Chief Innovation Officer

Location: Dakar or Thies, Senegal with traval across Africa**

About myAgro

At myAgro we’re revolutionizing the way farmers can invest in themselves. Our award-winning social enterprise model has been recognized by the Skoll Foundation, World Economic Forum, TED and Bill Gates. We are on track to reach 1M farmers – mostly women – invest in the tools they need to make their farms 80% more productive while protecting their soils, increasing their climate resilience and creating a more equitable agricultural ecosystem in the countries we work.

We’re changing the future of agriculture in Africa and we want you to join our dynamic, innovative and growing team if you care about economic justice, alleviating poverty, gender equality, and climate resilience in one of the global hotspots for climate change. Helping people earn more money is the first step to creating lasting change – in health outcomes, education, women & girls empowerment and more.

About this role

We’re looking for someone who is a great team manager and has a natural gift of creating original and novel ideas and solutions.This is a new and important role to accelerate our growth and deepen per farmer impact. The CIO will oversee our Agriculture, Sales/Tech R&D and M&E departments and lead a team of special projects to either lower costs per farmer or dramatically increase impact per farmer. In this role the CIO will:

1. Drive New Growth Opportunities – Identify, prioritize, develop, and launch new products, services and business models
2. Build and Grow Innovation Capabilities – Create new organizational capabilities, including technical and people-driven, that ensure a steady stream of innovations
3. Be effective at storytelling with data to mobilize change within the organization or sales team.
4. Champion Innovation – Evangelize innovation internally and externally to influence the brand in the market and create pull for creative talent

A Chief Innovation Officer that does these things helps myAgro:

• Creates an innovation strategy that is understood and endorsed by key stakeholders including executive leadership, employees, customers, and partners
• Builds a well-balanced innovation portfolio and roadmap that drives investments that help us increase the number of farmers served, impact per farmer or dramatically reduce the cost per farmer to drive growth.
• Ensures the company is successful in taking its innovations to market in a timely and scalable way
• Uses innovation to differentiate the company in the market, provide unique value to customers and help build long-term relationships with customers
• Evangelizes innovation so the company is viewed as innovative, visionary and a market leader by our team, customers, industry groups and media

You do not need to be an agricultural expert to apply. We have agricultural expertise on the team – what we need is someone who is a great general manager with an innovative lens to drive new products and new ways of operating. The innovations and R&D you lead might have to do with new sales models, using technology and mobile networks to simplify operations.
Salary $125,000 – $160,000 depending on relevant experience

Your ideal background:

• 10+ years of experience leading R&D in FMCG companies or experience leading human centered design at organizations like ideo.org or other design-focused consulting firms.
• French fluency is a plus but not required.

myAgro’s aim is to have 50% of all positions filled by women in the next 2 years. We strongly encourage women to apply.

We will review applications on a rolling basis but prioritize those who apply within the first two weeks of posting.

Deadline: Dec 1.

myAgro provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, marital/parental status, national origin, age, disability, political opinion, social status, veteran status, and genetics. myAgro complies with all applicable federal, provincial and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment.