Research Associate - IITA Ghana

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) is a not-for-profit institution that generates agricultural innovations to meet Africa’s most pressing challenges of hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and natural resource degradation. Working with various partners across sub-Saharan Africa, we improve livelihoods, enhance food and nutrition security, increase employment, and preserve natural resource integrity. IITA is a member of CGIAR, a global agriculture research partnership for a food secure future. Please visit www.iita.org for more information on IITA.

Job Description

The “Strengthening Rural Livelihoods and Resilience to Climate Change in Africa: Innovative Agroforestry Integrating People, Trees, Crops, and Livestock” (GALILEO) project has an objective that relies on Multi-Actor Approaches (MAA) to co-develop context-specific, people-centred agroforestry innovations in representative agro-pastoral (AP), agroforestry (AF), and agro-silvo-pastoral (ASP) systems (simply all called AFSPs) from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The aim is to promote agroforestry as leverage to significantly improve agricultural, household, and climate change adaptation and mitigation performances and to enhance biodiversity in SSA. The project builds upon 8 agroforestry Living Labs (LLs: local scale and actors), in Senegal, Ghana, Cameroon and Kenya and a regional Innovation Platforms (IPs), set up across these 4 AU SSA countries.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) therefore seeks to recruit a Research Associate under the GALILEO Project. 

The Position

The Research Associate will Work with teams of research and development partners, community-based organizations and farmers towards the achievement of project goals and objectives 

Primary Responsibilities

• Provide support and technical backstopping for IITA and its partners in the identification, validation and establishment of living labs.
• Support design of data collection tools, review data sources, data collection, etc.
• Assist in the translation of results from the Living Labs on cocoa agroforestry and adapted technologies that can be used by the cocoa sector.
• Support the design, organize and undertake survey activities gaps identified in cocoa agroforestry.
• Undertake surveys, data analysis and reporting.
• Provide technical support for on-farm cocoa agroforestry research activities.
• Identify, define roles and build multistakeholder partnership (MSP) of key stakeholders and partners on agroforestry. 
• Participate in key stakeholder meetings, and field-based missions as and when needed.
• Support IITA and its partners on training on adaptation practices for cocoa agroforestry
• Produce reports on workshops and meetings conducted under the current cocoa project portfolios.
• Contribute to stakeholder mobilization and coordinate communication between consortium partners.
• Work closely with the project partners to identify results and field stories that should be highlighted in communication materials.
• Undertake regular visits to the field to support implementation of ME&L and to identify where adaptation might be needed.
• Contribute to project annual reporting by providing required ME&L data.
• Any other tasks that may be assigned by the supervisors.  

Required Skills or Experience

Qualification Required & Experience

The candidate is expected to meet the following qualifications and experience level:

• An advanced degree in any of the Agricultural Science disciplines, especially Agronomy, Soil Science or Extension.
• Minimum of 4 years of relevant work experience in Agricultural research, project management, or related fields.
• In-depth knowledge of statistical tools for data analysis.
• Experience in participatory research with focus on sustainable agricultural production, conservation agriculture, natural resources management and gender inclusion. 
• Experience working with development partners as well as the private sector. 
• Strong communication and analytical skills, with ability to convey complex information to stakeholders of varying levels of experience or ability. 
• Excellent IT skills (Word, Excel, Power Point).

Duty Stations

The successful candidate will be based in Accra, Ghana at IITA office with travel to projects sites.

Terms of appointment:

This is Nationally Recruited Staff (NRS) position. Initial appointment is for Two years with the possibility of renewal, contingent upon individual performance and the availability of funding.

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