About Earthworm

With most of our staff operating directly on the ground where the issues are, we work with our members and partners to make value chains an engine of prosperity for communities and ecosystems.

We see a world where forests are a boundless source of materials and a home for biodiversity; communities see their rights respected and have opportunities to develop; workers are seen as productive partners, and agriculture becomes the instrument to feed a hungry planet and keep our climate stable.

Your Role

Being a Field and Smallholder Landscape Lead, your role is to work collaboratively with farming communities, especially oil palm smallholders, to understand their business and livelihood needs, to create value proposition and to promote resilience against market fluctuations and climate change. This role will require you to be based in projects sites in Kinabatangan and Lahad Datu.

• Oversee the project management with involvement in annual workplan planning, managing budget and resources, as well as aligning and executing workplan priorities for the Kinabatangan/ Lahad Datu region with other teams within the organization.

• Plan, coordinate and deliver smallholder resilience programme in the field. This includes supporting smallholder communities to develop, implement and monitor income diversification, regenerative agriculture, farm best management practices (BMP) and MSPO certification activities – including diagnostics, developing new concepts/ models, designing transformation action plan and implementing transformation activities.

• Regular preparation of reports. That involves delivery of quarterly, annual and other form of reports requested by internal and external stakeholders.
• Create proposals and support the pursuit of business development and fundraising opportunities.

• Development of resources, tools, solutions and training modules in reference to income diversification, regenerative agriculture, farm best management practices (BMP) activities and related topics. This includes also developing and managing a comprehensive database to capture details of project level output/ outcome/ impact data.

• Regular engagements with external stakeholders individually or in collaborative platforms. This includes managing and establishing collaboration with external stakeholders including businesses, NGOs, universities, government agencies etc.

Your Profile

You are passionate in improving nature, livelihood of smallholders, and sustainability practices of the oil palm industry, and identify as a self-starter and innovator who believes that farmers are entrepreneurs with vision and leadership. You thrive on human relations, both within the team and organization, and externally. Your interests in boosting smallholder resilience makes you keen to frequently travel to rural areas and empathetically engage with the communities to co-develop solutions. An excellent team player with good leadership ability, you comfortably work across teams and stakeholders to achieve fulfilling and intended impact on the targeted groups.

Your love for community development drives you to create innovative and insightful strategies to continuously increase the resilience of smallholders. You appreciate that sustainable and responsible sourcing ultimately affects the environment protection and improvement, achieved through collaboration with communities and stakeholders. This collaboration requires natural public speaking skills for conducting meetings, trainings and workshops; strong eye for details in analysing data, developing solutions and executing the propositions to close identified gaps; and willingness to keep learning (and unlearning) and to take initiative when opportunities arise.

To be successful, it would be a strong advantage to have a good understanding of environmental and social issues in Malaysia affecting smallholder farmers, have fluent ability to converse in Bahasa Malaysia and English.

Working Conditions:

• Degree in Agriculture, rural development, environmental sciences, social sciences or other field (preferable)
• Minimum 3 year of experience
• Full-time position
• Open-ended contract
• Fluent in Bahasa Malaysia and English (written and spoken)
• Role to be based in Sandakan / Kinabatangan, Sabah (Malaysia)
• Malaysian Citizenship

Joining Us

If you are in search of having a meaningful impact, with a desire to innovate and act in the social and human rights space, this offer is for you! The team you would join is highly committed to and passionate about finding concrete solutions to improve relationship between People and Nature and regenerate ecosystems.

To join this adventure, apply by sending your application (resume and cover) at malaysia.recruitment@earthworm.org by 31 July 2024 with the subject "SHLead2024" followed by your name.

Only selected candidates will be contacted.

Good Luck!