Haramaya University, Haramaya,
The Bilateral Ethiopia - Netherlands Effort for Food, Income and Trade (BENEFIT) in Ethiopia
Vacancy for full-time positions with the Programme on Integrated Seed Sector Development in Ethiopia (ISSD Ethiopia Programme) Report to: Regional scientific coordinator and project manager; and technically to ISSD Ethiopia Project Management Unit (PMU) in Addis Ababa. The position: The job advertised by this vacancy is for the position of Gender and Rural Development Expert, for each of the duty stations mentioned above. You will function within a team of experts with complementary expertise in integrated seed sector development. You will be mainly working on strengthening informal seed system. You will also play an important role in mainstreaming gender in the project by coaching other team members in gender sensitive and responsive activity planning. Informal seed system activities of ISSD are aimed at helping farmers to improve seed access and use of farmer preferred varieties for the most important food and nutrition rich crops, including traditional and neglected crops. A specific aim of these activities is to focus on understanding and responding to the seed demand of the above mentioned crops, with special attention to women and vulnerable farmers. You will support participatory variety selection processes with germplasm from formal and informal sources and promote local seed quality control mechanisms. You will play an important role in gender analysis of ISSD approaches, activities, and processes along with other regional experts, identify capacity gaps in relation to gender and facilitate necessary capacity development.  You will be supervised by the regional scientific coordinator, who will be assisted by a project manager. The project manager will supervise you on a day to day basis. Expertise, guidance, and support on project strategy and implementation, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and data management will be provided by the Addis Ababa based ISSD Ethiopia project management unit (PMU) and team of experts from Wageningen University & Research (WUR), the Netherlands will support PMU. Regional activity planning will be conducted with the participation of PMU and often in collaboration with other projects united by the BENEFIT partnership, which is explained briefly below. You will be an active participant in knowledge sharing and learning events with the teams based at other duty stations. Key Responsibilities: Provide support and facilitate linkages with regional partners to implement informal seed system approaches and achieve targets. Serve as the primary ISSD staff person responsible for coordinating informal seed system activities and implementing informal seed system component at the regional level.Together with farmer organization and seed experts, lead the development of the regional gender responsive ISSD informal seed system component to achieve the target of reaching at least 50% women farmers.Establish partnerships and develop approaches for scaling the activities on informal seed systems, and support activities like capacity strengthening of partners; experimentation; exchange/twinning of farmer groups. This includes supporting the development of grant proposals for scaling informal seed system activities. Represent the informal seed system component during project meetings held regionally and nationally. Collaborate with regional seed and farmer organisation experts and technical partners to promote a more conducive and enabling environment for informal seed systems at regional level.Work with gender experts at the national BENEFIT partnership level and at WUR (CDI), to facilitate gender analysis of ISSD approaches, activities, and processes along with other regional experts in order to improve the gender responsiveness for all ISSD components and activities, and where appropriate facilitate gender training at regional level.Support collection and analysis of data related to M&E of informal seed systems; you should work with the M&E team of the project in data collection; management; analysis; and reporting and contribute to M&E and progress reporting of gender equality resultsDocumenting and sharing experiences on gender and informal seed systems work: You will participate in project knowledge sharing processes and events within your own team and with others. ISSD Ethiopia aims to improve access to quality seed The goal of ISSD Ethiopia is to improve female and male smallholder farmer access to and use of quality seed of new, improved and/or farmer preferred varieties to sustainably increase agricultural productivity. The project builds upon more than four years existing experience in supporting the development of a vibrant, pluralistic and market oriented seed sector in Ethiopia. In its current phase (2016 – 2019), ISSD Ethiopia will strengthen seed producers in informal, intermediary and formal seed systems; enhance the performance of seed value chains within different seed systems; and contribute to the improvement of an enabling environment for seed value chains in the different seed systems. In addition, the project will strengthen the professional capacities for implementing the ISSD approach.  ISSD Ethiopia is implemented in four regions of Ethiopia through multiple partnerships The ISSD Ethiopia project is one of four projects united under the BENEFIT partnership in Ethiopia. BENEFIT stands for Bilateral Ethiopia-Netherlands Effort for Food, Income and Trade. It is a partnership among four projects in the country, including ISSD Ethiopia, and with the Ethiopian agricultural sector itself, funded by the Dutch Government. ISSD Ethiopia is implemented by five regional ISSD units hosted at four universities and one seed enterprise in four regions of the country, supported by the PMU and BENEFIT partnership coordination unit (PCU), both located in Addis Ababa, and by Wageningen UR, the Netherlands. Regional implementing partners are: Bahir Dar University; Haramaya University and Oromia Seed Enterprise; Hawassa University; and Mekelle University, operating in Amhara, Oromia, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) and Tigray, in corresponding order of mention.