Technical Officer | LifeTree Bangladesh – Sundarbans

Job Description

Title: Technical Officer | LifeTree Bangladesh – Sundarbans

Company Name: The Earth

Vacancy: 1

Age: 25 to 45 years

Job Location: Bagerhat, Khulna

Salary: Negotiable

Experience:

• 3 to 4 years
• The applicants should have experience in the following business area(s): NGO

• 3 to 4 years
• The applicants should have experience in the following business area(s): NGO

• Age 25 to 45 years

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in forestry, Agroforestry, Agriculture, Environmental Science, or a closely related discipline.

Required Experience

• Minimum 3–4 years of relevant field experience in agroforestry, social forestry, or plantation-based work.

• Experience directly implementing or overseeing social forestry, mangrove, or community-based forestry activities is strongly preferred.

• Experience supervising or mentoring field-level staff is preferred.

• Experience working in coastal, saline-prone, or climate-vulnerable landscapes is an advantage.

Required Skills and Competencies

• Solid technical knowledge of climate-smart agriculture, agroforestry, social forestry, and plantation management, with the ability to work hands-on in the field.

• Strong supervisory and team-leadership skills, with the ability to mentor and provide constructive feedback to field staff.

• Good training and facilitation skills.

• Experience conducting farmer-level training, assessments and applying findings to strengthen field support.

• Experience collecting data and/or overseeing data collection and performing data quality assurance checks.

• Familiarity with improved agricultural and food and nutrition security indicators.

• Experience supporting women entrepreneurs.

• Experience working with product aggregation, grading and sorting, marketing, value-added processing and enterprise development with small farmers.

• Strong organizational skills, with the ability to consolidate data and reports accurately and on time.

• Basic digital literacy, with familiarity with smartphone-based data collection tools such as KoboToolbox preferred.

• Strong report writing skills in both Bangla and English.

• Willingness to travel extensively and work in rural, coastal, and saline-prone field conditions.

• Patience, cultural sensitivity, and sound judgment in resolving field-level technical and team issues.

• Experience working with international or national organizations in similar development programs.

• Experience working with diverse populations.

Preferred Skills

• Prior experience in agroforestry, social forestry or mangrove restoration or tidal/coastal reforestation projects.

• Prior experience supervising a field team of similar size.

• Familiarity with the Dacope/Khulna coastal context.

• Experience supporting women’s capacity building and women’s empowerment initiatives.

The Earth Society (TES) is a youth-centric NGO working on climate action, green skills development, sustainable entrepreneurship, and advocacy in Bangladesh. Through its programmes, TES weaves together capacity building, ecosystem restoration, and livelihood development to nurture an inclusive ecosystem of resilience and regeneration.

Project Description

LifeTree Bangladesh – Sundarbans is a regenerative agroforestry and reforestation initiative implemented by The Earth Society, in partnership with Sundori Agro and Mother Trees, and funded by Ecosia. The project facilitates the plantation of climate-resilient trees through homestead agroforestry, live fencing, and social forestry across the coastal districts of Khulna and Bagerhat, along the ecological buffer zone of the Sundarbans — helping restore degraded landscapes, strengthen climate resilience, and build sustainable livelihoods for coastal communities.

Job Purpose

The Technical Officer provides direct technical supervision of an assigned team of 3–4 Field Technicians and plays a hands-on technical role in implementing the project's social forestry/mangrove restoration component, given the specialized skills this component requires and the scale of the work involved.

The Technical Officer is trained and mentored by the Technical Specialist and works jointly with the Technical Specialist to train Field Technicians. The Technical Officer directly oversees social forestry implementation within their assigned area, serves as the primary reviewer of nursery, seed bank, and plantation monitoring records maintained by Field Technicians, and conducts regular spot-check monitoring in the field.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Supervision and Team Leadership

• Directly supervise, mentor, and provide day-to-day technical support to an assigned team of 3 or 4 Field Technicians and their related farmer groups (average 10 per field tech) as needed.

• Conduct regular spot-check monitoring of Field Technicians' work, including field visits, data quality checks, and troubleshooting.

• Ensure that field data collected by Field Technicians is complete, accurate, and correctly uploaded to KoboToolbox and the donor monitoring portal manner.

• Support Field Technicians' work planning and track progress against targets within the assigned area.

• Escalate technically complex issues beyond the team's scope to the Technical Specialist.

Social Forestry and Mangrove Restoration Implementation

• Directly oversee implementation of the social forestry and mangrove restoration component within the assigned area, working hands-on alongside Field Technicians and troubleshooting where needed given the specialized technical requirements of this component.

• Provide technical guidance on social forestry site selection, species selection, planting, and maintenance practices.

• Lead outreach and coordination with local government, communities, schools, religious institutions, and other entities in relation to implementing the social forestry component in designated geographic areas, ensuring permissions are received, volunteers are trained, and all logistics in relation to supplies and materials are properly managed and recorded.

• Responsible for progress monitoring and reporting of social forestry activities in designated areas.

Training and Capacity Building

• Work jointly with the Technical Specialist to develop supportive supervisory and training materials to train Field Technicians on implementation of the LifeTree System, including orienting communities, leading farmers and their families through sessions to support farming goals and women’s decision making, facilitating farmer group training sessions on topics including species selection, planting techniques, tree maintenance, and agroforestry/social forestry practices and training lead farmers to provide peer support, fulfill their coordination and monitoring roles, and undertake group marketing activities.

• Provide trainer-of-trainer style training to Field Technicians and assist Field Techs in training lead farmers.

• Support Field Technicians in carrying out Lead Farmer orientation and technical sessions in addition to the farmer group training sessions, providing deeper technical content and coaching on peer support and record-keeping until Field Technicians demonstrate full technical comprehension and good training and facilitation skills.

• Support Field Technicians in facilitating family sessions to increase understanding of the program and ensure support of household members engaged in the program, especially women.

• Support and guide Field Technicians in delivering hands-on technical assistance and training to farmers, lead farmers, and community members, ensuring quality and consistency in the field.

Plantation Monitoring

• Supervise and spot-check plantation monitoring conducted by Field Technicians, including seedling survival, health, growth, and pest/disease issues.

• Support replacement planting and corrective action planning within the assigned area.

• Assist in the data collection process from enrollment and corresponding baseline to data collection of three survival rates after one month and 9 months of planting.

• Analyze tree survival data and review badge accomplishments and related scores with the Technical Specialist and use results to target additional field support.

Reporting and Documentation

• Consolidate field-level reports and data from the assigned Field Technicians and share with the Technical Specialist promptly.

• Prepare quarterly technical progress inputs for submission to the Technical Specialist for inclusion in donor and NGOAB reports

• Document lessons learned, farmer innovations, and success stories from the assigned area.

• Support the preparation of technical inputs to project work plans and progress reports.