Position: Business Acceleration Unit Head

Location: Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh

Last Date: 15-Mar-2022

Vrutti is a Centre for Sustainable Livelihoods, enhancing people’s well-being through knowledge, innovation and transformative actions. Our passion is to bring about solutions at a scale that eliminate inequities and marginalization and create wealth for the marginalized. We strongly believe that a dynamic, strong, and responsible private sector is a critical ingredient to achieve this, combined with synergistic relationships between people, civil society and public bodies to ensure equity. Towards this, we develop market-based models of development building on community strengths and promote a culture of entrepreneurship and facilitate and nurture partnerships to reach scale.

One of the flagship programmes of Vrutti is 3Fold, which focuses on enabling farmers to become wealthy, resilient and responsible, being successful entrepreneurs, and sustained job creators, having their income increased by three times.  The model believes in the empowerment of farmers and their entrepreneurship orientation/potential and nudging the same to achieve the impact.  It addresses the key gaps of lack of integrated services (end-to-end) which is appropriate to the farmers, need for ‘diversified options’ (value addition, farm, allied and off-farm), augmented by ‘integrators/activators at field level’ and ‘technology’, and establishment of a sustainable eco-system at a Cluster level, that enables collaborative actions for collective impact. Vrutti currently works with 29 FPOs in 5 states in 7 locations covering 37,500 farmers through this 3-fold model.  In the 3Fold model Business Acceleration Unit ( Head) is to develop and support farmers and their institutions, Vrutti incubates ‘Clusters’ called ‘Business Acceleration Units (BAUs)’ to establish a strong ecosystem in the agricultural sector so that farming enterprises in these clusters become sustainable and scalable – institutions, technology, activators, collaborator

About the Role:

The Business Acceleration Unit Head will be responsible for the following:

• BAU Head is responsible for ensuring all the key deliverables of the 3Fold model such as farm advisory services, Enterprise Development, Financial Access and services, Marketing and value addition, Institution Building etc., to increase the wealth, resilience and responsibility of small & marginal farmers.
• Responsible for enabling the farmers and farming institutions to be an entrepreneur/Business institution.
• Responsible to facilitate accelerated and ensured services with an integrated package include access to seeds, inputs, Agri machinery, financial, access to markets etc.,
• Developing entrepreneurs locally and creating a market for products like seeds, bio fertilizers and pesticides etc.
• Understanding of the commodity and product value chains, identifying opportunities are key to increasing incomes, continues opportunity mapping, feasibility and build linkages
• Identifying diversified enterprises and linking to agriculture is critical for getting additional incomes, diversifying risks and building resilience.
• Strong presence in promoting and strengthening Farmer Interest Groups (FIGs), Enterprise groups and Farmer Producer Organizations.
• Steer headed and supports the functioning of the BAU team includes ABAs (Agri Business Accelerator), Activators, CEO, FIO, Supply Chain Specialist, Institution development head, Assistant BAU head etc.
• Demanding the services from the service lines and ensuring those are implemented and followed through at the BAU level.
• Evolving and executing the business plan of the Farmer Producer Companies to make them independent and sustainable.
• Build the partnership of FPCs with key ecosystem players such as SFAC, NABARD, NABFINS, FWWB, Corporates, NCDEX, KVK etc., to access markets, finance and knowledge.
• Enable the capacities of the BAU team, FPO board members, lead farmers, and entrepreneurs for effective implementation of 3 Fold
• Working closely with ICT Partner, information technology solution partner for farmer specific/enterprise specific, farm advisory, order booking, inputs requirements, outputs predictions and aggregation for marketing.
• Ensuring the MEAL (monitoring and evaluation) system is established and adhered to.
• Ensuring the reports and information provided to various people as per the agreed timelines.
• Preservation of Agro Biodiversity in Bankhedi cluster, promotion of organic farming, Sustainable Agricultural Practices (SAP) with small and marginal farmers, conservation of indigenous seeds and local varieties by RVD demo plots, conservation of soil & water.
• Promotion and ensuring of PGS (organic certification) among farmer members
• Promotion and ensuring organic products, quality maintenance, branding and Marketing of organic products of the FPCLs

 Desired qualifications, experiences and skills

• Postgraduate in social science, MSW & Agriculture, marketing and management graduates or related fields with experience in the development
• 5 + years of experience in the development sector, marketing, management & agriculture.
• Should be willing to work on an entrepreneurial approach and ensure the BAU operations are financially sustainable in a shorter span.
• High belief and willingness to work with social enterprises, their promotion and establishment.
• The candidate should be able to communicate, read and write in English and the respective state language (Hindi).
• Personal flexibility and high motivation to impact the team and farmer collectives.
• Working knowledge of computers, MS Office, internet, email, etc.
• Skills in report writing and

Salary range- Commensurate with the candidate’s qualifications and experiences and matching current industry standards.

Interested candidates can send their resumes to [email protected]