Jennifer Kamoso

Jen is a passionate people and environment-centered development practitioner and senior leader in the One Acre Fund Rwanda Program. In her current role, she manages a team of internal consultants to improve organizational processes, mitigate risks, and leverage opportunities to drive strategic priorities across the organization.

Jen is originally from the US, but has lived and worked in Rwanda for 8 years; she now holds dual American and Rwandan citizenships. She has a background in Environmental Engineering and a Masters Degree in Development Practice (MDP). Her career began in rural Northeastern Tanzania, where she lived and worked in farming communities, supporting local leaders to incubate small agricultural businesses with the 2Seeds Network. That is where and when she fell in love with development work and decided to continue her education with a master's degree at the University of California at Berkeley. Upon graduation in 2018, she moved to Rwanda, initially focused on transferring knowledge from the 2Seeds Network to Spark MicroGrants. While working with Spark in Musanze, she supported capacity development for facilitator-trainers, worked on partnerships, supported the leadership team to orient towards and track progress against goals, and initiated the organizational excellence function in the operations division. In late 2021, Jen moved to Kigali to join the One Acre Fund Rwanda Program. Since joining OAF, she has worked on a variety of strategic projects, and led the Internal Consulting Team, which has flexed from four to twenty staff at a given time. She started a rotational career development program to support staff to develop skills and gain new opportunities across the organization, which contributes additional bandwidth to the team on a temporary basis until staff land a new permanent role. Her focus is to maximize the team's value addition to the Rwanda program by innovating operational and process improvements, enabling data-driven insights and decisions, implementing pilot projects, and initiating key strategic projects. She also works closely with the Rwanda Steering Committee to establish and align on long-term strategy, drive progress towards targets, and orient all teams towards top priorities. Jen is a founding co-lead of the Climate Smart Agriculture Food Systems Action, with Richard Makuza. In her free time, you can find Jen playing pickleball or padel, cycling, teaching yoga, and jogging or walking with or without a stroller at Car Free Day or the wetland parks in Kigali. Feel free to greet Jen in Kinyarwanda -- she will love it!