Vacancy Announcement
ETHIOPIAN AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATION AGENCY
Position: Junior Project Officer – Analytical Support, Agribusiness Accelerator Project
Term of Employment: One year
Duty Station(s): Addis Ababa
Required Number: One
Salary & Benefits: Competitive
Application Deadline: October 23, 2016
BACKGROUND:
The Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) has been established by the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) to identify and address systemic bottlenecks to Ethiopia’s agricultural development. The Agency does this through problem-solving, implementation support, and capacity building of stakeholders involved in implementation of interventions that address the systemic bottlenecks. The Agency reports to a Transformation Council chaired by the Prime Minister and whose co-chair is the Minister of Agriculture.
The programmatic focus of the Agency responds to a core set of needs identified by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Transformation Council. Within the Agency, issues are divided into four different groups: Production and Productivity which includes Inputs and Crop Protection, Livestock, Research and Extension, Mechanization, Rural Finance & Agro-Processing Value Addition; Agribusiness and Markets including Market Services, Market Infrastructure, Commercial & Contract Farming, Domestic and Export Market Development, and Cooperatives Development; Environmentally Sustainable and Inclusive Agricultural Growth including Sustainable Irrigation & Watershed Management, Sustainable Land Management, Gender and Nutrition, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, and Planning and MLE; and Enhanced Implementation Capacity which includes ICT, Private Sector, and Organizational and Human Capacity. Across the programs, the ATA engages public, private and non-governmental stakeholders to support strategic planning, manage and strengthen implementation capacity and test innovative models.
Our Culture
We have an exceptional team of highly competent employees with a proven track record of success in managing complex activities and achieving transformational results. Our culture is one where talented, dedicated and adaptable individuals are committed to doing their best and exhibit great team work to achieve excellent results.
At ATA, we provide an exceptional platform for people who want to achieve their highest potential and make a meaningful contribution in changing the country’s agricultural sector. We offer rewarding work in a young, fast-paced growing organization with passionate, committed, motivated colleagues and excellent career development and training. We recognize our most valuable assets are our staff and are committed to providing our employees with the tools, training and mentorships necessary to achieve their career goals.
POSITION SUMMARY:
The Government of Ethiopia (GoE) has made the transformation and commercialization of the agriculture sector a key tenet of its second Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP II). At the very core of the strategy to achieve this transformation is the transition of smallholder farmers from subsistence orientation to market focused production systems and activities that better integrate them into domestic and global supply chains. The full development and competitiveness of the entire agricultural value chain is thus critical to ensure that smallholder farmers can make the necessary market linkages that allow such supply chain integrations to happen. Agriculture oriented businesses that are so essential to make value chains competitive are however largely missing, in particular across the downstream end of the value chain. A number of challenges have contributed to the absence of sufficient number of agriculture enterprises in Ethiopia, chief among them an under-developed business ecosystem “building blocks” such as access to appropriate and timely financial products and services, talent, support businesses, and under-developed downstream processing/manufacturing capabilities. There is thus a need for targeted support to spur the growth of agribusinesses that can address this gap.
In many other countries, a well-designed and well-financed Agribusiness Accelerator has shown the ability to fill such gap through comprehensive business development services and funding for start-ups and growth agro-enterprises. The Ethiopian Agribusiness Accelerator Project will test and validate the accelerator concept for Ethiopia. The Agribusiness Accelerator will be very targeted in its initial years in terms of both value chain focus as well as product and service offerings to demonstrate its impact. It will anchor its activities around identification and operational capacity building of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) for investment readiness and scale up, and provision of matching seed grants to the most promising SMEs. The value chain focus for testing the accelerator model will be on honey given agro-ecological strengths, strong existing demand sinks, high degree of investment attractiveness, strong government support, and other parallel investments that create opportunities for significant leverage.
The Junior Project Officer will be a core member of the Agribusiness Accelerator Project Team and will be primarily responsible for providing analytical, technical, and problem solving support on a range of areas that include, but not limited to: value chain analysis, market and investment research, training module development, business opportunity identification, and operational capacity building. Stakeholder enagemetn and management will also be an important area of responsibility of the Junior Project Officer.
The Junior Project Officer will work closely with Program Teams within ATA’s Agribusiness and Markets and Enhanced Implementation Capacity Verticals as well as across other ATA Program Teams, and with external stakeholders such as the Ministry of Trade, Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, Federal and Regional level government bodies, relevant associations, and other private sector market actors to improve and expand market infrastructure and services for agricultural commodities in Ethiopia.
This position will officially report to the Project Lead of the Agribusiness Accelerator Project.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES:
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: