Vacancy Announcement

ETHIOPIAN AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATION AGENCY

Position: Regional Data Management Officer Click here to enter text.

Term of Employment:  One Year possibility of extension

Duty Station(s): Oromia (Addis Ababa),

Required Number:  One

Salary & Benefits:  Competitive

Application Deadline:   7 Sep 2021

BACKGROUND

The Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) is a strategy and delivery-oriented government agency created to help accelerate the growth and transformation of the country’s agriculture sector. The ATA envisions that, by 2025, smallholder farmers are commercialized with greater incomes, inclusiveness, resilience and sustainability, contributing to Ethiopia’s achievement of middle-income country status.

The agency focuses on two primary national approaches to catalyze agricultural transformation. First, we support the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Resources (MoALR), its affiliate institutions, and other partners to identify and address systemic bottlenecks within an Agricultural Transformation Agenda. Second, we support Regional Governments to accelerate development of high-priority commodity value chains in clearly defined geographic clusters, through the Agricultural Commercialization Clusters (ACC) Initiative.

Our major activities include conducting strategic and analytical studies, providing technical implementation support, coordinating platforms to better integrate partners and projects, and designing and directly leading a number of implementation projects. Our headquarters are in Addis Ababa, and we have regional offices in Amhara, Oromia, SNNP, and Tigray regional offices, allowing us to work closely with a wide range of public, private and development sector partners across the country.

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 Digital Agriculture program within the ATA has been established to develop and support initiatives related to the use of information communication technologies within the Ethiopian agriculture sector. The Project Officer will currently work on two projects – AIM and CropIn.

The Agricultural Investment Mapping (AIM) project convenes government and development partners to gather information on investment portfolios. The tool develops a comprehensive view on actors, activities, and geographic locations involved to maintain and administer an online database and mapping tool displaying all major investment in the Ethiopian agricultural sector (by Government, bilateral and multilateral development agencies as well as other actors).

The Project Officer will collect and manage data, assist in the development of databases and data visualization tools working closely with regional partners and stakeholders as well as Spatial Dev, an international technology, and data visualization firm.

The CropIn project utilizes CropIn’s Smart Farm platform, a cloud-based system that has been developed with features to collect, analyse, and visualize detailed Farmer Production Cluster (FPC) information within Agricultural commercialization Clusters (ACCs) program. The system allows agriculture extension workers capture farmers’ profiles, FPC clusters and plots, register crops, geo-tag, and provided near-real time FPC clusters performance reports to enable regional ATA offices and federal FPC team make real time and data-driven decisions

The Project Officer will ensure the accuracy of data collected by development agents, demonstrate and socialize the platform to relevant Regional Bureaus, assist in the preparation/translation of materials as well as delivery of trainings to development agents. The Project Officer will further provide support to development agents in the collection of data through the CropIn system.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Responsibilities of Project Officer for CropIn and AIM include, but are not limited to:

Manage the regional AIM and CropIn workload to ensure on time completion of deliverables

• Coordinate and follow up on all regional data-collection activities.
• Develop training and rollout schedule for development agent.
• Hold training to the project’s stakeholders and partners on the use of the data collection tools.
• Assess the capability of project collectors and updaters to execute the project and provide additional capacity building training.
• Collect and compile feedback from kebele, woreda, region focal person, other project stakeholders on the digital platform and send to the federal project team.
• Write up key findings and technical issues for federal team.
• Support data quality control checks during the transfer of records from ‘work-in-progress’ to ‘finalized-version’
• Support the expansion of AIM and CropIn tools in the regions, zones and woredas
• Reprioritize outputs/deliverables and adjust implementation plans when required.

Assist the CropIn and AIM Team Leads in results-focused stakeholder management in order to build collaborative relationships with key internal, Federal, and Regional stakeholders

• Regularly engage regional stakeholders: RBoAs, RBoTs, Development Partners and Development Agents to collect the required data across the projects.
• Demonstrate the Cropin digitalization platform to their respective RBoA and WBA.
• Create ownership of long-term project owners via joint implementation, capacity building, and supporting enhancement activities post-transition.

Assist the Team Leads for AIM and CropIn in the implementation of the projects’ deliverables to ensure the intended impact collecting the relevant datasets

• Provide problem solving support during the design or enhancement of the projects and provide inputs from the regional perspective.

The Project Officer is responsible for compiling and submitting data and reports in order to ensure alignment on project implementation

• Prepare regular reports on own workstreams.
• Support the preparation of all biweekly, quarterly, and annual performance reports.

Other

•  The Project Officer is responsible for additional interventions assigned by the Team Leads to meet Digital Agriculture program functions

Job Requirements

Required qualifications:

• MSc or BSc Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, GIS or another relevant field from a reputable university required. M.Sc Education/Master's Degree in a relevant field from a reputable university preferred/
• At least 5 years’ relevant professional experience for BA candidates or 3 years for Masters of which at least 1-2 years+ relevant work experience related to project management and data and/or software in public, private or development sector organizations.
• Experience training end-users and conducting small to medium scale training sessions
• Experience/familiarity with digital data collection (i.e. web/ mobile technology)
• Basic understanding of Ethiopia’s agricultural system
• Experience with project and stakeholder management preferred
• The following capabilities are critical to play this role effectively
• Familiarity with data collection and analytics systems
• Data sourcing, management, analytics, reporting and visualization
• Development and management of large datasets and data analysis tools
• Demonstrated familiarity with project development, implementation, management, funding flow tracking and reporting
• Fluency in English and other regional languages preferred

How to Apply

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS

We invite all candidates meeting the required qualifications to submit (i) a cover letter and (ii) CV (maximum 3 pages) CLICK HERE by mentioning the position title on the subject line.

Please DO NOT submit scans of certificates with your application.

Women are highly encouraged to apply.

Only short listed candidates will be contacted.