Local Economic Governance Specialist - JE Austin Associates Inc

JOB TITLE: Local Economic Governance Specialist

LOCATION: Tamale, Ghana

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE: August 2022 – August 2026

LEVEL OF EFFORT: full-time

REPORTS TO: Policy Advisor

SUPERVISES: n/a

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The USAID-funded Ghana Market Systems and Resilience Activity (MSR) is a five-year, $35.9M follow-on project to USAID/Ghana ADVANCE II. MSR will leverage over a decade of experience linking smallholders to markets, inputs, and services in Ghana.

The project will strengthen commercial relationships between market actors, improve the rural entrepreneurship ecosystem to enable greater market participation, particularly for women and youth, expand the availability of agribusiness services, and link targeted policy initiatives to improved local economic governance. These activities will result in competitive, stronger, and more resilient markets, thus increasing inclusive agriculture-led economic growth in northern Ghana.

Project objectives are to:

a) increase commercialization and profitability of agriculture markets,

b) increase institutional capacity of market actors,

c) improve market access and quality of business services and

d) improve the enabling environment for local market actors.

OVERALL RESPONSIBILITIES

The Local Economic Governance Specialist shall be responsible for coordinating and facilitating implementation of the policy and regulatory reforms activities of the MSR Activity, with the aim of improving the enabling environment for local market actors.

SPECIFIC DUTIES AND TASKS

• Work closely with stakeholders in the ZOI and target MSR value chains to identify policy and institutional constraints to growth and identify strategies and activities to address those constraints
• Assist in analyzing and developing project activities to address regulatory reform constraints in the ZOI
• Assist in identifying and analyzing major policy constraints regarding competitiveness in target MSR value chains
• Analyze needs for research and policy papers to provide evidence for advocacy, public-private dialogue, and policy making, and work with local researchers to develop such evidence
• Assist in developing and supporting evidence-based advocacy initiatives for policy reform with market actors in the ZOI
• Engage with local governance institutions, market actors, and civil society to develop and advocate for policies that improve function of markets with respect to risk reduction and management, business performance, and opportunities for market growth and continuity
• Facilitate the establishment of collaborative and evidence-based policy dialogue platforms to engage public and private actors in the ZOI
• Promote information dissemination flows, systems, and tools from the government to private sector local actors
• Plan, organize, and facilitate dialogue among the government, the private sector and civil society to identify policy priorities, refine policy language and assume responsibility for actions that will achieve intended policy outcomes
• Work with project colleagues to develop communications plans and strategies to promote food safety and other key issues
• Collaborate with MoFA, FDA and GSA, to engage media service providers to create messaging content and a plan for dissemination across radio, social media and community platforms to create awareness on food safety and other key issues and advocate behavior change among actors.
• Develop the capacity of local governance institutions to strengthen them to increase the compliance and enforcement of policy regulations for formal and informal markets
• Facilitate capacity building of local regulatory institutions to fulfil their mandate to provide training to the private sector in enforcing SPS and food safety standards
• Facilitate advocacy capacity building of associations and other private sector representatives in the ZOI
• Coordinating collection of data and inputs to prepare project reports for USAID
• Assist in developing policy-specific communications tools for stakeholders and beneficiary engagement
• Contribute to project work plans and reports