Type: Engineering, Business
Role: Mountain Harvest Fellow
Venture: Mountain Harvest
Location: Mbale, Uganda
Deadline: July 14, 2019
About Mountain Harvest
Mountain Harvest is a young, innovative coffee production company that works to raise the quality of life for smallholder Arabica coffee farmers on Mt Elgon in eastern Uganda, by increasing incomes, helping build farm and household assets and enhancing farmer resilience to shocks on a commercially and environmentally sustainable basis.
Mountain Harvest believes such change can only be achieved by unlocking and monetizing unrealized potential of the farmers coffee and farms. Our approach involves three major interventions:
- elevating quality into the premium segment of the specialty coffee market;
- disconnecting pricing from the commodity and Fair-Trade markets through a relationship-based trade with roaster-retailers that pay substantially higher prices for quality and impact (social and environmental);
- and by using the additional margin generated from higher prices to invest at the farm level through an intense, service-oriented engagement with farmers.
In partnership with Mountain Harvest and Ground Up Investing, as a Fellow with Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB Canada), you will be placed with Mountain Harvest to work with their team in Uganda. Throughout your Fellowship with EWB, you will receive guidance, mentorship and financial support from the community in Canada and in East and West Africa.
About Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB)
EWB is a free-thinking charitable organization that brings people and ideas together to tackle the most crucial causes of poverty and inequality. We nurture talent and leadership, enable social entrepreneurship and advocate for policy innovations to cross-breed systems-changing innovations to ensure economic and public opportunity reaches everyone, including the most underserved and marginalized populations, especially women and girls.
Through our leadership curriculum and Fellowships Program, we offer experiential learning opportunities in Canada and sub-Saharan Africa to launch future shapers equipped to understand and re-engineer complex social systems. For more information, visit ewb.ca.
About You
Mountain Harvest works to open new possibilities for coffee farmers on Mount Elgon by raising the quality and value of their coffee using ecological, climate-smart methods and improved processing. Our goal is to increase our average price by roughly 2 times, which we believe is achievable based on recent successes by entrepreneur led start-ups in Burundi and Colombia. The additional margin generated will in turn enable the investment in productivity and quality at the farm level that is necessary to enable realistic pathways out of poverty for our farmers and support the company’s growth so that it can ultimately deliver such life changing value to a larger number of farmers.
We currently seek Fellows to work in the following areas:
- Finance – Provide in-depth support to Mountain Harvest’s finance team with a focus on creating and ensuring implementation of financial and accounting systems, monitoring, managing and analyzing financial performance, preparing budgets, projections and financial reports.
- Agronomy – Evaluate current farming practices and design interventions that would enable smallholder farmers to increase coffee productivity and quality, including the production and application of organic fertilizers (compost, vermicular, biochar, etc.), conservation agriculture, intercropping, and the use of shade trees.
Sound exciting? Here’s who we are looking for:
Skills & Qualifications
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in relevant field;
- Strong problem-solving skills;
- Excellent analytical skills;
- Strong interpersonal, communication and presentation skills;
- Ability to think creatively and innovatively;
- Able to build strong, lasting relationships with key stakeholders;
- Ability to work in a fast paced, team-based environment;
- Proven ability to multi-task, appropriately prioritize workflow and complete tasks;
- Committed team player with strong organizational skills;
- Awareness of cross-cultural communication and ability to maintain constructive relationships with diverse set of key stakeholders.
Application Inquiries
- For inquiries about the EWB Fellowship experience, please contact: fellowrecruitment@ewb.ca
- For inquiries about the role with Mountain Harvest, please contact: Sylvia Dimiti
Application Instructions
For further details, please refer to our website.
