Vacancy Announcement
ETHIOPIAN AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATION AGENCY
Position: Senior Director, Agricultural Commercialization Clusters (ACC)
Term of Employment: Fixed
Duty Station(s): Addis Ababa
Required Number: One
Salary & Benefits: Competitive
Application Deadline: December 12, 2016
BACKGROUND:
The Ethiopian 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 Agricultural Commercialization Clusters (ACC) initiative has been introduced in Ethiopia to apply a geographically-focused approach for rapidly enhancing priority commodity agricultural value chains throughout the country. The implementation of this initiative will support agricultural sector transformation by enhancing and supporting existing structures of government, private-sector and other non-governmental partners, to address systemic as well as commodity- and geography-specific bottlenecks in agricultural value chains.
Agricultural commercialization clusters are defined as geographically concentrated networks of producers, agro-industries, traders and other private and public actors engaged in the same industry and that are inter-connected and building value networks, either formally or informally, when addressing common challenges and pursuing common opportunities. This concept builds on previous federal and regional efforts for value chain development, including part of the government’s focus on Economic Growth Corridors and crop production and productivity Initiatives in priority woredas. The current approach advocates for a more focused and market-driven solution with significant coordination and support between federal and regional bodies.
POSITION SUMMARY:
The Federal ACC Secretariat is an office in the ATA mandated to coordinate Federal engagement on ACCs across Regions, provide effective upward reporting to the higher federal government office and Federal and Regional stakeholders, mobilize domestic and external resources, and provide training and capacity building to Regional. The Federal ACC Senior Director will lead and oversee all operations of the ACC and report directly to CEO.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES:
The main responsibilities of the Federal ACC Senior Director include:
Leadership
Project Management
Resource Mobilization
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- planning and implementation of agricultural growth or
- market-led value chain development and upgrading activities (preferably including project management of large-scale agricultural development, agro-processing and/or agribusiness focused initiatives).