About the Program:

WRI Africa’s Food Program aims at transforming food systems in Africa to address food and nutritional insecurity for a rapidly growing population while driving economic development, increasing their resilience to climate change while pivoting away from potential future emissions, having positive impacts on biodiversity, and generating greater equity outcomes for women, children youth and other vulnerable groups. WRI Africa’s Food Program is anchored on four reinforcing principles:

• Producing nutrient dense foods that address food and nutritional insecurity, generating jobs for youth, women and other marginalised groups, while keeping within planetary boundaries on nature and climate,
• Reducing food loss and waste (FLW), including evidence generation and building partnerships with public and private sector stakeholders to advance the Target-Measure-Act approach,
• Restoring degraded agricultural lands to increase productivity while generating essential ecosystems services for agriculture such as soil health, water and biodiversity that is critical for pollination and other ecosystem services,
• Protecting remaining natural ecosystems from conversion to agriculture and degradation.

Job Highlight:

• As the Regional Lead for Sustainable Improvement of Food Productivity, you will lead the Food Program’s initiative on sustainable enhancing food productivity. This includes developing an overall strategy, developing new fundraising opportunities, leading the research program, overseeing technical staff, developing policies and leading engagement with jurisdiction policy makers to sustainable improve food production in order to enhance food security.  You will oversee research focused on developing high resolution time series of crop type and yield data and use modeling in order to develop jurisdictional/country/landscape food gap analysis for WRI priority geographies in Africa (hereafter called priority geographies). You will, on the basis of this analysis, develop food security  policies and strategies for the priority geographies and lead the engagement with these jurisdictions to influence jurisdictional policies. You will develop and build on partnerships and networks to ensure scalability to other African jurisdictions.
• The position will be led from our WRI Africa Food team and linked to WRI’s Land & Carbon Lab, which works on monitoring all forms of land cover and land use, including monitoring of croplands around the world. You will report to the Director of Vital Landscapes.

What will you do:

Research and policy agenda (50%):

• Develop a research strategy to address food security in Africa based on crop-type, yield mapping in priority geographies
• Oversee research and technical analysis on time series crop-type mapping and yield detection in priority jurisdictions in cooperation with WRI’s Land & Carbon lab
• Synthesize findings and develop quantitative food gap analysis for priority jurisdictions
• Develop food security policies for priority geographies
• Develop policies and best practices to sustainably close yield gaps and improve food security in WRI priority geographies while helping farmers to adapt to climate change
• Assess scalability of the methods and data developed to other African jurisdictions
• Assist Land & Carbon Lab to undertake annual monitoring of all forms of land cover and land use
• Support the development and integration of the cropland data with other datasets within the land and carbon lab, and any other datasets within WRI
• Ensure data is made available as open source/access for decision making in Africa
• Lead the production of written outputs including research papers, reports, internal briefs, blogs, presentations, and press releases
• Lead the editing, peer review, publishing of all research and communication outputs in this area of work
• Support the monitoring and reporting of the “produce” elements of WRI Africa’s work, including working closely with the ‘managing of results’ team to develop and monitor the relevant crop/yield indicators.

Engagement and Partnerships (20%):

• Develop and lead the engagement strategy for policy change on food security in focus jurisdictions/ countries.
• Develop and lead engagement strategy on uptake of developed analysis and data on crop-type, yield trends, in priority geographies.
• Cultivate new and help manage existing relationships to deliver on this work. This includes forming or joining coalition on research, and/or policy in priority geographies
• Engage with jurisdictional government, research organizations, NGO and UN to support data collection on crop-type, yield, and important socio-economic and climate variables
• Represent WRI in key events, increase the public profile of WRI’s work on enhancing productivity initiative, crop-mapping, yield detection and food gap analysis
• Provide technical support to local and national partners to scale promising practices in WRI Africa’s priority geographies
• Support policy teams to ensure countries’ NDCs sections on agriculture and food systems are aligned with both mitigation and adaptation goals.

Fundraising (20%):

• Identify funding and cooperation opportunities
• Lead proposals related to food gap and food security analysis and the deployment of geosciences and their application in monitoring of crop yields in Africa, including the resources (financial and human) required to do so
• Lead and co-lead other proposals developed by WRI teams in this area of work, with an emphasis on Africa
• Review other proposals developed by WRI Africa to integrate relevant strands of work on yield monitoring.

Personnel and program leadership (10%):

• Lead and nurture a growing team of researchers under the enhancing food productivity program
• Carry out day to day project management
• Recruit and supervise staff in relevant work areas
• Support the development of the WRI Africa food strategy with all aspects related to yields, nature and climate.

What will you need:

• Education: You have a completed a PhD degree in agriculture, food security analysis in relation to sustainable land management practice
• Experience: You have 8+ years of relevant, full-time professional experience
• Demonstrated knowledge and expertise on issues related to food systems transformation in Africa, including international climate policy, and sustainability challenges related to land and natural resource management
• Experience designing and managing complex, multi-partner projects in an NGO setting
• Experience creating and communicating theories of change, results frameworks, and other components of a MEL for project donors, partners, and stakeholders
• Experience with fundraising as a lead as well as part of a team
• Experience with geoscience methods and tools for assessing croplands in Africa
• A record of relevant publications
• You are willing and able to travel internationally
• Languages: You have verbal and written proficiency in English. Working knowledge of French would be desirable.