disruptions or practices that could undermine the validity of results and escalating them quickly.
• Supply coordination: Work with local distributors and partners to keep trial products and inputs stocked and available so that no site stalls waiting on materials.
• Structured data capture: Record observations, participant feedback and site status after every visit in a consistent format, and maintain accurate spreadsheet logs spanning individual sites and whole trials.
• Analysis and reporting: Synthesise data across sites into clear, structured written reports that surface trends, identify likely drivers of results, flag risks, and give the Emerging Trends team and wider project team enough detail to make decisions without needing to visit the site themselves.
• Stakeholder coordination: Liaise directly with field officers, participants, interviewers, host sites, local officials and county contacts to keep visits, schedules and relationships running smoothly, and communicate site status and emerging risks proactively.
• Methodology and technology piloting: Contribute ideas and flag opportunities where new measurement approaches or technology-enabled tools could improve how trials, demos and field interactions are designed or executed, and help test those ideas in practice.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical, analytical or business-related field (required).
• Minimum of two years of professional work experience (required).
• Fluency in both Swahili and English (required).
• Hands-on experience setting up and running structured pilots or trials from scratch, with disciplined monitoring through a complete project cycle (preferred).
• Demonstrated experience recruiting and onboarding large numbers of participants at scale (preferred).
• Strong analytical and data management skills: comfortable working with spreadsheets and datasets, performing complex analysis, spotting trends and relationships, troubleshooting inconsistencies in data, and translating findings into reports that support decisions (preferred).
• Prior involvement in randomised controlled trials (preferred).
• Strong organisational skills and the ability to juggle multiple sites and workstreams at the same time (preferred).
• Nice to have: background in ag-tech, work with smallholder farmers, digital or data-driven agricultural pilots, and/or nature-based or soil carbon projects.
• Willingness and ability to travel to and stay in rural farming areas across multiple counties for extended stretches. Location shifts as projects are confirmed rather than following a fixed schedule tied to one base.