Opportunities at Sasakawa Agricultural Organizations – The Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA) is an international non-governmental organization with its head office located in Tokyo, Japan, and Country Offices in Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria, and Uganda.
SAA is dedicated to helping Africa build resilient and sustainable food systems, an aspiration that underline “Africa feeding Africa”. SAA works in close collaboration with national agricultural research and extension services, International Agricultural Research Institutes, Private Sector, NGO’s, Universities, CBOs, Farmer Associations, and Donor agencies by designing and implementing practical and innovative agricultural extension and advisory service delivery and capacity building programs to tens of thousands of frontline extension staff and several million farmers in Africa, with primary intervention focus in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mali, and Uganda; as well as Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Burkina Faso where SAA also builds talents and skills of national extension staff and youths in collaboration with agricultural universities and colleges.
In the current SAA Strategic Plan (2021-2025) , the organization aims to increase farmer’s income and food and nutrition security through promoting market-oriented, sustainable, resilient, and regenerative and nutrition-sensitive agricultural innovations and building the capacity of Extension personnel and farmers.
SAA prioritize “Regenerative Agriculture (RA)” at the center of its technological intervention as part of its efforts to realize “Sustainable Agricultural Intensification” in Africa in an environmentally-socio-economically sustainable manner, by combining Integrated Soil Fertility Management and Conservation Agriculture approaches to help mitigate climate change and increase farm productivity.
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SAA seeks to recruit a Lead, Regenerative Agriculture to provide support to its Strategic Focus Area “Sustainable, Resilient and Regenerative Agriculture in response to Soil Degradation and Climate Change”. The position will be based at the SAA Strategic Partnerships Office (SPO) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and she/he is expected to travel to SAA intervention countries in Africa. Due to COVID-19 and other factors, the position may be initially based at the other SAA Country Offices in Uganda, Nigeria or Mali pending relocation to Addis Ababa at a later date.
Major Duties and Responsibilities:
The Lead, Regenerative Agriculture role will include, but not limited to:
Networking and Partnerships / Opportunities at Sasakawa Agricultural Organizations
- Building and maintaining international, regional, and national networks and partnerships that are relevant to the promotion of “Regenerative Agriculture” and that contribute to achieving SAA’s overall strategic plan.
- Assess SAA positioning periodically as well as integrate its efforts with other partners to harmonize concepts and framework on Regenerative Agriculture principles that can help address the needs of farmers across all the target countries.
- Identify and promote priority emerging and cross-cutting issues in Regenerative Agriculture and help align SAA activities towards achieving some of the regional commitments.
- Strengthen E-Extension by widening the scope of partnerships to help scale up the use of ICT approaches to improve farm productivity.
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Resource Mobilization / Opportunities at Sasakawa Agricultural Organizations
- Monitor international donor trends, identify and promote regional and country focused fundraising initiatives and opportunities, and maintaining donor relations to enhance the introduction, promotion, and adoption of Regenerative Agriculture practices in Africa.
- Be proactive and support the SAA country teams with developing country or regional level proposals with a view point of mainstreaming and widening the adoption of Regenerative Agriculture practices into Country operations.
Learning, Communication and Advocacy
- Keep up with up-to-date developments in Regenerative Agriculture approaches and provide optimum recommendations that may enable productivity enhancing impacts at farm level.
- Build a deeper understanding of Regenerative Agriculture approaches among interdisciplinary teams of SAA.
- Contribute to capacity development and strengthening of SAA staff and personnel from national agricultural research and extension system partners and progressive farmers in view of Regenerative Agriculture.
- Contribute to development of the global evidence-based extension approaches through peer reviewed publications, especially regarding Regenerative Agriculture.
Integrated Monitoring and Evaluation / Opportunities at Sasakawa Agricultural Organizations
- Engage in monitoring, evidence generation and publishing the impacts of Regenerative Agriculture technologies on improved crop productivity, nutrition improvement and increased farmer’s income.
- Generating evidence on the effectiveness of SAA interventions to advance successful, proven and validated Regenerative Agriculture practices and solutions.
- Harmonize and enable comparability and consistency of set of indicators to measure progress against the outcomes at an institutional level over time and between different geographies and teams.
Competencies:
Management Skill/Experience
- A strong coordination record together with superior interpersonal skills, and demonstrated performance in creating, motivating, and leading diverse teams of qualified professionals.
- A minimum of 10+ years of coordination and management-related experience in agricultural development, preferably in Africa.
- A high degree of personal organization and ability to multi-task and work under pressure.
- Excellent written, presentation, and verbal communication skills in English (knowledge of French is an asset)
- Ability to work independently in a multidisciplinary and multi-cultural environment.
Technical Skill/Experience
- Demonstrated experience with soil science, agronomy, and agro-ecology
- Experience in guiding teams and participatory extension approaches.
- Knowledge of innovation systems and innovation platforms in Agriculture Development.
- Proven record of statistical analysis of primary and validation research data
- Demonstrated experience with scaling-up technologies and large-scale technology adoption.
- Demonstrated ability to write and publish journal articles.
- The candidate should have an MSc or PhD in Soil Science, Agronomy, Cropping systems or other highly relevant field and related area.
Duty Station: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Mode of Application: Applications should be sent to Ms. Shushan Negussie, at shushan@saa-safe.org
